A World Elsewhere

by Wayne Johnston

  “Esse is the Mistress of the Fortress of the Forest, isn’t she? The one Landish is in love with.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Did you make a contribution?”

  “No. Well—”

  “You love her more than me.”

  “I love you, Deacon. Not more not less. I love you.”

  “I’ve been with you a hundred times as long as her.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Will you get married?”

  “Someday, I hope.”

  “You’re going away without me.”

  “No.”

  “Yes you are.” He withdrew his hand. “I’m going to sleep now.”

  At six-thirty, Mr. Henley came to The Blokes to take Deacon to dinner. Deacon followed him down the stone steps of the grand stairway, through the breezeway and the Winter Garden.

  The butler went the wrong way, the way he went when he was taking him to the Rume to visit Mr. Vanderluyden. Deacon thought about telling him Goddie was waiting for him in the Lesser Banquet Hall but he knew he wouldn’t listen. He stared up at the butler’s back as they went past the tapestries. He saw the closed doors of the Rume ahead. Light from the fireplace that was bigger than the Druken mausoleum flickered through the crack between the doors. The butler, without even slowing down, took the handle of each door and pushed them open. He did what Landish said was called standing at attention as Deacon walked past him. Inside, Mr. Vanderluyden was sitting in front of the fire.

  “Hello, Deacon,” he said.

  “Hello, sir,” Deacon said. “Goddie’s waiting for me for dinner.”

  “You’re having it here tonight. Goddie’s having dinner with her mother, so you’ll be having it with me.”

  A table with one chair facing Mr. Vanderluyden was set before the fire. The butler took the handles of the doors again and walked backwards from the room, pulling them to as he went.

  “Actually, I won’t be eating, but I’ll sit with you,” Mr. Vanderluyden said. “I’ve never had what people call a healthy appetite for food. I eat enough to keep from getting sick, but food doesn’t really interest me. But I’m sure you’re hungry. You always are. I don’t know where you put it all, do you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you feeling well after your adventure in Lake Loom? No chills?”

  “No, sir. It was an accident.”

  “It wasn’t an accident that you were down by the lake alone on a cold winter night. You must have been very upset about something.”

  Deacon was silent.

  “Well, sit down.”

  Deacon took the silver covers off the bowls and plates. There was soup and bread and lamb chops with mint jelly and potatoes with specks of parsley that Deacon tried to scrape off with his fork but couldn’t. He ate quickly, licking the last crumbs of butterscotch cake from the back of his spoon.

  “There,” said Mr. Vanderluyden, “all done?”

  Deacon nodded.

  “Come sit in the chair beside mine. Don’t worry about the chimney witch. You know she won’t show herself unless I’m here alone.”

  Deacon sat in the chair and watched the leaping flames around the huge logs. The fireplace was the biggest one in all of Vanderland.

  “Mrs. Vanderluyden will soon be staying in New York. She likes it more than Vanderland. Goddie will be staying here. Don’t tell anyone until I say you can.”

  “Landish and I were in New York,” Deacon said. “I didn’t like it. Landish didn’t mind the big Golden Queen and the Eel Train, but I did.”

  “The El Train,” said Mr. Vanderluyden. “We built it. The Vanderluydens.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t like it. I had a dream about it.”

  “Well, that’s all right. I don’t like New York either. It’s all dust and mud and horse manure and streams of human vermin in the streets.”

  A log snapped loudly and sent out a shower of sparks.

  “Deacon, what do you think Landish would rather be, your father or a writer? If he had to pick one.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why do you think Landish can’t write and burns all his words?”

  “He can’t put people into words.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe it’s because of you. I don’t mean that it’s your fault, really. It’s not his either. He tries to take care of you because your mother told him to. Because he feels he’s to blame for what his father did. But Landish didn’t take away your parents. His father did.”

  Deacon nodded.

  “Landish can’t take care of you. He admitted it to me. That’s why he gets drunk at night and leaves you to the Blokes. And carries on with a governess.”

  Deacon began to cry. He turned his head away from Mr. Vanderluyden.

  “I’m sorry,” Mr. Vanderluyden said. “I know that you like Landish and he likes you. But what if you’d both be better off without each other? It would let him write so he didn’t have to burn the pages every day. That’s why Mrs. Vanderluyden is going to New York, because we make each other unhappy. It’s the same with you and Landish.”

  Deacon didn’t answer. It was hard to stop crying once you really got going.

  “I would like you to stay here with Goddie and me. You could live here in this house, not just in The Blokes but in the whole house. All of Vanderland would be as much yours as mine. As would the name of Vanderluyden. Deacon Vanderluyden. And someday, when I’m gone, it would all be yours. Goddie’s a girl, so you would be my heir. Your parents would be very proud of you, and very happy that you were living in a castle and not in an attic. Think of your mother, Deacon.”

  “Can she see me from the Tomb of Time?”

  “Of course she can. Well. It’s getting late. You should go back to The Blokes or Gough will worry. Think about what I’ve said. What it would be like to have the run of Vanderland, to play here and live here, and make Landish happy. And remember, don’t repeat a word of it to anyone. It’s our secret.”

  “All right.”

  “Just let Landish think you had dinner as usual with Goddie and don’t mention we met here in the Rume.”

  Landish had adopted him and now Mr. Vanderluyden wanted to adopt him. Deacon Vanderluyden. Because Goddie was a disappointment.

  He wouldn’t want to stay with Landish if Landish didn’t want him, if Landish would be better off and happier without him. “Go, Landish,” he imagined himself saying. “Go away. I’ll be all right. I’m sorry I made you so unhappy.”

  Landish accepted Van’s invitation to ride with him on Sunday afternoon on the trail around Lake Loom. As a stablehand was tacking up Van’s horse, Landish walked about, waiting for him, wondering what he was up to now.

  “Am I being taken off into the woods to be done away with?” Landish said, as Van walked up to him.

  “I told you that if your life and Deacon’s depended on it, you would let me have Deacon. I said nothing about doing away with anyone.”

  Van mounted swiftly and easily. He cantered along the paddock fence while a stablehand led Landish’s horse across the yard and another boosted him into the saddle by making a stirrup with his hands. The horse was much bigger than the one he was used to. She was old with not a gallop left in her according to the stablehand, but his usual horse had been chosen earlier by a guest who had left early in the morning with a hunting party that would not return until after dark.

  “She’s a plodder,” Landish said to Van, as he came up alongside him.

  “She was once our finest horse,” Van said. “She’s not often chosen anymore. No one picks her anymore, as Deacon would say. I thought she would enjoy getting out. This might be her last time around the lake.”

  They set off in the dappled shade of a canopy of leaves towards Lake Loom.

  “How is your book progressing?” Van said.

  “You’ve brought me out here to talk about my book?”

  Van shrugged.

  “It’
s not progressing. On the contrary. It’s as though the typewriter removes letters from the pages, pecks them off and eats them.”

  “How many pages would you say you’ve written?”

  “Thousands.”

  “And all of them burned.” Van laughed. “Some of what you wrote at Princeton was very good. Do you still have that mad play, Nutstewyou?”

  “I still have it in my head. Every word.”

  “Yes, I expect a lot of people do. Your victims. I’ve given up on the book I told you about.”

  “Why?”

  “I feel especially absurd when, while I am writing, I look up from my page at the thousands of volumes that surround and tower over me, and that make the single sentence I am trying to construct seem so inadequate by comparison with the millions in those books that have been judged worthy of eternal preservation. But I have many consolations. What’s one unfinished book compared to Vanderland? But you have nothing but your book.”

  Van urged his horse into a trot. “I’m going to ride ahead a bit,” he shouted over his shoulder. “I’ll come back to meet you. I won’t be long.”

  Landish tried in vain to goad his old horse along. But moments later he saw Van riding back towards him at a canter. Slowing his horse to a trot and drawing back lightly on the reins with one hand, he stopped in front of Landish. In his other hand, he held Captain Druken’s hat box balanced between him and the saddle horn.

  The wood and the silver clasps gleamed as they never had before, not even when the hat was in his father’s care. He hadn’t really seen the hat the night he stole it. It had been too dark in the nobleman’s house, and he had carried it away in a sack that he had handed over to the wealth inspector waiting in the shadows for him at the end of Dark Marsh Road. There had been no time to linger over the exchange of the hat, let alone inspect the hat itself. Now the precious laurel wreath of sealers gleamed in the Carolina sunlight as it rested on the saddle of a horse in the otherworldly woods of Vanderland, in the possession of the young man who had once befriended him at Princeton.

  “Surprised, Landish? I told my people to work on it as if it were going to be displayed in one of the galleries. I’ve had it for the last month. You went to a lot of trouble for a mere hat, Landish.”

  “So, it seems, did you. What do you want, Van? I see old Trull hovering as usual, with his pistols no doubt.”

  “Exactly what you want, I think. For Deacon to be happy.”

  “I don’t care about that hat.”

  “Yet you had it shipped here from thousands of miles away. I bought it from a Mr. Nobleman who wrote to me, telling me that it had been stolen from him and would soon arrive at Vanderland. His intent in contacting me was mercenary from the start. So he dropped his claims easily for a certain sum.

  “There is a man—I understand he is a social welfare inspector—whom Mr. Nobleman referred to as your accomplice. He’s still inspecting, still living with his wife and children. I had some inspecting done up there in your home town myself, Landish, in these last few months. In such a place it was not hard it seems for Mr. Nobleman to get wind of the many letters your accomplice was receiving from Vanderland. With some of these in hand, he confronted him and he confessed.

  “So I have a proposition for you. I can have you sent back to Newfoundland, where you and he will both stand trial. Or you can simply leave without the boy.

  “I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this. I’d hoped you’d see the sense of leaving Deacon here with me. But I don’t think you ever will. I’d hoped to cause the least unpleasantness, for Deacon’s sake.

  “You had only to let Mr. Nobleman keep the hat. Much would be different then. I would have no way to take Deacon from you. The two of you could have simply walked away from Vanderland. To what, God only knows, but whatever your fate, it would have been one that you freely chose. But you, you could not renounce the hat. You could have come to Vanderland free and clear of your past, which is more than I was able to do. Deacon is fortunate to have been picked by you, Landish. Other men would have said good riddance to the hat and made Deacon the primary motive of their lives. In which case, he would never have risen above the drab, ill-fated mass into which, by mischance, he was born.”

  “What now, Van?”

  “You can meet with Deacon and say a proper goodbye. Or you can cause Deacon great anguish by forcing Mr. Trull to escort you back to Newfoundland where you and your accomplice will be tried and found guilty and go to jail.”

  “I know now whom I’m dealing with.”

  “I am very fond of Deacon, even more so than I am of Goddie who, as you know, is not my daughter.”

  “Deacon is not your son.”

  “Nor yours. He will soon get over you. Sooner than I did. If you do the sensible thing. We’ll go back to the house by the vineyard and inside by the cellar door.” He tipped his hat to Mr. Trull. “Keep your eye on him. He looks like he has a mind to make a fuss.”

  In the Smoker, Deacon sat with the Blokes. At dinner, Goddie had been the same as always. She was Goddie the Bad for a while. She told him he’d be a Bloke when he grew up, but not at Vanderland because there’d be no need for Blokes when she was gone. All the Blokes would be turned out and wind up God knows where. They wouldn’t just stay in The Blokes until they died, like Palmer would. Then she started crying and said she felt sorry for the Blokes. Deacon wondered if Mr. Vanderluyden would let the Blokes stay in The Blokes when there was no one left for them to tutor. He might if Deacon was still there and asked him to.

  The others had left the Smoker and gone to bed. Landish sat in a chair before the fire. He looked around. Three windowless rooms. He couldn’t hear a sound from outdoors, nor any from inside the house except those of Gough preparing for the night, whose shadow he could see beneath the door.

  He was trapped, now, with no choice but to leave Vanderland without Deacon. He tried to convince himself that it was for the best. He thought about the attic and the privations that Deacon had assumed were commonplace. He thought of how it would be for Deacon if his having a roof over his head ever again depended on a man as small-souled as the nobleman, or someone even worse. He prayed that never again in his life would Deacon have to curry favour with or be polite to a man like Hogan.

  At Vanderland, all that he couldn’t do for Deacon, or protect him from, would fall away. What the boy had so far suffered and endured would sink into the Murk.

  But it might take less than Landish going to prison to make Deacon fret himself to death. Whatever assurances Landish gave him, Deacon would think it was his fault. There would be no convincing him that Landish would not be poor and perish like a dog that no one could afford to feed, that he would not be lonely in the nighttime when the wind came up and it sounded as if the walls were caving in, that he would not be sad when he remembered Deacon. Unless he could give him a lifetime of reassurance in the few minutes or hours that Van might let them have to say goodbye, the boy would fret and mope and pine until the knobs of his backbone were poking through his belly.

  Van had sent him two bottles of cognac. He swore to the Blokes that he would only have a taste. He drank both bottles.

  “I’ve thought it all through,” Landish told Van the next night, after being summoned to the Rume. “You’re right. I’m leaving Vanderland without Deacon, so better that I do so in the way that least upsets him.”

  “It’s for the best.” Van smiled. “You’ll think so, years from now.”

  Van extended his hand but Landish ignored it.

  “There is another matter, another person involved.”

  “Another person without whom you’d hate to leave.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes. And I thought Gertrude’s was the worst-kept secret at Vanderland. A governess. A governess of all things. Sedgewick and others have told me. You have apparently done a poor job of hiding your infatuation with this girl. You and your governess will soon leave in the Packard. A good thing I taught you how to drive it.”

&
nbsp; “I’d like a few days. I want to say a proper goodbye, not just to Deacon but the Blokes and Goddie—and your wife.”

  “You’ll leave three days from now.” Van handed him an envelope. “Money. A lot. Enough to take you and Godwin’s governess far from here. Be careful that it isn’t stolen from you.”

  Landish nodded. “Take good care of Deacon.”

  “I’ve changed, Landish. I’ve come to realize the true worth of the lofty sentiments of novelists and poets and artists of all kinds. Such sentiments are merely the means by which we fool ourselves into thinking that we’re as noble in life as we portray ourselves to be in books. But when that nobility is tested, it will not stand. You, a sealer’s son, must know that. You are hardly a Romantic.”

  “Perhaps I’ve changed.”

  “I think you’ll be glad to hear I’m divorcing Gertrude. On the grounds of adultery. I’ll never cease to be the laughingstock of Vanderland and New York until I do. Deacon’s becoming my son will mean the rebirth of Vanderland.

  “So the main reason is that I don’t want her to have anything to do with Deacon’s upbringing. I’m sure you don’t, either. I don’t want her interfering or telling Goddie things that she’ll repeat to him.

  “I won’t leave her destitute either. I won’t destroy her. I’ll find something modest for her in New York, support her in some fashion. I’d rather not be embarrassed by the ongoing spectacle of Gertrude Vanderluyden’s decline.

  “Goddie will stay here, of course. She isn’t mine by blood, but she is in every other way. I hope it’s not too late to remove the mark of Gertrude from her.

  “It is my hope that Goddie and Deacon will become brother and sister—and great friends. It will do each of them a world of good to have the other as a sibling. It will take some time for Goddie to get used to Gertrude being gone. But she and Deacon can learn much from each other. You know, Landish, I feel more hopeful than I have since I first met you. I believe that most of us will look back fondly on the coming days, however difficult things may be at first.”