A World Elsewhere

by Wayne Johnston

  “Which name is better, Druken or Carson?”

  “I don’t concern myself with names. But never speak in front of Mrs. Vanderluyden unless she asks you a question. Keep your answer short. Call her ma’am or Mrs. Vanderluyden. She’s like Nun One, or the nobleman, or even the wealth inspector. Our fate is in her hands.”

  “Landish says you take after your grandfather,” Deacon said to Goddie, as they waited for Sedgewick to begin geography class. “What does ‘take after’ mean?”

  “It means you’re a lot like him.”

  “Grandpa was old.”

  “Not always.”

  “Father never says I take after him. Mother doesn’t either.”

  “Landish says you look like him. He says you’ve your grandfather’s eyes and your grandfather’s forehead.”

  Goddie stared blankly at Deacon for several seconds, then suddenly burst into tears and ran off shouting for her mother.

  “You must mind what you say to her, Deacon,” Landish said when Deacon told him what had happened. “Strange forces come to play on even the most literal, unambiguous pieces of information that enter that child’s mind. You and I can have our little jokes, but let’s keep them to ourselves. For instance, don’t mention Gen of Eve to her. I don’t want her to misunderstand that figure of speech. And don’t mention Captain Druken’s hat or Princeton to her either.”

  “What did Goddie, I mean Godwin, tell you today?” Landish said, shaking his head when Deacon repeated a story Goddie had told in Stavely’s music class called “Jack and Beans Talk” and said that in old Gough’s history class she had asked how long the “Victorious Error” lasted.

  “How long did the Victorious Error last, Gough?” Landish asked in the Smoker.

  “The Victorious Error has lasted sixty-four years,” Gough said. “A prize has been offered to anyone who corrects it.”

  Noah’s Ark angels. Cain Unable. Lot’s wife turned into a spiller of salt. Starting with Abraham, all penises were circle-sized.

  Gough said that Landish was lucky. He asked him to imagine what teaching Goddie foreign languages was like.

  Landish laughed. “She sounds almost like a little Landish.”

  Deacon felt sorry for her. She looked frightened when she didn’t know the answer, so sometimes he pretended not to know it. The Blokes knew he was pretending, but he wasn’t sure if Goddie did. He knew she wished it was like before when they didn’t have him to compare her to.

  She was in the habit of speaking as if she and her father managed his share of the Vanderluyden fortune in tandem. “Profits are slightly down,” she announced to Landish and Deacon on their first day together for their reading and writing class, frowning as if she were speaking of a trend whose reversal would be her main task for the next few months.

  Gough told Landish about the Vanderluyden fortune-founder, the “Admiral,” the first Godfrey Vanderluyden. He was said to have had a written vocabulary of about three hundred words, most of which, on the rare occasions that he tried to write them, he misspelled. When he wrote words that should have had double e’s, he replaced the second e with an a, often to innocuous effect, such as when he wrote of going to “sea the widowe,” but more famously to bizarre effect, such as when he misspelled “deed” and wrote to a man with whom he had recently agreed upon a price for a trotting horse: “Please send her dead to me to proove that she is mine.”

  “Father says there’s no such thing as God,” Goddie said. “Mother says listen to Father about everything but not God. She says it’s just as well that he pays no attention to us. She says she doesn’t care if he pays attention to her as long as he pays her allowance. Mother says we’re not as good as God at anything. God is the best at everything. He got here first. Darkies lay on the face of the sheep. Then God said ‘leather be light.’ Those were the first words ever spoken. The most important words ever spoken. Everything started when God said them. It was dark so He started a fire. He sawed that which was wood. He gave us a minion over everything. Gough said minions are lesser beans. Like servants, Mother said. God is the supreme bean. The King is more like God than me. But I’m more like God than you. And you’re more like God than even the smartest darky. God has no father and mother, but He’s not like you. He’s not an orphan. Mother says no one gave birth to him. He gave it to Himself. He sent His son to die on the cruise of fiction.”

  It wasn’t until they’d been at Vanderland two months that Deacon met Mrs. Vanderluyden. Her name was Gertrude but Landish said he must never call her that. She came to the Academy when he and Goddie were there with Landish. Deacon thought she looked pretty and smiled at her.

  “So you’re the orphan who sits in my daughter’s company at school,” Mrs. Vanderluyden said. “What was your father’s last name?”

  “Druken, ma’am.”

  “Your father’s last name.”

  Landish stepped forward. “It was Carson, Mrs. Vanderluyden.”

  “So Druken killed Carson. And Carson’s mother. Druken made Carson an orphan. And now Carson’s son is Druken’s son except they share no blood. Captain Druken. No doubt the captaincy was self-conferred. The son of a murdering savage plays father to the murdered parents’ son while tutoring my only child. It’s not exactly an ideal arrangement for Godwin, is it?”

  She covered her face with her hands and drew a deep breath, her shoulders slowly rising and falling.

  Deacon looked at Landish, who ever so slightly shook his head.

  “He is so small, so thin,” Mrs. Vanderluyden said. He thought her voice was nicer than before. “His eyes—there’s barely room inside him for his soul. He must have no idea how he came to be here. Did you have to take him three thousand miles from home to keep him from starving to death?”

  “Our situation was—”

  “No one’s fault but yours. You let yourself be taken in by my husband. As did I. But you’ve no better sense than to come back to him for more.”

  Mrs. Vanderluyden stepped closer to Deacon. Their noses almost touched. He thought she smelled like soap. She put her hands on his shoulders. He could barely feel them. “Never harm Godwin in any way,” she said. But she touched his cheek with her finger. “Mr. Druken will explain to you what I mean by harm. And what will come from disobeying me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You’re not a member of this family,” Mrs. Vanderluyden said. “You have to understand that. I have no one but my daughter. You have no one but Landish Druken, such as he is. I’m sorry for that. And Landish Druken has no one but my husband, such as he is. You two would not be here if not for Mr. Vanderluyden. You would not be here if it were up to me. I know that sounds unkind. But there is much that you are far too young to understand. Both of you had better be on your best behaviour. And you, Deacon—I hate to be so severe with you, but you must be especially careful where my daughter is concerned. What is my daughter’s name?”

  “Godwin, ma’am.”

  “That’s right. And you must never call her anything but that. If I had my way, you would call her Miss Vanderluyden, even when speaking to her.”

  She stood erect, stepped back and looked at Landish. “You must care for yours. I must care for mine. I must. You cannot interfere.”

  “I assure you I won’t, even though I can’t imagine how I could.”

  That night as he climbed into his bed, Deacon said that she was nicer than Goddie made him think she’d be. Landish too had been surprised to hear tenderness creep into her voice when she spoke to Deacon. She must not have been prepared for what she saw, a boy still disarmingly frail despite two months at Vanderland. But her undisguised contempt for her husband made him uneasy. She saw herself and Landish as kindred victims of Van, both “taken in” by him. Perhaps she was exaggerating. But she’d sounded desperate, determined to persist in a fight she knew she couldn’t win.

  Landish confined himself to his room on Sunday afternoons to work on his book. He otherwise worked on it when, as he told the Blokes, “
idleness and inspiration coincide,” but he spent Sunday afternoons writing it whether he felt like it or not. He told them: “First you become an anecdotalist. Only a raconteur can certify an anecdotalist. And only a scribe can certify a raconteur. When you’re allowed to write things down, you become a scribe. Then you have to choose between fiction and non-fiction. A fork in the road. Two roads that look a lot alike. But either way you’re called a scribe. A scribe of fiction, first class, is not allowed to write a story, but can oversee the writing of a scene, with or without dialogue, or even a character sketch. And then you rise up through the ranks until you get your first commission and are put in charge of writing an entire work, in my case one of fiction.”

  Van had given him a typewriter to celebrate the three-month anniversary of their arrival at Vanderland and appointed his secretary, a Mr. Smythe, to give him rudimentary lessons in the use of the machine. That, combined with solitary practice, had resulted in his developing a technique involving only his thumbs and index fingers. His fingers were so large that he frequently struck two or more keys at once, but he had come to prefer the clatter of the typewriter to the near-silent scratching of pen on paper. The typewriter, a cast-iron Remington that, being completely unenclosed, caused Gough to describe it as being “all innards,” looked like the overturned skeleton of some skinny, many-boned animal with a single rack of forty ribs.

  The weather brightened through the early summer. When it was nice, the others, Deacon included, would go outside and leave The Blokes to him, but when it was wet or cold, they had no choice but to put up with the din that he made. Deacon stuck his fingers in his ears and tried to concentrate on reading. The Blokes strained to hear the gramophone. Gough told Landish that it sounded as if he was not so much using the typewriter as trying to subdue it, as if the main task of his life was not to compose a book but to exact, by means of bludgeoning it, an admission of defeat from a small creature that he kept hidden in his room. His fingers pounded the keys like hammerheads, the typewriter jumped about and thudded on his desk, which in turn knocked against the wall, while his feet kept a kind of time with his fingers, stamping on the floor with such force that the adjoining rooms shook as much as his did. The tumult went on almost ceaselessly, with pauses just long enough to suggest that he might be done for the day, and then it would resume, seemingly louder than before, as if he had asked the thing that he was doing battle with if it had had enough and been answered with some vicious, deeply personal, filth-ridden insult.

  When he at last emerged from his room, his face would be scarlet red and his hair matted to his forehead, from which beads of sweat still dripped, his shirt clinging to him, so wet it was transparent and his pink back and belly showing as clearly as if, from the waist up, he was naked.

  “You look as though you’ve got a fever,” Gough said one day. “How many pages did you write?”

  “Ten,” Landish said. “But I used the letter X a lot. A lot more than any other letter.”

  “Why?” Deacon said.

  “Because every word in his book contains the letter X,” Sedgewick said.

  “Because, Deacon,” Landish said, “it’s the best letter to type over other letters with. It’s the best way to cross out things that look worse on paper than they sounded in your head. Sentences you can’t believe you wrote and pray you don’t remember. Sentences that, in other circumstances, it would amuse you to know that anyone could write.”

  “And you’ll tell no one what the book’s about?” Gough said.

  “I’m afraid that I’ll stop writing if I talk too much about it.”

  “Or maybe you’re afraid you’ll start,” Sedgewick said.

  “You’re too hard on yourself, Landish, that’s all,” Stavely said, curling a strand of his long white hair round his finger. “Sedgewick may be right. Why don’t you let someone else see what you write before you cross it out?”

  “Too late for what I wrote today,” Landish said.

  “What do you mean?” Gough said.

  “I crossed out everything. Every last word. And then I burned the pages.”

  “Good God, Landish,” Sedgewick said, his voice so high-pitched it made Landish wince. “What a waste. For us, I mean. We could have all had some peace and quiet this afternoon.”

  “How much have you kept since you started, if you don’t mind my asking?” Gough said.

  “Nothing. I may be in the process of writing, and will one day be trying to find a publisher for, the first entirely expurgated book.”

  That evening, Landish was the last to leave the Smoker. Deacon, alone in their room, heard him holding forth as he used to in the attic. About the dots, he hoped, or even Sedgewick—Landish kept telling him he “sensed” the man could not be trusted—but he was almost certain he was upset about Captain Druken’s hat, which was long overdue. Two days before, he’d said he wished Captain Druken’s hat would hurry up. He had many times written to the wealth inspector but received no replies. In his letters, he always referred to the hat as “the item that you promised you would send to me.” He couldn’t call it a hat, he told Deacon, because the letters might wind up in the wrong hands.

  He listened to Landish for what seemed like hours, his tone rising and falling. The other Blokes shouted from their rooms for him to go to sleep.

  “I was reading aloud something that I wrote,” he told Deacon when at last he came to bed.

  “I’m sure the wealth inspector will keep his promise,” Deacon said.

  Landish said that he was sure too, in a way—at least that he’d keep his promise if he was still able to. “Who knows what may have happened since we left?”

  “What may have happened?”

  Landish said someone might have found out where the inspector was hiding the hat.

  “The nobleman?”

  “Maybe. Or someone else. Almost anyone. I was a fool to leave without it. The wealth inspector might be in trouble because of me. How could I have left my father’s hat in someone else’s hands and then gone off three thousand miles away?”

  “What kind of trouble?” Deacon said.

  “The man might be in jail for all I know. A wife and three children left with no one to support them. Or he may not be as honest as we think. A man who is paid to withhold vouchers from the poor. He may have made some sort of deal to sell the hat.”

  Deacon shook his head.

  “You might be right. Maybe he sent it when he was supposed to and it went astray on the way from there to here. Things go astray. Between there and here, someone might have stolen it. Opened the crate and stolen the box. Things get sent and don’t arrive. It happens. That’s why I should have found some other way.”

  Deacon asked Landish what he would do with the hat if it arrived. Landish said he would show it to the Blokes, and Van too. But even so, Deacon must not talk to anyone about the nobleman or how Landish got the hat back. And he’d make up some story about why it took the hat longer than it took them to get to Vanderland. He smiled reassuringly at him, undressed and got into bed. But he tossed and turned. He couldn’t bear to think why the wealth inspector hadn’t replied. If he’d washed his hands of the hat and of him and the boy, he wouldn’t blame him. There might be someone at the mail depot who was telling the nobleman that the wealth inspector was getting letters from America, where Landish Druken went.

  In the morning, when they woke, he got up and sat on the edge of his bed, facing Deacon. He said he thought he knew what had happened to the hat. The wealth inspector had sent it—it had arrived in a crate at Vanderland, delivered to that part of the house where freight from the train was received. And in spite of its having been addressed to Landish Druken, Van had opened the crate and taken the hat, which was now hidden somewhere in one of the hundreds of rooms at Vanderland.

  “How would Mr. Vanderluyden know the hat was in the crate?”

  Landish said he wouldn’t have known anything about the hat, he had probably just opened the crate out of curiosity—who woul
d tell him not to?—and found it and decided he must have it for no reason but that it belonged to Landish.

  “Because of Princeton?” Deacon asked.

  Landish said he wasn’t sure, but he was certain he was right that Van had the hat even though he had no proof.

  “But he picked us,” Deacon said. “To help us. He didn’t know about the hat.”

  Landish said he picked them because he felt guilty for what he did at Princeton, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t hurt his friend again if he got the chance.

  Deacon wasn’t sure Mr. Vanderluyden had done what Landish said. You couldn’t find a hat in such a house. “What will you do?” he asked. “Vanderland’s so big. You can’t sneak about from room to room, people will see you.” Landish said they had to pretend they didn’t know Van had stolen the hat—after all they couldn’t afford to accuse him, couldn’t demand he give them back the hat. They had to pretend they didn’t know he’d stolen the hat. “At least I know it’s here,” he added. “At least I know it’s nearby. That’s something, I suppose.”

  “I suppose,” Deacon said.

  But Deacon knew Landish would think about the hat almost all the time until it was found or arrived from Newfoundland or until he couldn’t stand it anymore. He wasn’t sure what would happen then. But he was glad Landish was happy about one thing: at Landish’s request, one of Vanderland’s carpenters had framed Gen of Eve in black wood and covered her in glass. Landish considered hanging it in his and Deacon’s room, on the wall opposite their beds, but Deacon said he wouldn’t want someone, not even Gen of Eve, looking at him all night long. So he hung it in the Smoker, and the Blokes—all but Sedgewick—complimented his mother on both her draftsmanship and her attractiveness.