The Pagan House

by David Flusfeder

  John Prindle teaches George the truths of Bible Communism, and Newhouse instructs John Prindle and George in woodcraft and hunting. John Prindle is the better student: George’s boots crack twigs hundreds of yards behind his companions on their forest hike, the gun in his hand weighs impossibly heavy—a bluebird startled by his unsubtle approach launches into flight with a rustle of brown leaves; and despite this, George feels stronger, more alive than at any moment since the first days of his marriage. His muscles strengthen, his intellect sharpens. They camp at the lake, Seth Newhouse roasts their catch, they unburden their hearts. George talks about Mary, and John Prindle describes his own path, his capacities early noticed by his seminary teachers, his unorthodoxy, the schism, his exile, his engagement to Hester Lovell, broken upon her rejection of his teachings, the primitive gospel recovered through sorrow and pain and doubt.

  On their return, they burn more fields for farming and in the evenings they sit with Newhouse, who, somehow, unspoken, has become the third member of their household. Newhouse has tastes for tobacco and whiskey and silence and doesn’t seem to attend to their debates, George’s questions, Stone’s elucidations. George follows his master along the path of wisdom. Christ returned in 70 AD at the destruction of the Temple. The fallen dispensation ended then but that knowledge has been lost, until now.

  Master: ‘Private property will be abolished.’

  Adept: ‘Revelation chapter twenty-one, verse seven: “He that overcometh shall inherit all things.”’

  Master: ‘And the marriage contract will be abolished.’

  Adept: ‘Matthew twenty-two, thirty: “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.”’

  Master: ‘Death will be banished in the Perfectionist passage from law to grace.’

  Adept: ‘And so we arrive regularly at the tree of life, as per Genesis three.’

  Newhouse doesn’t appear to listen to any of this. He sits by the fire, smoking his pipe, drinking from his bottle, worrying over his prototype for a new species of animal trap, spring-driven, because Newhouse has become dissatisfied with the hole made by even a tiny shotgun pellet.

  ‘It’s on account of the profit,’ he tells them, one of his longer speeches. ‘You catch the animal by the foot, makes for a better pelt.’

  John Prindle disagrees. He tells him that the issue is an aesthetic one, and moral. ‘I might even say religious. You are as much in love with the perfect as we.’

  Newhouse blinks his suspicious eyes at this and shakes his head. He refills his pipe. His skin is the same colour, and almost the same texture, as the cherrywood of the chair on which he sits. Newhouse is a year or two younger than George but George feels towards him the same deference as to any tree or bear or lake.

  ‘We can count you in the justified one hundred and forty-four thousand,’ says George, joining in the game, but Newhouse is not listening: he’s at work with the steel mechanism on his lap that he’s squeezing apart at the hinge, ready to snap, and John Prindle laughs, and says that Newhouse in his heart is as sincere as the most assiduous worshipper.

  And George’s heart? He misses his child, he misses Mary, who lodges with her sister in Rochester, disavowed by her parents for her Perfectionist views. Her liaison with Captain Carter is buried, as are her letters to her husband that lie unopened at the bottom of George’s valise. His letters to her are written in the periods of John Prindle’s absences, when George and Seth Newhouse return to the condition of awkward solitaries in each other’s presence. These letters, candle-lit, on which he expends such thought and pains, remain unsent, consigned weekly to the fire that warms them.

  John Prindle believes that everyone is capable of every task. Discipline, patience, hearts open to the breath of God’s inspiration, books of professional knowledge will build them their Mansion House. He sits at the table, his sleeves rolled up, a green visor worn low on his brow, muttering and coughing, his breath rolling out ghost-clouds into the wintry room, as he steadfastly works, reads, discusses, designs, discusses, rejects, scraps.

  ‘Providence shall make all things clear,’ is all he says when George or, more mischievously, Seth Newhouse, enquires of his progress. And George is reminded of that other house without foundations, that he dreamed of, three miles down-river, in his blind-horse days. And he decides that that was a clouded vision of this true one: the family house was earth to heaven, beast to man, man to god, a fore-glimpsing of the task he had been put on earth to achieve.

  John Prindle shows his typical energies and a unique indecision. Their cabin has become a forest of paper and blueprints, books everywhere, half-completed plans tacked to the pine walls, paper cities of imagined and demolished buildings pushed by the breeze along the floor. His outlook changes again, colonnades crumble; and John Prindle is not so exalted that he does not recognize the desirability of some professional opinion. The Mansion House is not only unbuilt, it has been undesigned a hundred times, and the first families from Vermont are due to live in it.

  These signs of Providence: the fore-party of Perfectionists fleeing the gossip and narrow-minded outrage of its Vermont neighbours arrives in the New Jerusalem by horse-drawn cart; it comprises John Prindle’s wife, Mrs Harriet Stone, who is more substantial and yet less corporeal than George had expected, and John Prindle’s sister and brother-in-law, the Fletchers, and Mr Fletcher’s friend Erasmus Hamilton, grimly holding the sides of the cart, his stove-pipe hat atilt on his whiskered, leonine head. George Pagan tries to conquer in himself an immediate antipathy. Hamilton is the sort of burly, self-assured man to whom Mary would trust her confidence. He is a Yale man from Newhaven, and an architect.

  John Prindle is delighted. That first night, he walks the perimeter with his providential architect. They make plans by starlight. A week later, their cabin has been demolished, tents erected by the horse barn, and work has begun. Everyone mixes cement, everyone lays stones and saws wood. The building takes root and grows. When spring comes, the roof goes on with the help of their Indian neighbours and the sons of the owner of the general store on Turkey Street. More Perfectionists arrive, former Congregationalists and Methodists, renegade Baptists and Anabaptists, two Anglicans, one Roman Catholic, children reborn in the primitive church, living without sin, bringing heaven on earth.

  It is one of George’s tasks to make a list of all the items that each member of their Association has brought. All things are to be held in common—but should any member choose to leave, he may, without notice, and without concern at being economically disadvantaged by the decision. In his first Home Talk, John Prindle says, ‘Anyone choosing to leave this family shall be able to take away the goods he brought in with him, or their equivalent value, whichever he so chooses. Common interest shall be paid on their value.’

  ‘But what if our enterprise should not be profitable?’ asks Matthew Fletcher, John Prindle Stone’s equanimous brotherin-law.

  ‘It shall be,’ says John Prindle Stone.

  The Association’s first charter announces that they shall live by the fruits of the land, as their precursors as tenants here, the Onyataka Indians, used to do. They shall trade the surplus of their harvest to their neighbours. They might even consider manufacturing Seth Newhouse’s new animal trap, should it ever meet his perfect specifications.

  Their house is a large one, with room for further communitarians to join. The parlours are larger than the private chambers because the Association is a family, and there is no need for family members to hide in private spaces. Nonetheless, the sleeping room that George has been allocated is one of the larger ones. This goes undiscussed. It is, he supposes, the fruit of his seniority in this enterprise.

  On the third day in the Mansion House, George goes to the horse barn to feed Jess for the final time. In their beginning is her end.

  In Paradise, the angels dance, and in this fore-Paradise so do the communitarians. And George Pagan, previously remarkable for his dry correctnes
s in all things, amazes his new family, first with his violin and then, even further, when he lays down his instrument to join the family dancing. His consciousness scatters as they move to the music that their boots make dancing on the Mansion House floor.

  On the seventh day, a cart comes along the road from Turkey Street. It rattles over the creek, continues along the rutted path, then makes the gentle climb up the incline to the Mansion House. Its passenger dismounts, the cart-driver unloads the luggage: two trunks, a box of linen, a bagatelle game. The boy who had been running the last part of the journey stops shyly at the front door of the Mansion House. His mother, in a long black dress that clings unwidowlike to her body, shields her eyes against the sun, and George Pagan, sitting by the front parlour window, working on the first week’s accounts, looks up at the new arrivals; and his heart leaps, stutters, and seems to fail. He gets up, then makes himself sit down again. Someone else will welcome Mary Pagan, his wife, to their community.

  He tries to delay his journey downstairs. He cannot keep himself from her for longer than a few minutes. In the small parlour, Mary, still dressed in all the outerwear of her journey, sits across from Mr and Mrs Stone. Little Georgie pulls away from his mother’s side to rush to his father, but then stands uncertainly in the space between them, unparented, bashful. Mr Pagan cannot look at his wife; neither does Mrs Pagan look at her husband. Both gaze upon Mr Stone.

  ‘I am here in repentance,’ Mary says.

  ‘And?’ says Mr Stone.

  ‘And hope.’

  Captain Carter would have pushed her harder. Mr Stone just smiles. He suffers all that is in her heart and he forgives. Mr Stone invites Mary to stay as long as she feels able, if Mr Pagan should consent, which, gruffly, Mr Pagan, does; and Mr and Mrs Pagan make silent simultaneous vows that they will prove themselves worthy of Mr Stone’s love, which is God’s.

  11

  It did not rain on the next day. Nor did Edgar go to soccer camp.

  ‘Warren’s making me see the doctor,’ Fay complained, when she came into the kitchen.

  Edgar managed to restrain himself from saying, Dr X?! Instead, wiping some of the sugary excess of YooHoo away from his mouth, he announced his intention to find the cat. ‘I’ll look for him. I should have done it before. I’ll start looking for him straight away.’

  ‘No, of course you won’t. You have your soccer to go to.’

  ‘I don’t mind missing it.’

  ‘That’s very dear of you but I wouldn’t dream of taking you away from an activity you enjoy so much.’

  He cycled down to Stone Park on a girl’s bicycle that Warren had borrowed for him and dismounted when he saw the Forza Italia girl coming towards him. She was smiling. He had not seen her smile before: it made her look even more imperiously beautiful, and the smile was directed towards Edgar. Edgar stood on one leg and then the other. He smiled back and arranged his voice to slide out a hello, which fell away as she walked past him to greet Husky Marvin, who was stretching by the wire fence behind him. The Forza Italia girl cradled her fingers around the wire to watch him perform his warm-up routine with his acolytes, Todd and Andy, who both wore the same outfit as Marvin, T-shirts over hooded grey sweaters, except theirs weren’t filled out like his by apologetically worn muscles. Edgar, blushing, walked on, leaving them, the girl leaning into the wire, Husky Marvin lifting his tops to show her the bruises on his skin.

  Edgar walked on past Stone Park. He lay beside the creek, shadowed by the bridge. Chin cupped in his hands, he eased his groin against the hard earth of the river bank.

  The image of Forza blue was still in his head. Embarrassment fading, Edgar was, he was pleasantly surprised to realize, both bored and contented. A day, a lifetime could stretch out of this moment, in the green prickly heat of dry grass, the buzz of mosquitoes and lonely wasps. Edgar drowsily, luxuriantly, sensually, he thought, yawned. A dry leaf drifted against his face and he crushed it, crackling, between his forehead and the ground.

  To forestall the inevitable implosive inhibition should he ever talk to Forza Girl, Edgar built a new erotic linkage. He invented a tanned girl called Lucy, who wore denim shorts and a white bikini top. He closed his eyes the better to see her, and he was lying on the poop deck of his yacht. Lucy blows him a kiss, she airily waves, and dives off, jack-knifing into the dolphiny blue of the Mediterranean or Caribbean Sea. Edgar follows: they make love in the water, dolphins and starfish, the sun glinting off the telephoto lenses of the newspaper photographers who are Edgar’s constant escorts, hungry for every image of Edgar’s life and doings.

  A car went over the bridge, rumbling the ground, and Edgar opened his eyes, forced himself still, stopped humping the earth, and saw the station-wagon going past, Warren efficient at the wheel, Fay fanning herself with her turquoise sun-hat.

  He would resume his cat investigations now and, after the triumph of those, attempt the more sinister task of uncovering Dr X. Perhaps, even, the thought was audacious, the two were connected? Hunched over his bicycle, his penis jauntily squeezed between waistband and belly, Edgar cycled surreptitiously back to the Pagan House, snaking a route away from the soccer pitch through gridded streets, the rain of garden-sprinklers, roller-skating children with blank unenquiring faces, lazy fat dogs.

  Walking up to the porch, Edgar heard a rustle in the bushes by the side of the house. He clasped his hands behind his back and bent double to inspect the undergrowth. He might solve his first case straight away, discover Tom asleep in a grotesque spider’s web—already he could hear breathing, harsh and laboured, and that might be the cat or maybe the sound of one of the wild erotic couplings that he was sure the blameless youth of Creek and Vail enjoyed. Pushing through dry leaves he found no Tom, no sex, but Jerome, on hands and knees, wearing gardening gloves and a battered straw hat. Jerome’s brown cardigan and trousers were spotted with stains that Edgar squeamishly chose to connect to gardening work.

  Jerome looked guilty. He performed a strange ballet of trying to rise and failing. ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist, but you can’t, I know it’s not—oh, young Edward. Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘I’m glad it’s you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It was a risk, I knew that. Sometimes he stays with her at the doctor’s and sometimes he comes back and picks her up later. I took the chance that he’d be with her throughout. You won’t tell on me, I hope.’

  Edgar nodded, because Jerome’s insistence of attention required him to do something.

  ‘The flowers are going to rack and ruin and he won’t let me look after them. Says I’m not up to the job any longer. Says he’s protecting me, and that’s when I really can’t stomach the gall of the man, really can’t. You won’t tell?’

  Jerome anxiously wiped his forehead with a gloved hand, rubbing off flakes of dry skin that drifted to the rosebed like snow.

  Edgar shook his head, not quite sure what it was he was agreeing to.

  ‘That’s enormously decent of you. You wouldn’t help me out here, would you? I just need to turn over this earth. Tom has a dreadful habit for urinating on the roses. Plays havoc with the pH levels. The shovel’s just there.’

  ‘I’m looking for the cat,’ Edgar said.

  He had decided to be the sort of detective who solved cases in flashes of inspiration—where others stumbled he would leap, not for him the plodding forensic logic of slow minds, but he supposed that any detective, even the most inspired type, would have a list of suspects. And pushing himself to the top was Jerome, complaining of the cat’s destructiveness to flowers, to which he showed a peculiar, perhaps criminal, attachment.

  Under Jerome’s direction Edgar dug into the earth and scattered it around and wondered if this was what was meant by the dignity of labour.

  ‘You’re a very decent boy, Eddie. You like lemonade?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Then we should move on. I don’t want to run the risk of him finding me here. Help me up now, will you
?’

  Jerome picked up his basket of gardening tools, which was the same basket he used to bring his evening offerings of snacks and pies to Fay. They climbed the rise past the Mansion House, a sprawling red-brick building, with wings and alcoves and chimneys, that looked as if it had been built by a mad god architect with a box of random house parts.

  A sour-milk smell clung to Jerome. He was not good at shaving: maybe his eyesight was not so good or he didn’t trust the tremors in his hands, but there were bristly clumps of grey hair below his ears and under his nose. Edgar regretted this. Jerome was the sort of man his mother had warned him about. Don’t talk to strangers—Never accept a lift in a strange man’s car—and she would surely have said, Never ever go to a cemetery with a strange man. Jerome was clearly a strange man, and Edgar and he were walking through the graveyard.

  ‘Ever since that fellow came to town I haven’t seen as much of Fay as I would like. What do you think of him?’

  ‘Of who?’

  ‘Warren, of course.’

  ‘I think he’s okay.’

  ‘Do you?’ Jerome sounded disappointed. His hands clutched and opened, never fully. He examined them, daring them, Edgar supposed, to make a deadly move. To live that old, Jerome must have incorporated astonishing quantities of vice. Below the cemetery was a golf course. Stout men in brightly coloured clothing ambled after their clumsily shot balls. A boy could die here and no one would ever know.