A World Elsewhere

by Wayne Johnston

  “Full fathom five thy father lies/those are pants that were his size.” He was ridiculously pleased when Van, finally, could not suppress a smile.

  In the middle of his junior year in the spring of 1890, Landish moved out of his dorm room and into Van’s house in town. They were inspired by Tennyson’s poem “The Lotus Eaters” to call the hilltop house and its spacious grounds Lotus Land. Van insisted on paying all the rent for a house that was bigger than the Drukens’.

  “You could fit this house into one room at Vanderland,” Van said.

  “Is the idea of building this Vanderland all that keeps you going?”

  “Isn’t that enough? The greatest house in the world?”

  They each had a storey of the three-storey house, Van the upper one, Landish the middle. Mr. Trull lived in three rooms on the ground floor. He had his own entrance and there was no connecting passage between his rooms and theirs. “He keeps an eye and ear out in case I leave, I suppose,” Van said. “I doubt he ever really sleeps.”

  Van chose as his bedroom the one at the opposite end of the house from Landish’s so that, he said, he wouldn’t be kept awake all night by the footsteps of “a stomping insomniac who can’t compose a word without roaring it out loud.”

  “And then I burn the words,” Landish said. “So far, I haven’t left a single word of my book unburned.”

  “You really are writing a book? I thought you were kidding and just reading your assignments out loud. What’s the book about?”

  “I can tell you it will be a novel. I know little more than that about it myself.”

  “You speak so often of Newfoundland, I’m maddened by your infatuation with the place. It’s just your childhood you miss, not Newfoundland,” he’d say. “Your childhood when everyone was nice to you, when you had no enemies and there was no one who was out to bring you down.”

  “Perhaps,” he’d say, and then start in about Newfoundland again.

  He told Van that he remembered the smell of ripening crab-apples borne up by the wind from the street below his house in late September.

  The shadow of a cloud moving over the patchwork colours of the mown fields in the fall. The white-capped waves on the harbour before a storm, the water all racing one way like that of a river as if the whole wind-driven harbour were moving on to somewhere else. The stream whose water was so cold and clear that, in defiance of his mother who warned him that he’d catch his death, he took off his clothes and lay in it on his back, all of his face immersed but for his nose as he looked up through the water at the sky. He remembered how good his skin felt when he put his clothes back on. How the air smelled of rain long before the rain began. Lightning so far away it seemed to make no thunder lit up from within the clouds above the Petty Harbour hills.

  On Dark Marsh Road, as at Princeton, Landish wrote every night, and every night burned what he wrote because it wasn’t good enough.

  In the attic, he composed his sentences out loud, drummed out their rhythm on the floor with his boot heels while his neighbours shouted protests from below. At the end of the evening he reread each page before he fed it to the fire. He remembered Van watching him do so, shaking his head in wonderment.

  Landish watched as, from the top windows of Lotus Land, Van trained his binoculars on Princeton, a general scanning from a carefully chosen vantage the movements and new developments in the enemy’s encampment.

  “We have the tactical advantage of high ground,” Landish said, “and even though we are greatly outnumbered, we will bring down a great many before they overtake the house.” Van ignored him, looking down the slope of Prospect Avenue for hours, sighing loudly with—Landish wasn’t sure—exasperation, impatience, disapproval.

  “What are you hoping to see, Van?” Landish said, but Van ignored him. He looked like a child who was pretending to disdain a group that had arbitrarily excluded him, turned him away with derisive taunts and mockery.

  “You can be part of it all any time you like,” Landish said, “whereas I came here expecting to be shunned.”

  Van smiled. “I like to watch it from afar,” he said. “The laughable vanity fair of the world. All that frantic toing-and-froing on the quad.”

  Van hadn’t liked it when Landish brought back to the house women whom he referred to as “fair ladies.” He required Landish to give him advance notice of his intentions to bring them home and vacated the house, staying away hours longer than he needed to and afterwards brooding in silence for days. There was also a middle-aged wealthy woman known among the students as the “trolling trollop” whose carriage with its tinted windows made the rounds of Princeton once a week. Landish was one of many sheepish-looking undergraduates who hastily climbed into it. “Methinks she doth divest too much,” he said to Van.

  Van said that, as a Vanderluyden, he could not take the chance of “availing” himself and thereby bringing upon America’s most famous family who knew what sort of infamy.

  They took English literature together, and upon going to class one day their professor told them he was glad to see that “the infamous twosome had come out from the cozy confines of their tryst.”

  His words were much quoted, their meaning lost on no one.

  It came to seem that the real purpose of their coming to Princeton was to establish Lotus Land, to live there and entice visitors from the university. They made it known that there would be salons at Lotus Land on Thursday nights.

  The president of Princeton had just declared that alcohol was the prime evil of the day. At the first Thursday salon, Landish raised a glass of cognac to the room at Lotus Land and said: “Leave us not without libation, and de-liver us, prime evil.”

  Looking about his two-room, marsh-overlooking attic, Landish could not help but long for the days when, once a week, four discreetly armed men who rode in the backs of coaches that drove up to Lotus Land wordlessly delivered cases of wine, cognac, cheese, grapes, smoked meats, bread, caviar, cigarettes, cigars—the Bare Excessities, he called them.

  The men and the goods arrived by a Vanderluyden train from Manhattan. The men were Norwegian—the Four Norsemen of the Metropolis. The most exclusive eating club at Princeton was The Ivy, referred to simply as “Ivy.” Landish called it “Scurvy.”

  “Not my best,” he said, “but I just can’t stop myself.”

  Now, in the darkness of his attic, he could not credit that there were such things as “eating clubs” anywhere on earth. Eighteen months and two thousand miles away from Princeton, “Hunger Clubs” seemed less far-fetched.

  He had called Lotus Land the Gobble and Guzzle Club. If someone had admonished him not to take it all for granted because, unlike those of his fellow students, his days of ease were numbered, he would not have listened. He’d known he had to think of the future and told himself he would, he would, but not just yet.

  Even now, it suited him to leave unasked, “What next?”

  When they heard of the board that was being served nightly at Lotus Land, ever more students came by, some of them deserters from the eating clubs. They were fledgling writers who proved, Landish said, that “the art of drivelry” was not dead. Landish asked that a vote be taken as to which of two names the new group should go by: The Knights of the Round Table; or The Knights Who, in Full Armour, Jostling Noisily for Room, Sit Side by Side on a Very Long Sofa. He named one student Sir Mountable, another one Sir Osis and another one Sir Vile.

  Van didn’t drink at the salons. He ate very little. He had no work to read aloud, not having written anything in his life but school assignments. He merely watched and smiled while Landish held court, and he only drank with Landish. No one said they minded that Van didn’t drink with them, even as they refused to abstain.

  “I’m a plodder,” he had often said. “I envy you. The words come pouring out just when you need them.”

  “You’re fair to middling,” Landish told him. “But you could be middling if you applied yourself.”

  “I’m so damn mediocre. I
have no talent, Landish. None. I inherited a lot of money from my father but not much in the way of a mind.”

  “Imagine,” Landish said, “if you could acquire the minds of geniuses and leave them to your sons. You would still have been shortchanged. ‘To my oldest son, I leave the mind of Shakespeare. To my second oldest, I leave the mind of Milton. To my third, the mind of Tennyson. To my youngest son, I leave the mind of Sir John Suckling.”

  After the others left, Landish and Van would sit side by side, slumped in their chairs in the living hall at Lotus Land, puffing on cigars, blowing plumes of smoke towards the ceiling, glasses of cognac warming in their hands, while Landish made anagrams of their last names.

  So it had been for Landish not so long ago—cognac sipped in front of roaring fires, nightly engorgement on the finest of foods, wit-appreciating dinner guests, the unstinting friendship and generosity of a wealthy young man who worshipped him.

  In St. John’s, he glanced at his reflection in windows, his moss-like mass of hair, what was left of the clothes that had been made by Van’s tailor who came to Princeton from Manhattan and pronounced Landish “unimprovable” but, at Van’s insistence, did his best.

  Whenever Landish saw a woman pushing an infant in a pram along the streets of St. John’s, he thought of Van’s sister, Vivvie, who had drowned at the Vanderluyden country estate when she was eighteen months old.

  Her nurse had been walking on the dock with Vivvie in her arms. Van happened to be the only other person there. Nurse stumbled. When Vivvie fell into the water, Nurse was still holding the blanket that she had been wrapped in. The child went under very fast. Van dove in to save her, but the water was so dark that he mistook a sunken piece of wood for his sister and was clutching it against his chest when he shot up to the surface.

  His family, his father especially, blamed him for her death.

  After telling him of Vivvie, Van stood, his face in his hands. Landish stood as well, uncertain what to say or do. Van threw his arms around Landish and pressed his head against his chest. He held on to him as if to keep himself from drowning, his fingers clawing Landish’s back. Landish hugged him, patted him. He tried to ease himself away, but Van clung tightly to him, sobbing, his fingers digging into his back. Their embrace lasted until the tears stopped and Van, his breathing back to normal, clapped Landish on both shoulders, stepped away, and turned to face the fire.

  “I’m sorry,” said Landish. “But you’ve nothing to be sorry for. Absolutely nothing.”

  “Now you will think that I’m—that way. Others think I am.”

  “I don’t,” Landish said, unable to summon up a less perfunctory denial.

  “Really,” Van said. “I’m not. It’s Vivvie that makes me seem to be many things I’m not. Don’t put any store by what other people say about me. When you belong to a certain kind of family, people like to think the worst about you. You of all people should understand. The only difference between the Vanderluydens and the Drukens is one of scale.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You, with all your women—you’re an exoneration of what many people think to be my nature.”

  There were nights, still, when Landish lay sleepless on his bunk in the silent house on Dark Marsh Road, picturing Vivvie sinking, drifting slowly down, her dress buoyed up around her face, her arms above her head. Nothing so made him wish that he and Van had never parted as the image of that little girl in the mud-darkened water, her brother just inches away, flailing about in panic.

  They had been friends. How their friendship ended did not change that. Thick and Thin, Landish had called them. Prince Ton and Prince Ounce.

  “I would never do such things,” his father told him when Landish repeated to him what he had overheard boys say at school. “Never mind what people say. They need someone of a lesser rank than God to blame. Nothing short of my death could satisfy them that I did everything I could to save my crew. I won’t die just to keep up appearances. All survivors are suspected of surviving at the expense of the dead, of forever keeping to themselves some awful secret.”

  He believed his father until he acquired enough knowledge from him to see for himself the truth behind his father’s reputation. He challenged his father then, who acted as if Landish hadn’t spoken, as if each “mishap” at sea or on the ice had been unforeseeable, inscrutably caused, the doings of some whimsy of the elements, against which Landish was too green to know it was pointless to bemoan or rail.

  Eventually he realized one day, by his father’s manner, his expression and his tone of voice, that he was waiting for it to dawn on him that things would remain the same with or without the blessing of Landish Druken. Later that night, he looked at his father, at his face that, even as he slept, seemed to register every second of the life that he had led, every accusation, spoken or unspoken, made against him, every spit or slur that had followed the mention of his name.

  He would not be the first idealist to learn the knack of squaring his conscience with a way of life that in his youth he thought could be reformed. There was an intricate set of necessarily imperfect rules that were followed the world over except by fools who, in the course of their foredoomed and lonely insurrections, were destroyed.

  His father was the first sealing skipper in the world to bring back one million seals from the hunt. Million. The word was everywhere in Newfoundland. The Board of Trade threw a dinner for Captain Abram Druken. One thousand flipper pies were served.

  “Million Abram” received the award of the Blue Ensign from the Governor. A gold medal from a prominent merchant. The OBE—the Order of the British Empire from Buckingham Palace. A “white-coat hat,” which his father called “the laurel wreath of sealers.”

  As a child, crouching down by his parents’ bed, Landish had reached underneath, taken hold of the small wooden trunk, and as gingerly as if it held explosives, eased it out.

  “The lock is just for decoration,” his father had said. He held the sides of the top of the chest with his fingers and slowly, ceremoniously, much as the Governor must have done at the official presentation, raised the lid.

  The first thing he noticed was the red velvet lining the inside of the chest, then the hat that was supposedly made from the very fur of the millionth seal. A baby seal. The purest white that he had ever seen.

  The first to bring home one million seals. Bring home. It made it sound as if the seals were dead when his father found them and all he did was bring them back.

  Every night, even if there was not so much as a breeze by day, the wind came up like something brought on by the darkness. It blew in through one side of the attic on Dark Marsh Road and out the other with a screeching whistle. Landish heard what he called the droning in the wires several streets away.

  He stood at the attic’s porthole, its only window, and looked out past the marsh, across the rooftops and chimneys of the city, to the Narrows. It was mid-October. He thought about the words “the fall.” No others would do for how things seemed, for the tantalizing transformation that was taking place, the slow, sad fall of all things into winter. It seemed to him that “the fall” was shot through with the fall and in part made it what it was and caused him to feel about it as he did.

  Everything was falling, failing. Night was falling faster, the light fading faster from the fields. Time by day passed faster and by night seemed not to pass at all. He turned the attic lights on sooner, but not before something like a dusky silence filled the two rooms. It was as if some old regime of time was falling and a new regime was near.

  It had been this “feeling” of the fall that first made him want to write.

  He wrote more than he ever had at Princeton.

  It was so bad he wished that he could burn it twice.

  In his and Van’s final year at Princeton, more and more students began to vie for an invitation to the Lotus Land literary salons. Van was the gatekeeper. He chose not only outcasts, the previously unpopular, the “unaffiliates,” but also young men whose fath
ers were almost as rich as his, some of them deserters from the usual eating clubs, The Ivy as well as The Cottage and The Cap and Gown.

  Landish assigned more nicknames:

  There were three brothers who were known as Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger and Pliny the Tiny. There were the Duke of Unwellington, Le Marquis de Malarkey, the Duke of Buxomberg and Sorethumberland.

  Landish’s authority was sometimes challenged, most often by way of allusions to his having no “name.” He would pretend to take it in good humour. When he felt most wounded, he deferred the taking of revenge, storing up witticisms until he was able to give far worse than he’d got, so destroying his would-be rival that the fellow either dropped out of the Druken circle or hung on as a sullen, silent member, a chastising sight to others with a mind to challenge Landish. And he sang along when they started up “What shall we do with a Druken sealer?” which they usually did late at night when all were drunk.

  Landish defended Van when the others mocked him for writing “Vanderbilge.” Landish called him “VanPun” and wrote puns for him which Van passed off at the salons as his own. He continued to do his best to be seen as something of an enfant terrible and Van managed to look as though he wrote the lines that Landish merely delivered, standing at his shoulder, not smiling, impassively savouring what his mouthpiece said. They put many a nose out of joint, Landish noting that Van could do so without much regard for the consequences.

  One night, even as he was laughing at his own cleverness, Landish was told that he and Van were being called sodomites by their professors.

  Landish sometimes took out of his attic closet his box of Princeton compositions, the only writing of his he had not burned. They—mainly Landish—wrote a roman à clef musical under the pseudonyms Filbert and Mulligan, which they called Nutstewyou. It was a great hit among those who were not the models for their characters. Among the ragged sheets and scrolls of paper, he found the main creation of the Umbrage Players, which had been called Who Consumed Keats?

  It began with a corpulent character named Stilton who was at work on an “epicurean poem” called “Parodies Lost.” Stilton, around whom everyone holds their nose, tells the audience that his purpose is to justify “the weight of man to God.” The characters were all major English poets and were all portrayed as corpulent with enormous bellies and backsides. Alfred Lord Tennyson became Well-fed Lard Venison. Coleridge and Wordsworth were the hybrid Cramyouwell Curdsworth. Shelley, groaning and clutching his belly, spent the entire play writing “Ode to the Worst Wind.” A rotund, burstingly buxom Mary Shelley was carried onstage by Frankenstein. A caricature of Rudyard Kipling, Rhubarb Nibbling, nibbled on shoots of rhubarb and every so often roared, “My gun comes up like thunder/On the bed where ’Manda lays.” Ne’er Hard Unmanly Hopkins danced about, lisp/singing “It seems I’ve sprung rhythm.”