The Pagan House

by David Flusfeder

  The architect smiles, bloodlessly, humourlessly. George Pagan is reminded of the cold fanaticism of Methodists from former days and he is reminded too of an earlier architect, Erasmus Hamilton, who drew up the plans for the Mansion House from, of course, John Prindle Stone’s designs. He and Hamilton had never got along either. George Pagan wonders if there is an inevitable distemper between the sort of man who makes houses and the sort of man he is. There is no one left to ask or confirm what sort of man he is. John Prindle Stone has taken refuge at Niagara, and Mrs Stone has followed him there, and the only person who has ever truly known him drowned nearly thirty years ago.

  They had tried to reach her, in those first months, year, after her death; they had called to her, kept calling to her, to touch her answering heart, to push back the veil to the immaterial world. And they had failed. They had found only silence or, worse, deception in the spirit world. For the final attempt, the Association had employed a pair of mediums, sisters from Rochester: communications were produced that were so unlike Mary in sentiment or grammar that even John Prindle had realized that the enterprise should be abandoned. ‘We are not yet holy enough,’ he had sadly decreed. And now, for the first time, as he is finally negotiating her long-deferred monument, George Pagan doubts the need to build this house.

  ‘I wish the house to be built quickly,’ he says.

  The architect shrugs. George Pagan is, in a sense, rich. Not as rich as Seth Newhouse, whose settlement at the dissolution of the Association took into the reckoning the benefits of his animal traps. But George has cash and he has shares in the silver-and tableware company that has grown, with God’s guidance, large and profitable, and this architect is not so grand that he is above performing work for rich clients.

  ‘Who are all these people?’ the architect asks.

  ‘They are celebrating the marriage supper of the Lamb.’

  Slowly walking up the rise past the summer-house, where lovers entwine within the twisted wood, is an Onyataka Indian woman; the brown shawl that covers her upper body might once have been woven of red or orange. She is making for the kitchen door at the side of the Mansion House, walking uncomfortably with the pains of decrepitude or the rage of dependency, but she will be rewarded: it is likely that this day shall be a good one for receiving alms.

  2

  Older, dirtier, ten years later, Edgar was on his way back to Creek and Vail. He hadn’t been Edgar for seven or eight years, but at JFK airport, in a mirrored interview room, as his fingers trembled stupidly to remove the steel chain from around his neck, his old name reasserts itself.

  He had been Edward again, and Eddie, and Metal Eddie and Mental Eddie. His hair had been long and now it was shaved, and there were the nicks of scars across his inner arms and on the top of his head, which was maybe why these aggressively polite men, whose bellies swell out their blue uniforms, have stopped him; or maybe it was because of his piercings and face studs that they have already made him remove, or maybe it was because he was who he was and bad things happened around him; and now, as he struggled to take off the chain, this moment had become emblematic of the whole journey—it was all going to go wrong if the clasp broke, if the chain spilled into a useless line of rusted links.

  ‘Take your time, Edward,’ the nicest one said.

  ‘Edgar,’ Edgar said, and a wave of sentimentality for the boy he used to be nearly drowned him.

  ‘What is the purpose of your visit, Edgar?’

  ‘You don’t carry many bags, do you, Edgar?’

  ‘How long are you intending to stay in the United States, Edgar?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘What aren’t you sure about, Edgar?’

  ‘What’s the purpose of your visit, Edgar?’

  ‘Are you carrying anything you might want to tell us about, Edgar?’ the nicest one said sympathetically.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Edgar apologized. ‘I’m here, I don’t know …’ A stubborn reflex or instinct to honesty made Edgar stumble, searching for the words that would satisfy them and not compromise himself.

  ‘Family duty,’ was the best he could come up with and it seemed to pass; the clasp released, he could feel it scratched and bending between his awkward fingers, but not broken. He offered the chain for their inspection and the largest-bellied of them fastidiously held out a green plastic bucket to drop it into along with his facial metalwear and coins.

  His father was right: Edgar smokes cigarettes and knows to light them against the wind. He rolls his own cigarettes, which the US Customs men affected never to have come across before, and the nastiest one was picking through his pouch of tobacco as if it were contraband.

  ‘It would be more comfortable if you stood up,’ the nicest one said, and Edgar knew what was meant by this, he’d been through this procedure before—they put on rubber gloves, he took off his clothes, intimate scrutiny, welcome to America.

  3

  It was a crowded bus that set off from the airport into the city, romantically entwined European couples with jangling rucksacks, briskly organized Nordic families, who talked in icy cracks of consonants, small Asian men carrying large boxes wrapped with duct tape, Latina girls whose legs bulged inside skintight jeans, a couple of solitary men who stared out of the windows and longed for beer, and, typically, Edgar was the only passenger on the bus with an unoccupied seat beside him. Even the bulkiest of the black ladies with the bulkiest assemblage of supermarket bags that she has refused to allow the driver to stow in the luggage hatch, who muttered and sang and gave off the sweaty odour of her accumulation of disappointed years, preferred to sit next to a dangerous-looking Puerto Rican whose wicked moustache implied he carried many knives. Once this would have pleased Edgar, this proof of his antisocial aura, aversion force-field, unspoken declaration of outlaw status, and now it made him want to cry. He couldn’t look normal if he tried.

  In New York City, Edgar took long subway rides to nowhere, walking through the carriages, carelessly letting the connecting doors swing behind him. He had the address of a DJ whom he knew from London and who lived here now and was expecting to put him up, but this was a mission Edgar needed to do alone. So, as he waited for his jetlag to subside, he wasted almost all of his trip-money on a Lower West Side hotel where he watched pornography trailers for three seconds at a time and the black-coated doormen always tried to stop him coming in, until he showed his room key, and then they became bitterly polite until the next time.

  He bought no drugs, he stayed away from computers. He wasted more money on movies that he watched half of, as if he were a child, paying attention to the colours rather than the words, and on large breakfasts that were intended to keep him full until night-time but instead enlarged his stomach and made him ache with hunger for the rest of the day until he allowed himself his dinner slices of pizza and Hershey bar earlier and earlier each evening. He discovered a bar near to the hotel that was decorated with the sort of brightly incompetent computer-generated art that he would have despised at home but where they considered his appearance modern so didn’t mind him sitting glumly through the night drinking one or two small glasses of beer.

  Edgar had intended to stay in Manhattan for at least a week, arrive for his duel with Warren with his wits attuned, but he couldn’t bear it in this city. He had expected wildness, Bohemians, excess, danger vixen women, men declaiming mad poetry, but everyone here just seemed unnecessarily rich. They belligerently jutted out their chins when they made their orders in coffee shops and bars. They walked slowly along the sidewalks as if staking claim to every moment of time as well as every inch of space. New Yorkers were, he decided, swollen with entitlement. Edgar liked this phrase and repeated it to himself like a mantra, and to the pleasant-faced girl with impressively hairy arms who was waiting by herself on a neighbouring bar-stool at the place where they tolerated him.

  ‘That’s interesting, what does it mean?’ she said, in an accent he couldn’t place.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he
said. ‘Are you Italian?’

  ‘Greek.’

  Her name was Maria, which was, he decided, a good coincidence, perhaps providential. She was carrying a book of poems by Rilke, which was exactly the sort of thing he had expected to find in New York but hadn’t yet. Edgar had never read Rilke but that didn’t stop him pursuing aggressively fanciful objections to his work that Maria good-naturedly allowed him to make, and she went outside with him when he smoked, and the evening ended with Edgar walking back to Maria’s apartment on the Lower East Side with her and her friend, who was also studying film at NYU. Matthias was a boy from Denmark who had the most friendly and guileless manner that Edgar had ever encountered. It made him feel sophisticated and bold. As they reached the front door to Maria’s apartment block, Edgar told Matthias to keep walking and he nodded determinedly and did so.

  ‘Where’s Matthias?’ Maria asked as they went into her apartment, whose walls were decorated with film posters and laminated restaurant menus.

  ‘I don’t know. He must have gone home,’ Edgar said.

  ‘That’s strange.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because he lives here.’

  This was very funny to her and she was still laughing when she poured them each a glass of grappa.

  Maria lay on her bed and Edgar sat on the floor and went through the playlists on her iPod. He wanted a song pure and peaceful, something from an uncomplicated past.

  Edgar interrupted Maria telling him about her father, who was a general in the Greek army. ‘Do you have any Kinks?’

  She sat upright on the bed and stared at him. ‘No one’s ever said that to me before.’

  ‘I’m only asking.’

  She looked very serious and excited. ‘I’ve been waiting I don’t know how long for someone to ask me that.’

  ‘“Waterloo Sunset”, maybe.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of that but I know people are much more advanced in London than here. Do you think being a lesbian is passé?’

  ‘Are you a lesbian?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think about spanking sometimes and I like to read about it. You could spank me? Or maybe I could spank you. Or is that too 101? I don’t want to be boring to you. Doctors. Nothing surgical, you understand, but I have these pictures inside me, like trailers for a movie I’ve never seen. I don’t know how to begin. Maybe you should tell me your kinks.’

  Edgar had the presence of mind to smile as if suavely and say, ‘No no, this should be about you.’

  And she unburdened herself. They spent the night acting out some of the pictures inside her: Edgar was a cruel doctor, a severe teacher, he was an army officer and Maria the disobedient new recruit. And when she demanded that he supply a narrative for their games he told her about ‘Pete’ Pagan Stone.

  Edgar had become something of an expert in the stories of the Pagan House. Before Edgar dropped out of sight of his family and the post office, he used to receive regular instalments of Jerome’s transcriptions and commentaries that Warren bundled up inside white envelopes crested with a picture of the Mansion House. When Edgar was at university he spent more time reading about the Perfectionists and their joint-stock Onyataka Ltd aftermath than he did his set philosophy books.

  ‘Who’s Pagan Stone?’

  ‘Born 1913, died 1977. Lived for a while in Paris before and after the war. Came home and inherited the house and a position in the company when his brother died. He was a Company man and wrote poetry. People knew him as Spanky Pete.’

  ‘Oh?’ she said, as if innocently. ‘Why was he called that?’

  ‘Pete was his nickname. You know, sort of regular-guy name suitable for business. Pagan was a bit out-there for corporate life.’

  ‘You know what I’m asking.’

  Maria sat cross-legged on the bed. She was naked apart from the blue fisherman’s hat she had put on for a reason he could no longer remember. Her breasts were goose-bumped, and around her left nipple were the three strands of hair that she had at first been embarrassed to reveal.

  ‘He had this thing with his housemaid. She was an Indian girl called Tara. There were these rumours that he used to beat her, for sexual reasons. But actually it was the other way around.’

  Tara had returned home from her boarding-school, a model of Christian education and humility. A handful of families was left on the Onyataka Reservation, thirty-five inhabitants in all, which grew briefly to thirty-six, then shrank again to thirty-five when Tara took up her place at the Pagan House. She was polished in a small-gem kind of way, and was sincere, and efficient in all her tasks and movements. How did she respond when ‘Pete’ Pagan Stone made his suggestion? She thought it at first some kind of complicated joke. They were in the parlour, he sitting with a volume of French verse, she dusting down clean surfaces for want of anything else to do. He made his suggestion and she laughed nervously, one dainty hand in front of her mouth. Nothing in her experience or her passions allowed her any conception of what her master was asking her, needing her, to do.

  After a difficult beginning, clouds of embarrassment on both sides, awkward negotiations, irritated instructions—Yes, yes, like that, only harder—they worked out between them a routine as efficient as any housekeeping rota, and she satisfied his requirements with a brisk diligence that he only wished contained more passion and less duty on her part (‘And in the lonely starless night, waiting to be chastized/I attend my cold apt mistress’).

  ‘Pete’ Pagan Stone entered ‘the fire realm of pain’ in the small parlour of the Pagan House, his trousers pulled down to his knees, his stomach pressed to the arm of a horsehair chair, looking first out of the window to the rise up to the Mansion House, and then to one of Aunt Bridie’s braidings on the wall, on whose brightly coloured innocent pastoral scene his imagination painted darker worlds of pleasure.

  He was his accustomed courteously reserved self at Company events, at all the picnics and barbecues and softball games and fishing weekends at the Company lodge on Finger Lake, tall in an old English suit, his handsome, sorrowful face deeply lined down the cheeks, prematurely silver hair combed back, watchful green eyes slightly bloodshot, because Spanky Pete silenced any sense of ridicule he might feel with regular infusions of Scotch and soda.

  ‘Pete’ Pagan Stone trouserless on his haunches his thickening Indian servant behind him wields the paddle against his naked rump. She is bored, her arm is tiring, there is cleaning to be done, he is insatiable. There are any number of activities she would prefer to be undertaking than this. She finds the noises he makes loathsome, the yelps and infantile cries. But then, she considers, swinging her arm, raising welts, sometimes, for variety’s sake, using her hand, red against red, her hand against the rosy blush of his sagging rear, rather his need to command her to do this than for their positions to be reversed, she on hands and knees, he administering the punishment, there are such men, and she might respect him more if he were one of them—but then again, she reflects, his must be the preferable place for why else is it the servant’s and not the master’s job to swing the cherry-wood paddle?

  This is a separate realm from the rest of their days, never a mention made of it, hardly an allusion. He is not especially strict with her, or over-gentle. She has her tasks to do and he will chide her if she fails in any of them. (And, with her man on the reservation, she has tried this, both ways, to mutual indifference, bafflement and pain.) But here, in the dim parlour light, her master rocks forward driven by the power of her stroke, rocks back eager for the next.

  Eventually Tara moved away to join her cousins in Wisconsin. She had grown stout and middle-aged, and ‘Pete’ wasn’t sad to see her go. He would write poetry again (it has been argued that ‘Letter to T—, Who Has Gone Away’ is the first decent poem he ever wrote), he liked to live alone, and there was an establishment in Syracuse where strong-armed farmers’ girls were delighted and relieved to cater for custom like his.

  Edgar swung his arm and clapped Maria’s right buttock.<
br />
  ‘That hurts,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry.’

  Contrite, he spanked her more softly but achieved a more pleasing percussion of skin.

  ‘I don’t mind. It’s all right.’

  Except this is wrong—if they are being ‘Pete’ and Tara, then it should be he who is on elbows and knees, swaying with each blow. But that would bring him closer to Jeffrey and he won’t let that happen.

  In the morning he realized he couldn’t put it off any longer. He stepped over Matthias asleep on the floor by the TV and walked across town to the Port Authority building, where he bought a ticket to Syracuse and spent the last of his money on two slices of pizza as he waited for his bus. It could have been the same bus he came in on from the airport: it made the same dry noises, engine grinding against itself, the screech of worn brake-pads, and while it carried a whiter, more demure cargo, Edgar was again the only passenger to have a spare seat beside him.

  4

  He had not warned Warren of his arrival. The avenging angel would make his own way to the Pagan House. Edgar intended to surprise Warren, his bucket of poisons, the dry, quivery lips of an old lady submissively tasting death. But it was harder than he had expected to hitch-hike out of Syracuse. He stood beneath an overpass in the rain, hungry and sorry, as cars and buses skidded obliviously past. He could be thirteen years old again, he could will himself into a hundred and fifty years ago and the overpass would be gone, but it would still be raining and he would still be hungry and damp and nowhere. Finally though he did get a ride towards Onyataka, high in the cab of a dairy truck.

  ‘People not likely to pick you up the way you look,’ the truck driver said.

  ‘So why did you?’

  ‘Bible preaches hospitality to strangers. This’ll be my good deed for the day, make up for some of the other stuff.’

  ‘What other stuff?’

  But conversation was over. Edgar watched the half-forgotten journey in silence until they pulled off the thruway and Edgar pointed to the huge grey concrete complex that was sucking off most of the traffic.