A World Elsewhere

by Wayne Johnston

  “She’s almost smiling,” Gough said. “But she looks tired or careworn or something. Perhaps she sensed that her time was short.”

  “It’s not the Mona Lisa,” Sedgewick said. “It’s merely a crude pencil sketch. Who knows what effect she was aiming for?”

  At noon, Goddie would go off for lunch in the Lesser Banquet Hall and Deacon would go back to The Blokes to have lunch with Landish and the others. Mrs. Vanderluyden did not eat lunch, declaring it to be a “vulgar, rustic custom,” but Mr. Vanderluyden insisted that it made sense to eat when the body most had need of nourishment. It was, he said, part of the “new way” at Vanderland. Goddie would come back from lunch and her post-lunch nap with a glazed, sated, drowsy look about her. It was for some reason always after lunch that she was especially resentful of being paired with Deacon in the Academy.

  “Did you enjoy your lunch, Deacon?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “What did you have?”

  “A slice of sausage and a piece of bread. And an apple. A five-point apple.”

  She smiled. “I didn’t ask you what you fed your horse. What did you really have?”

  Deacon didn’t answer.

  “I had the most delightful lunch. Veal chops and roasted potatoes. And strawberries and chocolate ice cream for dessert.”

  Deacon pictured a large plate bearing two veal chops encircled by large, fat-basted roasted potatoes, all of it covered in gravy.

  Goddie slumped in her chair, lazily kicking her feet, which didn’t reach the floor, staring at Deacon, her hands clasped on her blue-velvet-dress-covered belly that rose and fell as if she was slightly out of breath.

  “You’re not my brother, you know. You’re not even my eleventh cousin times three. You’re only here because Father likes Landish. He doesn’t like you.”

  Often she would fall asleep shortly after the first lesson of the afternoon began. As they were on orders from Mrs. Vanderluyden that Goddie must never be touched, the Blokes woke her by loudly clapping their hands or stamping their feet. Goddie would wake in such alarm that she would gasp or scream or cry out for her mother. Once, she slid straight off the chair and onto the floor and, beginning to cry, would not budge from where she sat until her mother was brought to help her up.

  “She has a much fuller day than the boy does,” Mrs. Vanderluyden said. “That’s why she doesn’t do as well in some things. The poor thing is exhausted. You men should focus less attention on the boy and more on Godwin. I don’t care how clever you think the boy is. I know he’s your pet, but you’re being paid to educate my child, not someone else’s.”

  Landish said that Goddie would set records. Before she left Vanderland, she would be the richest person never to have set foot on a ship or train. Never to have seen a town, let alone a city. Never to have seen a thing her father didn’t own. Never to have set foot in or on something she wouldn’t own someday.

  Goddie was also instructed daily by a number of governesses who taught her posture, comportment, etiquette, manners, costume. Mrs. Vanderluyden said that their collective task was to stifle her Vanderluyden half and cultivate her Jandemere half, to rid her of whatever “coarseness of nature and ill-refinement she may have inherited from my husband’s side of the family.”

  It was in the after-lunch periods that Goddie would look at Deacon with an expression of intense concentration before holding forth:

  “Landish is a Druken, so there’s no telling what he might do to you someday. He might murder you. Finish the job. Finish the Carson family. You’re just a bother to him anyway. Landish has a woman in Ashton. But she won’t marry him as long as he has you. He would have finished his book long ago, but he has to spend his time and money taking care of you. You can’t get into Heaven unless you have a grave. God can’t take your father’s soul until he finds his body. Your mother’s in Heaven all by herself. So even in Heaven she’s unhappy. Mother says your mother lost her mind when she heard about your father. She didn’t get her mind back when she went to Heaven. If she went to Heaven, because Mother says that if an apple like you fell from her, who knows what kind of tree she was.”

  But the next time she saw Deacon, she would be penitent to the point of bursting into tears, hiding her face in her hands. “I’m sorry I said those things, Deacon. None of them are true. Sometimes I’m so hateful and so mean. I don’t know why. It comes into my head and I say it. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help it. You don’t say bad things to me. You don’t say anything to me. Maybe I wouldn’t say things if I was smart like you. I know I’m not smart. I heard Father say to Mother I can’t hold a candle. That’s a smilie. He hurts my feelings sometimes. If you tell me you hate me, I’ll be very sad, but I won’t tell Mother.”

  “I don’t hate you, Goddie.”

  “I hope I never say bad things to you again. You’re very nice. I’d be so lonely and unhappy if you went away. Like I was before you came here.”

  Deacon tried without success to imagine what it meant that his mother had “lost” her mind, so he told Landish what Goddie had said.

  “There’s no woman in Ashton, Deacon. I’ve never been to Ashton. As you know, I’m not allowed to leave Vanderland. The book—I may never start it, let alone finish it, but it won’t be your fault either way. My book is in Just Mist and might just stay there forever.”

  Deacon told him that one second Goddie was nice and the next she was mean. Landish said that was called “turning” on someone. Deacon said that eating food, even just talking about food, made her turn on him. “Gustatory nastiness,” Landish said, but didn’t tell him what it meant. Deacon said she made fun of his lunch.

  “Tell her you had prime rib for lunch.” Then he said he was joking and Deacon mustn’t joke with Goddie. Landish said Goddie and her mother were “Daughter Fickle and Mrs. Snide.”

  Deacon felt sorry for Goddie when Goddie was sad. And when Goddie felt sorry for him. And for Mrs. Vanderluyden who didn’t sound mean when she said mean things. She said “son of a savage” but then she fixed his collar and said, “Off you go, out of my sight.”

  Deacon thought Goddie smelled nice. She was the first girl he had ever met unless he had met one in the Murk. She looked soft. And she was always pink like Deacon was after tub time. Everything she wore looked new. She wore one dress in the morning and another after lunch. She was bigger than him, but her hands were smaller. She told Deacon after lunch one day that her mother said that Deacon would never grow. He would always “be the runt of the little.” But her father said he would grow when he was good and ready.

  “If they must be tutored together,” Mrs. Vanderluyden said to Landish, “then I want him properly dressed. I don’t want Godwin spending her days in the company of a boy who looks and smells like the child of a scullery maid.”

  Landish asked Mrs. Vanderluyden if she meant to model Deacon on the boys his age who came to visit Goddie from New York. “I don’t want to look like them,” Deacon told Landish. Landish agreed with him that they looked like girls, their long hair done up in curls and flounces and in some cases even ribbons. They wore sailor suits and hats, short pants or skirts, gleaming, black-buckled shoes and white knee-high socks. They wore Buster Brown suits with large floppy silk bows at the neck. They looked like the boys on the ship.

  “I will dress him as I see fit,” said Mrs. Vanderluyden. “Don’t worry. There’s no point in trying to make him look like his betters. The result would be absurd. There’s no disguising what he is. Near presentability is the most I’m hoping for, for Godwin’s sake.”

  Overseeing a tailor, a barber and a governess, from whom she said she was not expecting miracles, Mrs. Vanderluyden had Deacon made over into something that she said would have to do. His hair was cut short and slicked back and flat with sweet pomade. He was measured for clothes of which three identical sets were made: a brown jacket with near-shoulder-width lapels that narrowed to nothing at the waist; a white shirt with a buttoned-down collar; a brown bow tie; a paisle
y-patterned velvet vest; brown shorts that came down to his knees; brown, silver-buckled shoes; and white mid-shin-length stockings.

  “Ma’am says you should give him a good scrubbing every morning,” one of the maids told Landish. “Scrub out his ears and clean beneath his fingernails and between his toes.”

  After lessons, Deacon changed back into his white shirt and trousers with suspenders as quickly as he could.

  “There you go—Goddie-ready, Goddie-worthy,” Landish would say every morning as he applied the final flourish of pomade.

  Deacon was glad to have been spared the indignity of some sort of indoor, beribboned hat such as Goddie’s New York friends were made to wear, but otherwise felt as absurd and uncomfortable as, judging by the expressions of the Blokes, they thought he looked.

  “Well, well, aren’t you something now, all dressed up like that?” Gough said, unable to keep from smiling the way he did when he was pretending not to notice something.

  “Goddie seems oblivious to his being a less onerous affront to her than he was before,” Landish told the Blokes.

  But one day, at the end of the last lesson, she said, “You look nice.”

  Deacon smiled.

  Bursting into tears, she ran off as if she had never been so hurtfully insulted.

  They were “promoted” again. Van said that he was going to give them a full tour of Vanderland no matter how long it took. They should start early.

  In the vestibule, through the stained glass windows of which the sun shone on the marble floor, he told them about the early days when they were building Vanderland, and showed them photographs. You couldn’t tell from the grounds of Vanderland what Carolina was like, he said—every tree and plant and grain of sand came from somewhere else. Landish asked him if he would have taken the marsh from Dark Marsh Road if Frederick Olmsted, the landscape architect, had told him he needed it for Vanderland. Of course, said Van.

  Deacon listened as Van told them how Vanderland began.

  No one could remember what things were like before. They dammed streams, they made some run in different ways. They used up a lot of horses and mules ripping trees out by their roots. If there was a hill where they didn’t want one, they got rid of it and put it where they did want one. They blew up rocks they didn’t like and brought in nicer ones from Mexico. It took thousands of men eight years to get the place just right. They made Lake Loom where no lake used to be, and for the house they dug a hole deeper than a dried-up lake. They took a picture from the bottom, of two men looking down into the hole.

  The walls were made of stone that masons cut up into blocks that looked like squares of fudge. A good granite block was thrown away unless it fit just right. The wood for the floors and walls came from places that were famous for trees. They plowed with something called a tractor instead of an ox because you didn’t have to shoot a tractor that had broken down. Some men gave their lives. They were hit by lightning. Or dynamite went off too soon. Things fell and not all of them got out. The roof was slick on rainy days. Some men who worked when no one knew how sick they were gave up the ghost on summer days when it was hot. They sacrificed themselves for something that wasn’t finished yet. He wished they could have seen it—but there might be a monument someday.

  Landish began to sing:

  Good King Vanderland looked out

  On the Feast of Stephen,

  When the poor lay round about,

  Deep and crisp and even.

  “The same old Landish. Half-baked satire. You wouldn’t know what to do with money if you had any,” Van told him.

  Van showed them the guest wing, long corridors like those in hotels, rooms on both sides. Men strolled arm in arm with women, nodding or saying hello to Van, then moving on. Sometimes a butler walked beside a wheelchair, pointing out to its stupefied-looking occupant the main features of the house.

  “You see how lucky you are, Deacon?” Van said. “Not everyone gets a guided tour from me.”

  Deacon was too short to see over most things. Take your time, Van told him. Look first, then walk. Landish said the house was an obstacle course of the priceless and the precious. Everything you thought was glass was crystal. Nothing had a hole in it. Nothing was dirty or wrinkled. There were no hobnail marks or other kinds of scuffs on the wooden floor. There were little white statues on small tables with bent and skinny legs. Walk slowly, Landish said, because you never knew when something priceless might be just around the corner or behind a chair. Every room was full of paintings you could spoil just by touching them. One of a boy with a big orange. He looked as if he didn’t know what it was for or that you had to peel it first.

  Landish said there was one painting you could spoil just by looking at it. You could only admire the box that it was in. Even Mr. Vanderluyden had never seen it. He took the word of the person he bought it from that it was in the box. Landish said that the older something was, the more it was worth. You couldn’t put a price on something that was so old it would fall to pieces if you sneezed. If something was made and no one could be bothered making another one of it, it was worth more than almost anything. The only existing copy of the most boring book of all time was a bargain at any price. Things that belonged to famous people were priceless no matter how mean the people had been. The bidding would be fierce for an authenticated pair of Herod’s socks.

  Van said Landish was a philistine.

  He showed them the small, gravity-driven master clock, inconspicuously located above the entrance to the stables, which drove, by an electrical connection, all the other clocks in the house, the “slave clocks” as they were called, some of which were fifty times the size of the master clock, which looked like a dinner plate. He said he was like the master clock. If not for him, Vanderland would wind down to nothing. Everything would stop. The generators, boilers, refrigerators. The lights would all go out, the fires. Everyone would leave and the rooms would lie empty. The people of Ashton would scale the wall, smash the windows. He asked them to imagine Vanderland open to the wind and rain, lived in by animals, scavenger birds gliding about among the chandeliers.

  “The point of living is to be remembered, Deacon. Remembered for doing something. There is no afterlife but that one. One instant you’re alive and the next—nothing. As suddenly as if your head had been chopped off.”

  “Surely a tour of Vanderland is possible that includes no mention of decapitation,” Landish said.

  “The world was not made. God did not make Vanderland. I did. I did not once consult with or meet by chance with God.”

  “What about the Tomb of Time?” Deacon said. “Landish says no one knows what it’s like because no one’s ever been there and come back. Except Lazarus and Jesus and—”

  “The gibberish he’s filled your mind with,” Van said, glancing at Landish.

  “Van thinks God resigned,” Landish said. “Because of declining health and a desire to spend more time with his family.”

  On day three of the tour, as they were partway through the middle floors with their massive living halls, Landish remarked that Deacon was looking especially tired. “Would you like to ride in a wheelchair, Deacon?” Van asked. “We’ll be walking a long way. I’m afraid those little legs of yours may not be up to it. I’ll push you and Landish can walk beside us.”

  “There’s no need for that,” Landish said, but Deacon nodded. The chairs were parked in a large closet just inside the main vestibule for those guests who, though able to walk, were elderly or infirm.

  Van had a servant bring them a wheelchair. The servant pushed it across the marble foyer. It was enormous, its handles a foot above Deacon’s head. The wheelchair had an upholstered back, four wooden wheels with spokes, two large wheels on the side and two smaller ones in front, flanking a cushioned footrest. The armrests of the chair were too high for Deacon to use, so he sat with his hands in his lap as if he lacked even the use of his arms. Landish lifted him into it and Van wrapped a tartan blanket around him, tucking it in beh
ind his shoulders and his feet so that nothing but his head showed.

  They resumed their tour. People Deacon didn’t know looked at him, then at the chair and smiled. He wondered if they thought he couldn’t walk or was so sick he might die soon. When he smiled back, they smiled even more and nodded to him. The chair glided along soundlessly on the smooth floor. When he arched his head it looked as if the ceiling was moving backwards.

  Landish appraised him. He looked like a spoiled but sickly child monarch being wheeled about a palace that no one expected him to live long enough to inherit.

  They encountered Mrs. Vanderluyden in one of the living halls. “A most unusual entourage today, Van,” she said, as she came towards them, her long, blue dress swishing with each step. “This is ridiculous. You look like the boy’s attendant, pushing him about while Mr. Druken walks unoccupied beside you with his hands behind his back. If only you paid as much attention to our guests.” She spoke while walking and did not stop to wait for a reply from Van, but made for the nearest door and slammed it behind her.

  Van said, “We have so many guests—people come and go like hotel guests. Many leave without ever having met me, without my ever having set eyes on them. That’s fine with me. Gertrude manages the guest list. I leave it to her to make sure that no one feels snubbed.”

  “I can think of no one better suited for the task,” Landish said.

  “Well, I’m not one of the sights of Vanderland, I won’t be gawked at by guests and visitors as if I’m a feature of a Hunt and Olmsted house. I built Vanderland. I am its creator. I’ll show myself to whomever I please.”

  Van took them to the Greater Banquet Hall, which reminded Deacon of the churches he and Landish had gone to on winter Sunday mornings to get warm. Dust motes swarmed like mosquitoes in a shaft of sunlight that brightened half the floor. He liked churches best when they were almost empty, just a few people in the pews, nobody saying a word or looking around, only statues on the altar, the ruby-red and light blue votive candles lit, but that was all.