The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction

by Gene Wolfe

  Without appearing to do so, I looked up and down both streets in search of another lounger like myself. There was no one—not a drowsing grandfather, not a woman or a child, not even a dog. Certainly no tall man with a forked beard and piercing eyes. The windows then—I studied them all, looking for some movement in a dark room behind a seemingly innocent opening. Nothing.

  Only the buildings behind me remained. I crossed to the opposite side of the Hauptstrasse and looked once more. Then I laughed.

  They must have thought me mad, all those dour burghers, for I fairly doubled over, spitting my cigarette to the sidewalk and clasping my hands to my waist for fear my belt would burst. The presumption, the impudence, the brazen insolence of the fellow! The stupidity, the wonderful stupidity of myself, who had not recognized his old stories! For the remainder of my life now, I could accept any case with pleasure, pursue the most inept criminal with zest, knowing that there was always a chance he might outwit such an idiot as I.

  For the Dream-Master had set up His own picture, and full-length and in the most gorgeous colors, in his window. Choking and spluttering, I saluted it, and then, still filled with laughter, I crossed the street once more and went inside, where I knew I would find Him. A man awaited me there—not the one I sought, but one who understood Whom it was I had come for, and knew as well as I that His capture was beyond any thief taker’s power. I knelt, and there, though not to the satisfaction I suppose of Baron H——, Fräulein A——, Herr R——, and the Count and Countess von V——, I destroyed the Dream-Master as He has been sacrificed so often, devouring His white, wheaten flesh that we might all possess life without end.

  Dear people, dream on.

  AFTERWORD

  G. K. Chesterton wrote that ordinary life “is like ten thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon.” If we look at it that way—which is rather fun—we can quickly come up with ten thousand stories.

  Some of which will show that the criminal cannot be apprehended. And some of which will show, like this one, that the criminal should not be.

  I will not lecture you on Jesus of Nazareth, but I advise you to find Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. In this story I asked you to consider that everlasting man’s short fiction. Fans have written me to say that this or that story stayed with them for days. Each letter makes me proud and happy. In my happiness and pride, I am prone to forget that there was once a storyteller from Galilee whose stories have stayed with us for millennia.

  KEVIN MALONE

  M

  arcella and I were married in April. I lost my position with Ketterly, Bruce & Drake in June, and by August we were desperate. We kept the apartment—I think we both felt that if we lowered our standards there would be no chance to raise them again—but the rent tore at our small savings. All during July I had tried to get a job at another brokerage firm, and by August I was calling fraternity brothers I had not seen since graduation and expressing an entire willingness to work in whatever businesses their fathers owned. One of them, I think, must have mailed us the advertisement.

  Attractive young couple, well educated and well connected, will receive free housing, generous living allowance, for minimal services.

  There was a telephone number, which I omit for reasons that will become clear.

  I showed the clipping to Marcella, who was lying with her cocktail shaker on the chaise longue. She said, “Why not,” and I dialed the number.

  The telephone buzzed in my ear, paused, and buzzed again. I allowed myself to go limp in my chair. It seemed absurd to call at all; for the advertisement to have reached us that day, it must have appeared no later than yesterday morning. If the position was worth having—

  “The Pines.”

  I pulled myself together. “You placed a classified ad. For an attractive couple, well educated and the rest of it.”

  “I did not, sir. However, I believe my master did. I am Priest, the butler.”

  I looked at Marcella, but her eyes were closed. “Do you know, Priest, if the opening has been filled?”

  “I think not, sir. May I ask your age?”

  I told him. At his request, I also told him Marcella’s (she was two years younger than I) and gave him the names of the schools we had attended, described our appearance, and mentioned that my grandfather had been a governor of Virginia and that Marcella’s uncle had been ambassador to France. I did not tell him that my father had shot himself rather than face bankruptcy, or that Marcella’s family had disowned her—but I suspect he guessed well enough what our situation was.

  “You will forgive me, sir, for asking so many questions. We are almost a half day’s drive, and I would not wish you to be disappointed.”

  I told him that I appreciated that, and we set a date—Tuesday of the next week—on which Marcella and I were to come out for an interview with “the master.” Priest had hung up before I realized that I had failed to learn his employer’s name.

  D

  uring the teens and twenties some very wealthy people had designed estates in imitation of the palaces of the Italian Renaissance. The Pines was one of them, and better preserved than most—the fountain in the courtyard still played, the marbles were clean and unyellowed, and if no red-robed cardinal descended the steps to a carriage blazoned with the Borgia arms, one felt that he had only just gone. No doubt the place had originally been called La Capanna or Il Eremo.

  A serious-looking man in dark livery opened the door for us. For a moment he stared at us across the threshold. “Very well . . . ,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said that you are looking very well.” He nodded to each of us in turn, and stood aside. “Sir. Madame. I am Priest.”

  “Will your master be able to see us?”

  For a moment some exiled expression—it might have been amusement—seemed to tug at his solemn face. “The music room, perhaps, sir?”

  I said I was sure that would be satisfactory, and followed him. The music room held a Steinway, a harp, and a dozen or so comfortable chairs; it overlooked a rose garden in which old remontant varieties were beginning that second season that is more opulent though less generous than the first. A kneeling gardener was weeding one of the beds.

  “This is a wonderful house,” Marcella said. “I really didn’t think there was anything like it left. I told him you’d have a john collins—all right? You were looking at the roses.”

  “Perhaps we ought to get the job first.”

  “I can’t call him back now, and if we don’t get it, at least we’ll have had the drinks.”

  I nodded to that. In five minutes they arrived, and we drank them and smoked cigarettes we found in a humidor—English cigarettes of strong Turkish tobacco. A maid came, and said that Mr. Priest would be much obliged if we would let him know when we would dine. I told her that we would eat whenever it was convenient, and she dropped a little curtsy and withdrew.

  “At least,” Marcella commented, “he’s making us comfortable while we wait.”

  D

  inner was lamb in aspic, and a salad, with a maid—another maid—and a footman to serve while Priest stood by to see that it was done properly. We ate at either side of a small table on a terrace overlooking another garden, where antique statues faded to white glimmerings as the sun set.

  Priest came forward to light the candles. “Will you require me after dinner, sir?”

  “Will your employer require us; that’s the question.”

  “Bateman can show you to your room, sir, when you are ready to retire. Julia will see to Madame.”

  I looked at the footman, who was carrying in fruit on a tray.

  “No, sir. That is Carter. Bateman is your man.”

  “And Julia,” Marcella put in, “is my maid, I suppose?”

  “Precisely.” Priest gave an almost inaudible cough. “Perhaps, sir—and madame—you might find this useful.” He drew a photograph from an inner pocket and handed it to me.

  It was a b
lack-and-white snapshot, somewhat dog-eared. Two dozen people, most of them in livery of one kind or another, stood in brilliant sunshine on the steps at the front of the house, men behind women. There were names in India ink across the bottom of the picture: James Sutton, Edna DeBuck, Lloyd Bateman . . .

  “Our staff, sir.”

  I said, “Thank you, Priest. No, you needn’t stay tonight.”

  T

  he next morning Bateman shaved me in bed. He did it very well, using a straight razor and scented soap applied with a brush. I had heard of such things—I think my grandfather’s valet may have shaved him like that before the First World War—but I had never guessed that anyone kept up the tradition. Bateman did, and I found I enjoyed it. When he had dressed me, he asked if I would breakfast in my room.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Do you know my wife’s plans?”

  “I think it likely she will be on the South Terrace, sir. Julia said something to that effect as I was bringing in your water.”

  “I’ll join her then.”

  “Of course, sir.” He hesitated.

  “I don’t think I’ll require a guide, but you might tell my wife I’ll be with her in ten minutes or so.”

  Bateman repeated his, “Of course, sir,” and went out. The truth was that I wanted to assure myself that everything I had carried in the pockets of my old suit—car keys, wallet, and so on—had been transferred to the new one he had laid out for me; and I did not want to insult him, if I could prevent it, by doing it in front of him.

  Everything was where it should be, and I had a clean handkerchief in place of my own only slightly soiled one. I pulled it out to look at (Irish linen) and a flutter of green came with it—two bills, both fifties.

  Over eggs Benedict I complimented Marcella on her new dress and asked if she had noticed where it had been made.

  “Rowe’s. It’s a little shop on Fifth Avenue.”

  “You know it, then. Nothing unusual?”

  She answered, “No, nothing unusual,” more quickly than she should have, and I knew that there had been money in her new clothes too, and that she did not intend to tell me about it.

  “We’ll be going home after this. I wonder if they’ll want me to give this jacket back.”

  “Going home?” She did not look up from her plate. “Why? And who are ‘they’?”

  “Whoever owns this house.”

  “Yesterday you called him he. You said Priest talked about the master, so that seemed logical enough. Today you’re afraid to deal with even presumptive masculinity.”

  I said nothing.

  “You think he spent the night in my room, they separated us and you thought that was why, and you just waited there—was it under a sheet?—for me to scream or something. And I didn’t.”

  “I was hoping you had and I hadn’t heard you.”

  “Nothing happened, dammit! I went to bed and went to sleep, but as for going home, you’re out of your mind. Can’t you see we’ve got the job? Whoever he is—wherever he is—he likes us. We’re going to stay here and live like human beings, at least for a while.”

  A

  nd so we did. That day we stayed on from hour to hour. After that, from day to day, and at last from week to week. I felt like Klipspringer, the man who was Jay Gatsby’s guest for so long that he had no other home—except that Klipspringer, presumably, saw Gatsby from time to time, and no doubt made agreeable conversation, and perhaps even played the piano for him. Our Gatsby was absent. I do not mean that we avoided him, or that he avoided us; there were no rooms we were forbidden to enter, and no times when the servants seemed eager that we should play golf or swim or go riding. Before the good weather ended, we had two couples up for a weekend; and when Bette Windgassen asked if Marcella had inherited the place, and then if we were renting it, Marcella said, “Oh, do you like it?” in such a way that they left, I think, convinced that it was ours, or as good as ours.

  And so it was. We went away when we chose, which was seldom, and returned when we chose, quickly. We ate on the various terraces and balconies, and in the big, formal dining room, and in our own bedrooms. We rode the horses and drove the Mercedes and the cranky, appealing old Jaguar as though they were our own. We did everything, in fact, except buy the groceries and pay the taxes and the servants, but someone else was doing that, and every morning I found one hundred dollars in the pockets of my clean clothes. If summer had lasted forever, perhaps I would still be there.

  T

  he poplars lost their leaves in one October week; at the end of it I fell asleep listening to the hum of the pump that emptied the swimming pool. When the rain came, Marcella turned sour and drank too much. One evening I made the mistake of putting my arm about her shoulders as we sat before the fire in the trophy room.

  “Get your filthy hands off me,” she said. “I don’t belong to you.

  “Priest, look here. He hasn’t said an intelligent word to me all day or done a decent thing, and now he wants to paw me all night.”

  Priest pretended, of course, that he had not heard her.

  “Look over here! Damn it, you’re a human being, aren’t you?”

  He did not ignore that. “Yes, madame, I am a human being.”

  “I’ll say you are. You’re more of a man than he is. This is your place, and you’re keeping us for pets—is it me you want? Or him? You sent us the ad, didn’t you? He thinks you go into my room at night, or he says he does. Maybe you really come to his—is that it?”

  Priest did not answer. I said, “For God’s sake, Marcella.”

  “Even if you’re old, Priest, I think you’re too much of a man for that.” She stood up, tottering on her long legs and holding on to the stonework of the fireplace. “If you want me, take me. If this house is yours, you can have me. We’ll send him to Vegas—or throw him on the dump.”

  In a much softer tone than he usually used, Priest said, “I don’t want either of you, madame.”

  I stood up then, and caught him by the shoulders. I had been drinking too, though only half or a quarter as much as Marcella, but I think it was more than that—it was the accumulated frustration of all the days since Jim Bruce told me I was finished. I outweighed Priest by at least forty pounds, and I was twenty years younger. I said, “I want to know.”

  “Release me, sir, please.”

  “I want to know who it is; I want to know now. Do you see that fire? Tell me, Priest, or I swear I’ll throw you in it.”

  His face tightened at that. “Yes,” he whispered, and I let go of his shoulders. “It was not the lady, sir. It was you. I want that understood this time.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m not doing this because of what she said.”

  “You aren’t the master, are you? For God’s sake tell the truth.”

  “I have always told the truth, sir. No, I am not the master. Do you remember the picture I gave you?”

  I nodded.

  “You discarded it. I took the liberty, sir, of rescuing it from the waste can in your bathroom. I have it here.” He reached into his coat and pulled it out, just as he had on the first day, and handed it to me.

  “It’s one of these? One of the servants?”

  Priest nodded and pointed with an impeccably manicured forefinger to the figure at the extreme right of the second row. The name beneath it was Kevin Malone.

  “Him?”

  Silently, Priest nodded again.

  I had examined the picture on the night he had given it to me, but I had never paid special attention to that particular half-inch-high image. The person it represented might have been a gardener, a man of middle age, short and perhaps stocky. A soft, sweat-stained hat cast a shadow on his face.

  “I want to see him.” I looked toward Marcella, still leaning against the stonework of the mantel. “We want to see him.”

  “Are you certain, sir?”

  “Damn you, get him!”

  Priest remained where he was, staring
at me; I was so furious that I think I might have seized him as I had threatened and pushed him into the fire.

  Then the French windows opened, and there came a gust of wind. For an instant I think I expected a ghost, or some turbulent elemental spirit. I felt that pricking at the neck that comes when one reads Poe alone at night.

  The man I had seen in the picture stepped into the room. He was a small and very ordinary man in worn khaki, but he left the windows wide behind him, so that the night entered with him, and remained in the room for as long as we talked.

  “You own this house,” I said. “You’re Kevin Malone.”

  He shook his head. “I am Kevin Malone—this house owns me.”

  Marcella was standing straighter now, drunk, yet still at that stage of drunkenness in which she was conscious of her condition and could compensate for it. “It owns me too,” she said, and walking almost normally she crossed the room to the baronial chair Malone had chosen, and managed to sit down at his feet.

  “My father was the man-of-all-work here. My mother was the parlor maid. I grew up here, washing the cars and raking leaves out of the fountains. Do you follow me? Where did you grow up?”

  I shrugged. “Various places. Richmond, New York, three years in Paris. Until I was sent off to school we lived in hotels, mostly.”

  “You see, then. You can understand.” Malone smiled for a moment. “You’re still re-creating the life you had as a child, or trying to. Isn’t that right? None of us can be happy any other way, and few of us even want to try.”

  “Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again,” I ventured.