A World Elsewhere

by Wayne Johnston

  “But that’s who I was, you see. It’s who I was the day we met, the day I sat beside you on the bench. The Vanderluyden who, by an unmentionable accident, caused the death of his sister on whom he had doted to the point of becoming a family embarrassment. Everyone knew. Yet no one said a word to you? I was sure that someday you’d confront me with the truth. I dreaded it. But I couldn’t bear to tell you.”

  “No one said a word. The measure of their fear of your family, I suspect. They might call us sodomites but even our worst enemies dared not cross that line.”

  “I think of Vivvie many times every day. I still speculate about the true source of the button. Nurse might have been mending someone’s shirt. Father or one of my brothers might have paid Vivvie a rare visit. I wonder if they checked their shirts as I checked mine, still wonder if one of my brothers is harbouring a dreadful secret.

  “I remember Vivvie as I saw her last, standing and holding the rails of her crib, laughing as I poked her belly with my finger.”

  Van turned and looked at Deacon, who was staring at him wide eyed, his eyes welling up with tears.

  “Padgy Porgie, pudding and pie/Killed the girl who made him cry/When the Iron baron had his say/Padgy Porgie went away.”

  “Even if it was a button from your shirt—” Landish began, but stopped when Van stood.

  “I have many times tried to convince myself to burn those shirts in this fire, burn them one by one as you burn the pages of your book, and burn the trunk as well. Four hundred and forty-four buttons. Some nights I have counted them a hundred times over. I have knelt here with a shirt in my hand, bunched it up and reared back to throw it, only to lose my nerve and replace it in the trunk.”

  “Shall we help you burn them, Mr. Vanderluyden?” Deacon’s small face was whiter than ever.

  “Come here, Deacon,” Landish said, but Deacon stayed put, his eyes shining with tears in the firelight and glued on the man in front of him.

  “I’m going to do it tonight,” Van said. “But not now while the two of you are watching. Go back to The Blokes.”

  “Make sure you burn them,” Deacon said. “Don’t listen to the chimney witch.”

  Van reached into the inside pocket of his housecoat and brought forth something wrapped in white paper that Deacon thought at first was a gift for him or Landish.

  “I also plan to rid myself of this.”

  “What is it?” Landish said.

  “It’s the button. It popped out of Vivvie’s throat when Nurse clapped her on the back. It was too late by then. Nurse gave the button to my father. He gave it to me in a little box tied with ribbon on my sixteenth birthday. I had no idea what it was. I opened it at dinner in front of everyone. My mother left the table, but my father and my brothers just sat there and stared at me. Inside the cloth covering, the button is made of metal that might not burn in the fireplace. I would probably search for it among the ashes. So I plan to throw it into the deepest part of Lake Loom.”

  “Can I see it?” Deacon said.

  “No,” Landish said, standing up and, taking Deacon by the hand, all but dragging him from the chair. “It’s time to leave Mr. Vanderluyden alone.”

  “Landish is right,” Van said, and turned back to the velvet-covered trunk.

  At The Blokes, they sat on Landish’s bed, Landish pressing Deacon, who was still crying, to his chest.

  “Why does he count the buttons when he already knows how many there are?”

  “Because he can’t help it.”

  “He should put a lock on the trunk. Then he’d know for sure that none were missing.”

  “He knows. He’d unlock the trunk and count the buttons.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you. He can’t help it.”

  “Vivvie’s mother must have been sad. And her father.”

  “I’m sure they were.”

  “And the nurse. Do you think she dropped the button?”

  “It was an accident, whatever happened. It was no one’s fault.”

  “He counts the buttons.”

  “He can’t help it, he said.”

  “He thinks the button might have been his. Because of what the nurse said.”

  “Maybe. A small, cloth-covered button the same colour as a bed-sheet. I suppose she might have missed it. It might already have been in Vivvie’s mouth when the nurse put her down for the night.”

  “Where is Vivvie buried?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but I think New York. Near her parents probably.”

  “Mr. Vanderluyden doesn’t like New York.”

  “I don’t blame him. Not now.”

  “Because of Vivvie?”

  “She puts some things in a different light.”

  “Mr. Vanderluyden.”

  “Maybe.”

  “He made Vivvie sound nice. He sounded nice when he talked about her. Most of the time. He sounded happy.”

  “Almost happy.”

  “He remembers her. She was in the Murk, but he wasn’t. Maybe, in the Tomb of Time, she remembers him.”

  “Maybe she does.”

  Landish thought about Van alone in his room at night, pulling out from beneath his bed the trunk that was filled with shirts, counting their buttons over and over again. He thought of how he must have felt when his young wife told him she was pregnant. It would have been painful enough to hear even if he’d never had a sister. But he must have thought instantly of Vivvie, hearing of this child that wasn’t his.

  He felt sick with guilt just thinking of how it would have been had he found Deacon one morning as the nurse had found Vivvie. He couldn’t imagine bearing such a burden for the balance of his life. And though he knew that such suffering was not justification for making others suffer, he wasn’t sure that he could have resisted revenging himself on the blameless just as Van had done when he betrayed him.

  He doubted that Van had burned or would ever burn the shirts, or throw the button in Lake Loom. But he wondered why he had told him the truth about Vivvie, after all this time.

  Deacon counted the buttons on his shirt, rolling them between his fingers. He couldn’t imagine ever having been so small that he could choke on a button. She had to hold the bars of her crib to keep from falling down. Deacon wasn’t even in the Murk when his father died. He was still in the Womb of Time. He wasn’t as old as Vivvie when his mother died.

  He had been like her when he was still at Cluding Deacon. Not knowing one word. Trying to crawl. He couldn’t remember it. She would be older than him now. Older than Goddie. Grown up. Maybe she would have looked a bit like Mr. Vanderluyden. She might have lived at Vanderland with him. Vanderland would be different. Mr. Vanderluyden might not be so unhappy. Deacon and Landish might still be in Newfoundland, in some place nicer than the attic. Goddie’s aunt, sort of. Aunt Vivvie. He wondered if Goddie knew about her. He didn’t think so. Choking on a button was something she would talk about. But it was all Just Mist. It wasn’t real. Vivvie went to the place from which no one knows the way back home. Even babies had to go there by themselves. He knew that if he fell asleep he would dream about the button and the chimney witch, so he stayed awake all night.

  Landish brought the sketch of Gen of Eve to the Academy, ostensibly to show as an example of a self-portrait for Goddie’s drawing class, but really so that Esse could see it.

  Gertrude was leading Goddie from the Academy just as Landish entered.

  “What do you have there?” she said.

  “A self-portrait by my mother. A pencil sketch she drew many years ago.”

  “I want to see it,” Goddie said.

  “There’s no time,” Gertrude said, leading Goddie away, who looked back longingly over her shoulder at Landish and the sketch beneath his arm.

  “Gen of Eve and Landish. So she was expecting when she drew this,” Esse said. “Expecting you. How lovely. And clever. A wonderful keepsake, Landish. I can’t imagine a sweeter one.”

  “I remember her drawing other sketches
, staring at the part she was working on through a magnifying glass. A magnifying glass in one hand, a pencil in the other. She would squint, frown, sigh. She said her work was hideous.”

  “Then I’ll bet it’s best admired through a magnifying glass.” Esse took one from the drawer of her table and began to pore over the sketch. “Oh, it’s marvellous, Landish,” she said. “Every detail is just right. She must have spent weeks, months at it.”

  The sight of Esse smiling as she looked at Gen of Eve brought to his eyes a sudden rush of tears.

  The Rume was almost dark.

  Mr. Henley had come to fetch him, saying that Mr. Vanderluyden wanted to see him to show him something special. They had walked together through the chandelier-lit house with its deep shadows, but now he was alone. There was a note pinned to Mr. Vanderluyden’s red chair: “Deacon, I’ve gone upstairs in the elevator. I’ll just be a minute.”

  The lamps were not lit in here, not even the two blue ones with the white globes on top that Landish said had cost a fortune. There was a golden tree of candles beside the iron staircase, but none of the candles were lit. Neither were the candles on the catwalk overhead, so Deacon couldn’t even see the books. There was an old globe as high as Deacon on one side of the fireplace. He spun it and stopped it when it came to Newfoundland. A relief globe, it was called. The land was raised. You could feel the mountains with your fingers. The fire was so low you couldn’t smell the smoke.

  The trunk that looked like a long narrow coffin lay in front of the fire. He saw now that the red velvet–covered top was divided into squares. He wrote his name in the velvet with his finger, then moved his finger back the other way and wiped it out. The trunk was uneven, a bit higher at one end than the other so it wobbled when Deacon sat on it. He got up, knelt on it and pressed down with both hands. It was still uneven, and he wondered if Mr. Vanderluyden would think that he had broken it.

  He heard a sound on the catwalk and looked up to see him standing at the top of the circular stairs, leaning his arms on the little balcony from which you could oversee the Rume without being seen—or give a speech if you wanted to.

  “Do you want to see inside the trunk? All you have to do is raise the lid. I’ll show you.” He walked down the narrow, winding stairs, one hand on the rail, the other in the pocket of what looked like a bathrobe, though it wasn’t white but red. “Satin” was the word for cloth that shone like that.

  “Come kneel by the trunk,” Mr. Vanderluyden said. They knelt side by side, before the trunk, before the fire. Mr. Vanderluyden raised the red velvet lid. “There are hinges on the other side. It doesn’t have a lock. It’s meant for storing clothes. I could stretch out full length inside it with my arms above my head. If I stood it on one end, I could step inside and close the door behind me.”

  “What’s in it?” Deacon said. The lid was blocking what little light came from the fireplace.

  “Shirts,” said Mr. Vanderluyden. “The ones I told you and Landish about.”

  “You said you were going to burn them.”

  “I decided not to.”

  “Did you throw the button into Lake Loom?”

  Mr. Vanderluyden got up and lit the red candles on the candle tree.

  Almost everything in the library that wasn’t made of wood was red. The wood was dark, and it was carved into shapes like the statues in the park. It shone like it was polished every day. There was a painting on the ceiling of clouds and angels with red dresses and white wings, and babies who were chubbier than Goddie and held their hands up in the air like they were falling.

  The shirts, though yellowed with age, were buttoned and neatly folded, arranged in two even piles in the far left corner of the trunk, which otherwise was empty. There was enough room in the trunk for ten times as many shirts.

  “Thirty-seven shirts. Twelve buttons to each shirt. Four hundred and forty-four buttons,” said Mr. Vanderluyden. He reached into the trunk and removed a shirt from the top of one of the piles. Its collar and cuffs were almost brown and frayed to the point that soon they might separate from the shirt altogether. He handed it to Deacon.

  “Count the buttons,” Mr. Vanderluyden said.

  Deacon carefully unfolded the shirt. It felt much lighter than the ones he wore. He could almost see through it. There were holes in the tails as if Mr. Vanderluyden had poked his fingers through them. Deacon counted out loud. There were two buttons on each cuff. “One, two, three, four.” One on either side where the collar closed. “Five, six.” He counted the buttons down the middle. “Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.” He looked up at Mr. Vanderluyden. “Eleven?” he said.

  He counted them again and got eleven. “Why is one missing?”

  Mr. Vanderluyden took the shirt from Deacon, folded it carefully, replaced it in the trunk and slowly closed the red lid. He stood.

  “Let’s take the elevator up to the roof,” he said.

  “I’ve never been in an elevator,” Deacon said.

  “Not many people have,” said Mr. Vanderluyden. “Don’t worry. It just goes up and down.” He took Deacon’s hand and led him around the column of the chimney. He slid open a wooden door, a panel in the wall, then did likewise with the elevator’s iron door, which Deacon was relieved to see was made of crisscrossed bars that he could see through. They stepped inside and Mr. Vanderluyden pulled the iron door back into place. He pushed a button and the floor began to rise beneath their feet like the floors had done on the boat.

  “Pulleys, cables, wheels, weights and counterweights,” said Mr. Vanderluyden. “That’s all. Powered by the generators in the basement.” The elevator slowed, stopped. Mr. Vanderluyden opened the iron door and a wooden one. He took Deacon by the hand again and led him out onto the walkway of the parapet, which ran round the upper walls of Vanderland like an elevated road. The air was cool. Deacon felt relieved to be outdoors, no longer in the little room that rose up as if by magic.

  There wasn’t a cloud. “The moon is almost full tonight,” Mr. Vanderluyden said. “If it wasn’t for the moon, we could see more stars.”

  “What happened to the twelfth button?” Deacon said.

  “I should have noticed when I lost it.”

  “Everybody loses buttons.”

  “I suppose. When Nurse gave my father the button that Vivvie choked on, he told me to take my shirt off and hand it to him. I was left standing there in front of everyone, wearing nothing but an undershirt. He counted the buttons. When he found that one was missing, he threw the shirt back in my face.”

  “You were sad when Vivvie died.”

  “Very sad. But I thought like the others. They blamed me. I blamed myself.”

  “But you said none of the buttons were missing.”

  “I told you what I wished was true. It’s hard not to—when you meet someone who doesn’t know the truth, who doesn’t know anything about you, it’s hard not to tell them what you wish was true. It’s as though what people don’t know about you never happened. You can start again. New. Go back to before everything was spoiled. But other people’s ignorance does not undo or change the past. And so you never feel absolved. You never feel better.”

  “It’s not your fault. Landish knows that too.”

  “I’ve changed my story twice now. He might not believe a word I say.”

  “I’ll tell him you sounded sadder than before.”

  “I should burn the shirts, shouldn’t I?”

  “Like Landish burns the pages?”

  “No, not like that. He will never run out of pages to burn.”

  Deacon imagined Mr. Vanderluyden feeding the shirts into the fire one by one, saving the one with the missing button until last, watching it burn the way Landish watched the last page burn. Landish did it every night. Gough said it was a ritual, but Sedgewick said that made it sound too grand.

  Mr. Vanderluyden leaned on the edge of the parapet.

  “Isn’t it something, Deacon? No matter which way you face, it looks the same. Vanderland is in th
e very middle of the mountains.”

  There wasn’t a sound. It was as if the clamour of Vanderland had been carried off by the wind, the place scoured of sound by the wind, which had since died down. How strange the silence seemed in the wake of such an uproar. The actors had withdrawn from the stage just before the curtains rose, but something of their recent presence still hung in the air, like the first moment that followed the passing on to elsewhere of the soul of Vivvie.

  The moon was low and bigger than the sun. It lit up the mountains. But the Smokies weren’t smoky and the Blue Ridge was more black than blue. They didn’t blend together like they did on sunny days. He saw the upper treeline of each ridge and the spaces in between the trees. The mountains would be dark when the moon went down.

  “I can’t see over the wall,” Deacon said.

  “Here, I’ll lift you up.” Van took Deacon beneath the arms and lifted him until his feet were even with the ledge. “Stand on the ledge, Deacon. I won’t let you go.” Deacon put his feet on the ledge. This was the highest up he had ever been. A motor car came up one side of the Esplanade. Its lights reflected in the fountain and spread out across the grass.

  “Isn’t it something?” Mr. Vanderluyden said. “You can walk all the way around Vanderland on this pathway. I own everything you can see from it except the mountains and the sky. Sometimes it feels like even they are mine.”

  There were people far down below on the steps, guests who had come out to meet the car.

  “We can see them, but they can’t see us. They can’t even hear us, but the sound of their voices carries up. It would be nice if I could run the entire place myself, have it all to myself, day and night.”

  “You’d be lonely.”

  “I suppose. If there was another Vanderland just like this one next door, a replica that no one lived in, I could go over there from time to time.”

  Deacon imagined another, empty Vanderland and wondered if its Rume would have a chimney witch.

  Mr. Vanderluyden lifted him down.

  “Were you afraid up there?”

  Deacon shook his head.

  “Don’t tell Landish that I stood you on the ledge.”