A World Elsewhere

by Wayne Johnston

  “Godwin, you must have misunderstood Mr. Sedgewick,” Landish said. “I’ve never been to Ashton. Imprisonment is a condition of my employment, as it is of your existence. I’m quite happy to get by on a twig from the family forest. Quite content with and grateful for my twiglet. What man who is paid a twiglet a year would begrudge his employer ten million trees?”

  “We weren’t just given our fortune, you know.” Goddie twirled a globe of the world on her desk. “My great-grandfather the Admiral built all the ships and railroads in America.”

  Landish strode back and forth, his hands in the pockets of his trousers, certain that he should say no more and certain that he would.

  “Indeed he did, Goddie. With his bare hands. All by himself. That’s why he was called a great grandfather and not just a passable one. They say you never saw such a man when it came to rustling up a ship or a railroad with spare parts. He would take what less resourceful people threw out in the trash and quick as a wink work it up into a steamship or a locomotive.”

  “You don’t have what it takes to get rich.” Goddie swept the globe off the table and onto the floor with both hands. It broke quite neatly in half. Her mouth quivered. “You made me do that. You’re full of mediocre blood. Father says that all the time. That’s why you’re poor. That’s why you drink so much. Father says weak men drink too much because they feel sorry for themselves.”

  “Or maybe they feel sorry for themselves because they’re weak and drink too much. It’s a tricky thing, cause and effect.”

  “You know I could have you dismissed.” She pouted, her pretty mouth turning down. “If I told Father how you speak to us, the kind of things you say about him and Grandfather and the Admiral.”

  “Please don’t tell your father, Goddie,” Deacon said. He was seated at the table next to hers.

  “Deacon, I don’t need your help with Van,” Landish shouted.

  “I’m telling Mother you called me Goddie!” She covered her face with her hands but peeked through her fingers at Deacon.

  “Please stop, Landish,” Deacon said. “Stop making her cry. She’s right. I can smell it when you’re decks awash.”

  “Goddie and the Holy Guest,” Landish said. He left the Academy even though the class had not yet begun.

  Deacon thought about Esse. He’d seen Landish take her hand and seen that she didn’t pull away. Seen her smile and blush and squeeze his fingers. Landish’s voice sounded different when he talked to her. And she was quiet when he was in the room. She pretended not to notice when he was nearby but Deacon knew she noticed. But Landish didn’t know he knew about her. He picked her and she picked him. She sounded different now, even when she talked to Deacon. Nicer. She sounded like she’d picked him too, but he wasn’t sure. No one had ever picked Landish. Not really. Landish might make a contribution. They would have a baby that was theirs, not someone else’s. Not the baby of someone who was in the Tomb of Time. It wouldn’t be the same anymore.

  Landish and Deacon were again invited to the Rume. Deacon refused to hold Landish’s hand as they followed Henley through the maze of Vanderland.

  “Still mad at me?” Landish said.

  Deacon nodded.

  The butler opened one of the large doors to the Rume but walked away without announcing their arrival. They heard from inside the murmur of a voice.

  “Is he talking to the chimney witch?” Deacon asked.

  The Rume was dark but for the flickering of firelight. Off to their left, out of sight, was the fireplace that was the size of the Druken mausoleum. Deacon knew that if the lights were on he would have been able to see Napoleon’s chess set and the big white bowl from China like the one that Mr. Vanderluyden once told him Goddie broke. She had said it didn’t matter because her mother said it was probably just “some Chinaman’s shitpot.”

  “Van?” Landish said.

  “Come in.” His voice was so low that Deacon barely heard it above the snapping of the logs in the fireplace.

  “I can’t see,” Deacon said, and he felt Landish’s hands on his shoulders, guiding him forward.

  They went inside. Van was kneeling in front of what Deacon took to be a piece of furniture, perhaps a kind of bench, that lay crossways before the fire, more than spanning the width of the fireplace. It looked like a long narrow coffin, but its top was covered in red velvet and there were no handles on the sides. His hands were resting palms down on the velvet.

  “It’s a trunk of sorts,” he said. “The exterior was carved by the man who carved the mantelpiece. It’s quite ornate, isn’t it, like a sarcophagus. Appropriate. Please, sit down.”

  He did not look up as the two of them sat down behind him, Deacon keeping his distance from Landish, holding a pillow tight against his chest.

  “I was fourteen when my sister, Vivvie, was born, Deacon,” he said.

  “Deacon knows about Vivvie,” Landish said. Van, still staring ahead into the fire, shook his head.

  “You know what I told you, Landish,” Van said. “It was not the whole truth.”

  “Then tell me the whole truth, for once,” Landish said. “But make no mention of a chimney witch.”

  “For fourteen years, I had been the youngest child, the youngest of four boys. My mother was forty-one. No one told me that she was expecting. I’m sure my brothers spoke of it among themselves but not to me. My father, well—it was only rarely that he spoke to me at all. The five of them, as well as other relatives, and my tutors, governesses, the servants—no one bothered to invent a reason for my mother’s lying in. She stayed in the guest wing of our house on Fifth Avenue.

  “I was as discreet as my elders tacitly instructed me to be. But I was mortified. Forever aware of the near proximity of a woman who was not only pregnant but was my mother. I blushed in the company of others, especially women. I couldn’t imagine how things would ever again be as they had been, for the end of all this secrecy would be the impossible-not-to-acknowledge fact and sight of a newborn child.

  “My brothers and I were taken to the nursery to see her a few days after she was born. They regarded her with fond amusement, this red and wrinkled little thing. I don’t know how long it was before they set eyes on her again—months, probably—but I went to the nursery as often and for as long as I was allowed to.

  “I was not, as I had expected I would be, embarrassed at the sight of her. I was … smitten. There ought to be a special, particular word for it, the love of a gawky, adolescent boy for his infant sister. I had never seen a newborn. I suppose I thought—if I had ever considered this or any other matter regarding infants—that they were the size of babies one saw being pushed in prams by their nurses. I had not taken much notice of babies of any age or size before. What I couldn’t converse with didn’t exist. I had defined the word sibling as ‘brother.’

  “But here was this shrivelled, all but blind, completely helpless, completely dependent tiny thing known as my sister who looked, I was assured, much as I had looked at her age. Vivvie.

  “Strange though it may seem to you, and sometimes seems even to me now, I formed the notion that only if constantly looked over, constantly watched, could she continue to exist. It was not that I feared that, while no one was attending her, while she was lying there alone in her crib, she would suffer some mishap—smother in, be strangled by, her blankets. I believed—though I couldn’t have put it into words at the time—that she was too new, too small and fragile to persist while unobserved, that someone older had to supply her with the self-consciousness, the self-awareness that she lacked and without which her self would vanish.

  “So I sat for hours by her crib, staring at her, fretting every time she made a sound, ignoring Nurse’s reassurance that babies were much stronger than they looked. She cried and gargled as if her lungs were stuck in her throat, let loose earsplitting screeches and squeals for which I could think of no explanation but that she was in agony. ‘She does it because it’s the one thing she can do,’ Nurse said. Perhaps she was ri
ght. How else could she assert the fact of her existence?

  “I spent a lot of time in the nursery, far more than anyone thought was proper, let alone normal, for a boy. My brothers coined the term ‘abnormale’ to describe me. Nurse felt put out at first. She saw me as some sort of odd, meddlesome nuisance, even rival, and an interloper in whose company none of the women who came and went felt comfortable or free to converse or comport themselves as usual. I necessitated the invention of many euphemisms. I was sent from the room when the wet nurse arrived and when Vivvie needed to be changed.

  “But Nurse was won over by how much I doted on Vivvie. She taught me how to hold her, how to support her head and shield the soft spot, how to coax from that fragile cage of skin and bones a belch as loud as you would hear in any tavern. It got so that, often, she would stop crying or go to sleep for no one but me. Nurse would send for me, and to the scorn of my father and brothers, I would ask Mother’s permission to be excused from the dinner table or the living halls. In the nursery, I would slump on a sofa, lay Vivvie on my squeezed-together legs, and rock her back and forth while Nurse watched and shook her head in wonder at how quickly Vivvie would fall quiet as she stared at me and chuckled as if something about the look of me amused her.

  “ ‘What are you doing, boy, apprenticing to be a nurse?’ Father said. ‘It’s not what your brothers were doing at fourteen. I doubt that there’s even a fourteen-year-old girl of our set who spends her time as you spend yours. You dote on that child more than your mother does. In fact, it would be unseemly for your mother to spend one-tenth as much time in the nursery as you do. Minding babies is women’s work, women of a station in life far below yours. It was not so that his grandsons could spend their time in the pale of wage-earning women that my father built up a fortune from the money his mother staked him for a single Hudson River taxi dory. You have no business in that nursery. A young Vanderluyden man does not accompany a pram-pushing nurse through streets lined by the houses of our friends and other near equals. It’s not just you who’s the laughingstock of the neighbourhood, it’s also me, the man who allows his sissified son to be the escort of his infant sister’s nurse. You’re acting like some giddy, moonstruck, knackered little rooster who doesn’t know what hens are for, let alone which ones are meant for him. It’s unnatural, this infatuation with your sister.’

  “But my mother took my side, saying that I was just going through a phase that I would soon grow out of, a phase, she said, that many girls and women of our set told her they found quite sweet and charming. She said that my passions were sorting themselves out and would find their proper objects in good time. ‘Sweet and charming,’ my father said, and told us how men thought of by women as sweet and charming were looked upon by other men.

  “He more or less gave up on me. ‘Baby girl and maybe boy,’ they called Vivvie and me.

  “I walked about the nursery with a towel on my shoulder in case Vivvie spit up. When Nurse and the governesses spoke of me to one another, they called me ‘young Mr. Vanderluyden’ as if there were a second, silent adjective in front of ‘young.’

  “I would have slept with her cot beside my bed if Mother had allowed it. I couldn’t sleep, thinking of Vivvie in the nursery, lying in her cot at night, her crying ignored by Nurse, who said it was good for her lungs and a sign that she was strong and healthy. My room was far from the nursery but I was certain I could hear her. Nurse said I would spoil her if I picked her up every time she cried. She said I was making her job harder because Vivvie preferred me to her and wouldn’t sleep when I wasn’t close by. ‘She knows it when you come and go,’ she said. ‘She knows your voice.’

  “In spite of my mother’s prediction, my passions didn’t sort themselves out and find their proper objects. I mean nothing sinister by that. But I remember the feeling of Vivvie’s little body in my arms, a chest half the size of my hand going up and down against my own, her breath warm and her little mouth wet against my cheek. Vulnerable, trusting, absolute blamelessness. There was nothing like it in life as I had known it until then.

  “ ‘You can’t devote your whole life to hovering over Vivvie,’ my mother said. ‘Think of how difficult it will be for her when you go off to Princeton. If only for her sake, you should leave her to Nurse and the nannies from now on.’ I tried for her sake, as my mother put it. I lasted one day and one night. I worried that she would think that I’d abandoned her. I found it unbearable to think that she would, even for an instant, think herself betrayed by me.

  “I went to the nursery and at the sight of me she shook the bars of her crib. Things were soon exactly as they had been.

  “ ‘Enough,’ Father said. ‘This has been going on for over a year. I wish I could send you off to Princeton tomorrow.’

  “I’m never going to Princeton,” I said. “What do I need Princeton for? My brothers didn’t go. You merely want to correct a family deficiency by having a son who went to Princeton. I can’t learn anything there that I can’t be better taught by my tutors.

  “It was only a few nights later that Vivvie choked to death on a button from a man’s shirt. From one of mine, Nurse said.”

  “Wait,” Landish interrupted. “You told me at Princeton that your sister drowned. I told Deacon—”

  “Now I am telling you the truth,” Van said. “I couldn’t bear to do it at Princeton.”

  “The account you gave me of your sister’s drowning was far too elaborate and detailed to be a lie, Van.”

  “It wasn’t a lie. It was a necessary, sustaining fiction. Let me finish telling you the truth and perhaps you’ll understand.”

  “Either you are out of your mind now, or you were when we met.” Landish couldn’t bring himself to add that the original version of Vivvie’s death, the telling of which had brought him to tears and left him in need of a prolonged, consoling hug from Van, had been a self-serving story in which Van made himself out to be an unappreciated, unacknowledged hero who had been accused of causing the very death he had risked his own life to prevent. Van had chosen from the infinite number of alternatives a vainglorious fable.

  Van put up his hand to silence him. “A button from one of my shirts, Nurse said. Though I found none of my shirts to be missing a button, this became the story in the household, assumed by my family, the staff and the servants to be true—a button proved I must somehow be to blame. There formed the vague notion that her death had proceeded from some disordering of the natural way of things. What except trouble or even tragedy could one expect when a young man stepped as far out of his rightful place as I had? Whatever chance I had had to live down my reputation for oddness vanished with Vivvie’s death. I was no longer Padgett Godfrey Vanderluyden. I was the young man whose single shirt button caused the freakish death of the infant sister with whom he had been so freakishly infatuated. How apt. I felt all eyes on me whenever I appeared in public, at gatherings, in church …

  “After first hearing of her death, I gathered all the shirts in my closet, and sought out the ones being laundered, and laid them all out on the floor of my room. I went slowly through every shirt, counting the buttons, feeling for them, frantic when, for an instant, I thought that one was missing. There were thirty-seven shirts, twelve buttons to each shirt. Four hundred and forty-four buttons. None were missing. I put every shirt in this trunk, which I locked and hid beneath my bed. But I was so preoccupied with grief that the shirts became, bizarrely, my intimate connection to Vivvie. I wanted no one else to touch them. So I told the others I had burned every one of them. I was a boy of fourteen. I didn’t know that would make them more supicious of me. ‘But there, you see,’ my father said. ‘That’s as good as a confession. The closest we’ll ever get to one from him.’ ”

  Van patted the trunk that lay on the floor in front of him. “Every night I opened the trunk and checked the shirts for missing buttons. I took the trunk with me to Princeton and checked the shirts every night in my room, Landish, while you were sleeping.”

  “Mr
. Vanderluyden, if you know there’s no buttons missing, why do you count them?” Deacon asked.

  “The trunk has been with me since she died. I never lock it because I know that every night I will search the same shirts for what I know I will never find. I can’t help it.

  “Nurse should have found the button. She checked the crib whenever she put Vivvie down for the night. Or at least she was supposed to check it. Nurse should have heard her. She was sleeping in the same room. How could she not have heard her? I would have. Everything in that house was managed to perfection. The whole thing is so unbearably absurd. The child of the richest man in the world. The button from a shirt.

  “And as for Father and my older brothers—all four of them said they hadn’t seen her, hadn’t been in the nursery, for weeks before she died. The official cause of death, and the one that those of our set pretended to accept, was given as ‘sudden fever.’ But I was the one struck down by her death as if by the worst sort of illness. I couldn’t eat or sleep, didn’t leave my bed for months. There was some sort of service for Vivvie that I doubt my father would have let me attend even had I been able to. I had been tutored, not rigorously, in religion. I had never given God much thought. Now I gave him none. I could put no credence in a God who merely looked on while the most innocent and blameless of his children choked to death while lying alone in the darkness.

  “The housekeeper came to my defence when Nurse said that it was my button that she choked on. She said that shirt buttons were constantly being lost and replaced. She said that if any of us lost a button, it might have been replaced before we noticed it was missing. But you know me, Landish. I was as fastidious about my clothes back then as I was at Princeton. If a button was missing, I’m sure I would have noticed. I’m sure of it. Don’t you think I would have?”

  “I’m sure you would have.” Landish placed his hand on Van’s shoulder, where he crouched before the fire and the trunk. “You mustn’t blame yourself. I only wish you had told me this at Princeton.”