Burning Down the House

by Jane Mendelsohn

  —

  No one knew exactly when Neva was returning so it was a surprise when Poppy saw her in an art supply store on Second Avenue, downtown. Neva had the same angular aspect, the same hair like ink, the same green eyes. Poppy had started taking drawing classes. She was purchasing paper, charcoal. Neva was looking at a display of colored markers. She explained that she was buying some for a little girl she knew. Actually, they were for Angel’s daughter.

  —

  Neva and Poppy kept talking and they walked west together, for a long time.

  What am I going to do? asked Poppy. What are we going to do?

  What are we? said Neva.

  —

  They walked onto a pier. It stuck out into the river like a branch into the air. They stood on the end of the branch, dangling above the water.

  Can’t you tell me anything? Anything that will help?

  I don’t know that I can, said Neva.

  Can’t you try? Can’t you tell me that you will always be here for me or that I will be okay or that you will never forget me?

  Neva said nothing. Then she said: I can’t promise any of that. Anyway, you’re too old now for my promises. You make your own.

  They both looked out over the water.

  Why are you being so cruel now, of all times?

  I’m not being cruel; I’m just being honest with you. I’ve always been honest with you.

  Is that all?

  It’s enough. And it’s what we have.

  Poppy licked the tears on her lips.

  What about hope?

  What about it?

  Can’t we have that too?

  I didn’t say you couldn’t.

  But you said all we have is honesty.

  Hope is not dishonest. Hope is nothing but honest. It’s very strong. Yes, I think you should have hope.

  Well, what can you say that will help me have it? Because I don’t anymore. I’ve lost it. I can’t find it.

  You’ll find it when you no longer expect it to give you exactly what you want, or even close to what you want. You’ll have it when you see that hope is patience, waiting, time.

  That doesn’t really sound like hope.

  Are you sure you aren’t asking for false hope?

  Maybe, she said, squinting, searching. I think maybe I’m just asking for love.

  Neva turned to her.

  That you have. You have all my love. You have it for as long as I exist, and you can remember it for as long as you do.

  Poppy couldn’t tell the difference between the water in her eyes and the water behind Neva’s head.

  So if I have love I have hope?

  If you have love you have hope.

  What about love conquering all. Poppy smiled. Is that true?

  No, that’s not true.

  So what conquers all?

  Nature, said Neva. Her hair blew out behind her like the black feathers of a bird.

  Nature conquers all? said Poppy.

  Yes, said Neva. Nature conquers all.

  —

  They stood hugging on the pier. You could see them standing and they looked like one person, their hair blowing around together in the wind.

  EPILOGUE

  IN THE CITY’S PARKS the trees stood holding the late-summer light, glowing with it, giant natural lanterns. Scattered blankets spread out over the lawns, covered with people, the afternoon flowing out from them in a soft current. Children walked by bodies of water and stuck their hands in the wet rushing. A kite jerked in the wind, spermatozoically. In the air was the contentment of people inside a mystery that they did not need to understand. The kite rose frantically higher, then softly fell.

  —

  The House of Steve fell not softly but with theatrics, like the final scenes of a complicated saga. Investments were unwound, properties sold off, debt restructured. A certain slide in social standing was endured as part of the loss of financial power. Some friends disappeared. Some advisers shrugged and stopped returning phone calls. Others flew in to assess the rot, pick the bones, and save some meat. Not everything was lost. Through the secular miracle of world markets, bonds, banks, rehypothecation, mortgages wrapped in credit wrapped in words, funds were salvaged, some real estate retained. Damage was done and yet the individuals survived. Even the worst of them, Jonathan, never went to jail. This was, like one of the conundrums Felix puzzled over, unbelievable. And yet it was true.

  —

  As it turned out, Patrizia had discovered in the examination room that she was pregnant with Steve’s child. She never had a chance to tell him. But it was what she had longed for and in spite of the shock of Steve’s death she carried the baby to term. She named him Stefano. Roman ignored the infant but Felix enjoyed him, its wobbly head, its alien eyes. Felix grew up quickly as a result of the birth of this sibling, and came into his own, found music and a sense of purpose. He learned how to make guitars. He painstakingly bent and molded the wood. He began composing electronic symphonies. He chose a new name for himself: Phoenix. He wrote a wildly ambitious orchestral piece and dedicated it to his late father.

  —

  One of the movements of his symphony is inspired by Han-shan’s Red Pine Poem 253:

  Children, I implore you,

  Get out of the burning house now.

  Three carts await outside

  To save you from a homeless life.

  Relax in the village square

  Before the sky, everything’s empty.

  No direction is better or worse,

  East just as good as West.

  Those who know the meaning of this

  Are free to go where they want.

  —

  Poppy often finds herself hearing this music, these words, in her head.

  —

  Alix fell in love, truly, for the first time. She had run into Genevieve a few days after the benefit for Ian’s show, and eventually Genevieve left her husband. She moved out of the townhouse with the room of baseball caps—her children were grown and had left home—and into Alix’s apartment. Alix finished the monograph on medieval art she had been thinking about her entire adult life. It was published. She saw much less of Ian. But she was a devoted aunt to her niece, Miranda and Jonathan’s daughter, the precocious and surprisingly unspoiled Greta. Alix took Greta to the Metropolitan, the way she had taken Poppy, and the two of them sat on the steps licking ice cream, Greta’s buckled shoes planted firmly on the worn stair.

  —

  Alix doesn’t remember, sitting on the steps with Greta, the time she had met Poppy on the same steps, the chilly air messing Poppy’s hair around, Poppy’s forehead furrowing into a series of unspeakably pretty commas. What Alix knows is a kind of comfort with Greta—who looks much like Poppy did as a child, although whenever this is mentioned Alix says she doesn’t see it—and with this child she feels an ease far removed from competition or tension, a second chance, a playful love.

  —

  Perhaps Greta was fortunate that Jonathan had lost nearly everything after Steve died. Short-selling, poor investments, the real estate slump in certain emerging markets. But Steve had saved him from total ruin, had put certain trusts and executors in place, ensuring that the benefits of various loopholes and tax advantages would soften any blow. Nevertheless, Jonathan’s circumstances were reduced. And the company was destroyed, he would have said. Creative destruction, others might have countered. His losses tempered him and forced him to become slightly less selfish, less vicious. It wasn’t so much the money as the social recalibration. At one point he had to ask Patrizia for financial assistance, which pleased her and irritated her in equal measure. He sought her attention at a family gathering, cornering her in a quiet room, while Stefano and Greta were on their way to Mars, packing lipstick, trucks, candy, and socks in a shopping bag. They were off. It was raining on Mars. They didn’t have an umbrella.

  —

  Ian’s show stole the season. The critics rhapsodized, audiences spread in
fectious word of mouth, a cult following developed, and even Angus, usually so spiteful and patronizing, praised it in a lengthy piece. It captured the moment. It made sense of the times. And it moved people. Night after night they experienced emotions coursing through their bodies. Hot reds and cold blues, cool greens and warming yellows, traveled down their arms, through their torsos, burst out the tops of their heads. It wasn’t just sensation, it was feeling, and it was thought. The consolations of art could be found in a simple candle on a stage, a voice rising up, the communal catharsis of the gathering. Ian watched from the back of the theater as the players gave themselves over to the music, to the story, to the human beings watching them. Together the actors and the audience rose up, ripped outside of time, elevated themselves like beams of light, and, like flames, set the house on fire.

  —

  He talks to Poppy at night when he is alone. For now, that has to be all right. He doesn’t expect her to care. He keeps talking. He whispers, he cries, he won’t forget.

  —

  She does care, she does wonder, although she wishes she did not. She begins to care about herself again, to wonder about her self. She begins to put herself back together, saying her own name over and over.

  —

  The love they have is an attempt to express the inexpressible. There is no word for it.

  —

  Eventually, Poppy was able to forgive Ian and have a relationship with him. It was not exactly a father-daughter relationship. He had not raised her and she had known another father, Steve, whom she would always think of as her father. But Ian knew her and their connection grew and deepened when she finally allowed it. He helped her when she decided to apply to college. He listened to her weigh her options, complain about deadlines, talk through her essay, and resolve her plans. He did not pressure her. He did not advise her. He only listened. He listened and reflected, and communication moved between them like satellite intelligence reaching back and forth across oceans. They were relieved to discover who they were supposed to be to each other, and in time they moved forward. They moved on.

  —

  You have to keep going, he told her without saying it. He told her by showing her, by continuing to try. He let her know she would always have him, that he would always be there for her to talk to. You’ll see, his actions said, I am here for you.

  —

  Poppy and Ian and Phoenix walk together in a park, near Poppy’s apartment. They make an odd kind of family but it is an arrangement that works. Poppy and Phoenix loop their arms around each other’s backs, Phoenix has grown, Ian ambles a few feet to the side. The distance between them is like the distance between letters, between words in a sentence. Irregular but with a logic. Relaxed and elegant in its simplicity. It makes sense, this empty space. It makes meaning.

  —

  Their shadows stretch out in the late-afternoon light as if for miles, like a wake running behind them.

  —

  When she leans on the railing and looks down into the Hudson River, Neva sees an emptiness which contains everything: the mountains she came from, this city she has made home, and the other rivers she visits when she travels. She goes back to visit Russia. She stares into the River Neva and sees the Hudson.

  —

  The river is always moving on, always emptying itself out. In this emptiness is the washing away of meaning to find the deeper meanings, the stillness, the unburning fires at the bottom of the river. She looks for them, catches glimpses, colors, glints of red and orange rushing past, turning blue, then black, into eddies, swirls, clear and cold.

  —

  And like a river Neva moves on, flows forward, continues. She carries children. She carries Angel’s daughter in her arms. She helps their family. She moves on from Patrizia and Stefano because Patrizia decides to do it differently this time, to spend more time with the baby. But Neva will never lack for children to carry. She finds a girl, back in Russia, on T. Street, and she saves her. She saves others, from Russia and from other countries. She works with people around the world, hoping to build a highway of freedom. She gives her life to the movement. She is a movement.

  —

  Neva walks along the Hudson River. She sees a vibrant violent calamity of light rain down on the water, smashing into it, sending electric radiance into the air. She keeps walking. She goes on. She feels her heart move outward like an army of roses, marching, ablaze, on fire. She runs with the strength of feeling. She rushes with the meaning of emptiness. She flows with resistless force. And she carries beauty with her.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JANE MENDELSOHN is the author of three previous novels, including I Was Amelia Earhart, a New York Times and international best seller. A graduate of Yale, she lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.

  An Alfred A. Knopf Reading Guide

  Burning Down the House

  by Jane Mendelsohn

  The introduction, author biography, discussion questions, and suggested reading that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of Burning Down the House, a thought-provoking new novel by Jane Mendelsohn.

  Discussion Questions

  1. Where does the title of the book come from? What major themes of the novel does it expose or support? In addition to any literal references to fire or burning, what symbolic significance might the title have?

  2. The author opens the novel with the sentence “It begins with a child.” She also repeats this sentence elsewhere in the book. Why do you think that the author chose to begin the novel with this sentence and to repeat it as a motif? How, for instance, does the book address the themes of childhood and innocence?

  3. Evaluate the theme of interconnectedness in the novel. How are the characters impacted by one another’s actions and decisions? Consider examples of cause and effect. Does the book ultimately support the notion of interconnectedness or does it suggest rather that interconnectedness is an illusion?

  4. What view—or views—of love does the novel present? What kinds of love and relationships are depicted in the novel? Does one kind of love seem to triumph over all of the other kinds? Explain. How does love ultimately seem to be defined by the book’s end?

  5. Poppy “always tells people that her family is like the House of Agamemnon or something out of Faulkner” (this page). What does she mean by this? How would you categorize her family? How does the Zane family compare with other families in world literature? Alternatively, what makes them unique?

  6. Who narrates the novel? Does any single point of view seem to stand out from all of the rest? If so, why do you think this is so? How do you think that your interpretation of or reaction to the story would differ if the story had been presented from a single point of view?

  7. Evaluate the structure of the novel. How does it help to expose or support major themes of the book or assist in revealing or otherwise echoing the state of the characters and the Zane family as a whole?

  8. How has Neva been affected by her experiences as a sex slave? Why does she find solace in comparing herself with a river? What has allowed her to go on and find strength in her new life? Has she found healing? If so, how? Why do you think that she chooses to share her story with Steve in particular, and how does he react to this?

  9. Would you categorize Burning Down the House as a tragedy? What elements of classical Greek tragedy does the book contain? How does the book otherwise challenge, defy, resist, or transcend this genre?

  10. Poppy says that Ian “is not one kind of person; like all of us, he has many aspects” (this page). Later, Neva wonders, is Steve “the personification of evil or a wise man? Could anyone be all one or the other?” (this page) Does the book ultimately support a fixed notion of good and evil or does it seem to support a more nuanced and complicated view of humanity and ethics? For example, do the characters in the novel seem to be defined more by nature or by their ethical choices?

  11. In Chapter 21, Patrizia acknowledges that she b
elieves she is having “not a crisis but an awakening” (this page). What is awakening within her and what seems to be causing this awakening? How does she believe she has changed? Is her awakening ultimately a positive or beneficial one? Explain.

  12. Jonathan muses in Chapter 24 that “nothing was pure” and that “we are all complicit” (this page). What does he believe that everyone is complicit in? Do you agree? Why or why not? What examples are found in the novel? What seems to cause these characters to choose complicity? Do any of the characters in the novel resist? If so, what are the consequences of their actions?

  13. What does Steve believe is the antithesis of democracy? What does he say democracy demands above emotion? How does he believe freedom is defined? How have these values been corrupted according to the novel? Does the book provide any indication of how this might be remedied?

  14. Evaluate the motif of secretkeeping. Why does Ian choose not to tell Poppy the truth? Do you agree with his decision? Why or why not? What are the consequences of his decision? Why does Steve keep the secret of Poppy’s paternity from all involved for so long? Likewise, how does Poppy’s inability to be truthful with her family affect her own trajectory? What other secrets are kept and revealed in the novel and what are the effects of these actions? What does this ultimately suggest about truth?