The Souvenir Museum

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “We’re going for a walk, if you’d like to come,” said Eloise.

  “That sounds nice.”

  “You can borrow a pair of boots and a coat.”

  As Sadie passed Michael Valert, he said, “It’s a large turd. Impressive. You must be feeding him well.”

  The boots wouldn’t go over Sadie’s thick calves, so she put on her wet shoes, a pair of rubber-soled Mary Janes. The coat wouldn’t button over her hips, so she wore it open. By we, Eloise had meant herself and a small, wild-eyed, disheveled terrier who looked like the dog in the Arnolfini portrait and whose name was, apparently, Shithead. Sadie followed the two of them out the door, across a field, and then, dismayingly, up a hill.

  “It’s an amazing house,” said Sadie, to prove to Eloise that she wasn’t too out of breath to talk. “Why Ireland?”

  “Why indeed. Apparently they like the Irish. I think they’re mad to have bought it.”

  “Why?”

  “It’ll take them donkey’s years to fix it up. Not to mention the cost. They’re not very practical. Here, let’s go this way.” Eloise opened a gate that said BEWARE OF BULL. “Come on.”

  Sadie pointed at the sign and said, “Bull?”

  Eloise’s hat was large and tweed. It had fallen over her eyes; she knocked the brim up with her fist and scanned the field. “Look,” she said. “He’s over there. Come on! Don’t be wet.”

  “I’m—they move fast, don’t they?”

  “He won’t bother us. Come on, Shithead,” she called in a sweet, threatening voice. “Shitty! Shitty.”

  The dog crossed first and they followed, and then climbed through some barbed wire, which caught in Sadie’s hair. She could feel the wet shoes tugging at her tights, the waistband of which had fallen below the equator of her bottom. She slid in the mud. At the moment she thought Eloise was purposefully testing or torturing her, but eventually she would learn that this was simply every walk in the country with every English person she ever met: mud and injury and a disregard for safety or private property.

  “What do you do?” she asked Eloise.

  The hat was down again; she punched it up again. “Really? I’m a doctor. Len didn’t tell you.”

  “Of course!” she said, though he hadn’t. “I meant what kind of doctor.”

  “Nephrologist.”

  Sadie looked at her watch. “What time is the wedding?”

  “Five.”

  “It’s one.”

  “’Tis,” said Eloise.

  “Does Fiona need help? Getting ready? If your mother’s not here.”

  “The Dutch will do that. They’re very good, the Dutch. Why, are you tired? We can go back. Lenny’s told me all about you.”

  “Oh,” said Sadie. “Sorry your mother’s not here.”

  “She’s got gout.”

  “Really?”

  “You think she’d lie?”

  “No. I just—I guess I didn’t realize women get gout.”

  “Runs in families,” said Eloise, and Sadie realized there was nearly nothing Eloise did not deliver as a threat. “This way.”

  They seemed to be angling back down the hill. She thought it was a hill; it might have been a mountain. “Lucky it stopped raining.”

  “Ground’ll be wet for the wedding.”

  “Are there roofs over the stables?”

  “Yes,” Eloise said. “But for the dancing there’s not.”

  “There’s dancing?”

  “The Dutch will want to dance, surely,” said Eloise. “And you. Americans are always dancing, aren’t they? Shitty!” called Eloise, in a headmistress voice. “Shithead! Get over here.” Then, carelessly, “I hope you weren’t bothered.”

  “Oh, gosh, no,” said Sadie. “By what?”

  “My father. He has a childish sense of humor.”

  At the house they went in a door at the back, yet another one. Eloise bundled the dog in a dirty pink towel the color of a tongue, then tucked him under her arm. “Do you want a tour?”

  “Sure.”

  “We’ll take the back stairs.”

  Like servants do, thought Sadie, who’d read enough books about English girls in peril to wonder whether she was about to be shut in an attic.

  Until recently the house had been owned and occupied by a single old man, who had died alone in one of the bedrooms. Somebody, perhaps the old man when he was a young man, had painted the walls with vivid tempera, which gave the rooms the intense look of Renaissance frescoes, brand-new, ancient, like marriage itself. The old man’s bedroom was blue. Lapis lazuli, thought Sadie. Had his family died? His wife, his children? But the old man had never married: it had been his parents and brother and sisters who had died or disappeared, one at a time. That was family, too. No man who’d ever been married could have died thus: alone but perfectly happy in his bed, a portrait of the Virgin Mary hung at a tilt over his head so he didn’t have to hurt his neck to look at her.

  “Sad to die alone,” said Sadie.

  “How do you know?” asked Eloise. She set the dog on the ground. He sniffed at the threshold of the room but didn’t go in. “I’m longing for it. But instead I will be surrounded by my children and grandchildren.”

  “Oh!” said Sadie. “You have children.”

  “Grown,” said Eloise. “Elsewhere.” Then, in an exaggerated English accent, though her own accent was already extremely English, “Gawn.”

  Sadie noticed her suitcase in the corner of the room, Jack’s duffel next to it. The bags had been repacked, zipped up. She hoped it had been Jack who’d done it. She suspected it wasn’t.

  Half the rooms were derelict and half under construction and absolutely nothing was finished. There were sinks in odd places, unhinged doors leaning on walls. The floors were wood, dusty, any varnish worn away. Everything felt precarious but also beautiful, an excellent place, thought Sadie, for starting a life together.

  “What did you get as a present?” Eloise asked.

  Sadie was happy to say. It had been her idea. “A guest book,” she said. They had ordered it from Smythson’s. It was leather-bound with the name of the house—Currock House—stamped in gold on the cover.

  “What?” said Eloise.

  Sadie didn’t know what misstep she’d made. Were you not supposed to say wedding presents before the wedding? But Eloise had asked!

  “That’s what I got,” said Eloise. “You’ll have to get something else.”

  “Well,” said Sadie.

  “Lottie’s invited,” said Eloise suddenly, as though the matter had been settled. “I’m sure Lenny said.”

  “The clown?”

  At that Eloise laughed. It was a disconcerting laugh: you could see her tongue move with every peal, a rapid clapper in a bell. “Not a clown, no.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Puppets. Right?”

  “You don’t know about Lottie! He worshipped her. But I’m sure he’s told you.”

  He had mentioned Lottie—that she was older than he was, that they’d busked together on the streets of London. Not a girlfriend: just a woman. He’d been a teenager when they met. When Sadie thought of it, the act was in the jittery black and white of long ago. But he never spoke of worship. Her ankles were sore. She wondered if there was somewhere to take a nap, or even time enough.

  “You must make him tell you about Lottie,” said Eloise. “It’s important.”

  “All right,” said Sadie. She crouched to the dog. “Hello, Shithead.”

  “His name,” said Eloise, “is Seamus.”

  “Oh! I thought—”

  “Shithead’s his nickname,” said Eloise, fondly, to the dog.

  The wedding was at five, with reception to follow. Most of the party went to the hotel in town to get ready, but the broke relatives—Sadie and Jack, Katie and Fred and their children—stayed behind. Sadie and Jack got ready in the blue bedroom, where the old man had died.

  “Where’s my bag?” said Jack. They had not been together long enough to pack in the same
suitcase.

  “There. Is your family always like that?”

  “English? Yes.”

  “Obsessed with shit.”

  He laughed. “Right. English. That didn’t bother you.”

  “I’ve had anxiety dreams more relaxing. Shame about your mother’s gout.”

  “Gout? No gout. Where did you get gout?”

  “Eloise said.”

  “Yes, she would. No: the problem is that Fiona converted to Catholicism and is now marrying an atheist.”

  “Which is worse?”

  “Hard to tell.”

  “How’s being Jewish?” she asked. “If she’s against Catholics.”

  “You’re not Jewish.”

  “I am Jewish. Are you in the wedding party?”

  “No.”

  “What’s with the suit?”

  He was stepping into striped pants. “It’s my morning suit. It’s what you wear to weddings.”

  “You own that suit?”

  “Yes,” he said. Then, “Your mother’s Jewish.”

  “Yes, my mother’s Jewish, so I’m Jewish.”

  “Says who?”

  “Jews the wide world over. Didn’t you know that? Matrilineal, mate.”

  “Huh,” he said. “Don’t call me mate. No, I think she’d be fine with that. You didn’t choose it, after all.”

  “But what if I did?”

  “Sadie,” said Jack.

  “What about Lottie?”

  “She wasn’t Jewish.”

  “Did you know she was invited to the wedding?”

  Jack smiled, but he also began to arrange his hair, his major vanity, the dark curls that he wore swept off his forehead. “No, she’s not,” he said.

  “Eloise said she was.”

  He laughed with some relief. “Don’t believe what Eloise says.”

  “She says you worshipped Lottie.”

  “Bollocks I did.”

  “I love it when you speak British. And you didn’t sleep together.”

  “Not often.”

  Sadie laughed. Jack didn’t.

  “Not often,” he said again.

  “Near the start or near the end?”

  He took his hands from his hair. “Right near the middle,” he said.

  When they drove up to the church they were already rushed. “Why does the car smell of wet dog?” he asked, and Sadie thought, Was that today? It seemed like weeks ago. She hadn’t had a chance to tell him the story, which she knew would delight him; it had slipped her mind.

  She parked the car.

  “Remember the emergency brake,” he told her.

  “I always do,” she said, though she’d forgotten.

  Inside the church they were hustled up to a front pew by a Dutch person in a red denim blazer. Nobody had to ask bride’s side or groom’s: the English were the ones in floral prints and hats and morning suits, and the Dutch were the ones in long braids and primary colors. Sadie turned to see if she could pick out Lottie among the guests, but all she could see were hats, an armada of them.

  The wedding, being a wedding, passed without incident.

  Afterward, they had drinks in the check-floored foyer of the house, with plates of pâté and toast handed around. The tempera paint on the walls rubbed off on people’s clothing. The twins’ hands were blue. Shithead’s port side was green. The guests who got too close to the yellow walls came away looking pollinated.

  “My mother would hate this,” said Jack. “Better she stayed at home.”

  “Do you like weddings?” said Sadie.

  “No,” he said. Then, “Lucky for us we’re already married.”

  Sadie laughed ruefully.

  “That drunk guy,” said Jack. “From the bar. Our first date. Didn’t he pronounce us man and wife?”

  “I don’t think he was credentialed.”

  “He might have been a ship captain. Do you like weddings?”

  She thought about it. The answer was no, but she thought she might like marriage.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They’re all right. No,” she said. “No. I don’t.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  She was crying then.

  “Oh no!” he said, startled. “No! What’s the matter?”

  The matter was she felt, all of a sudden, the force of his family, and understood them as quicksand, and didn’t know whether she should get herself out or try to rescue both of them. Eloise, the father, even darling Fiona, even Katie’s twin sons, Thomas and Robin, with their Rod Stewart haircuts and old-man outfits that matched everyone in the family. She’d understood matching clothing—tracksuits, Disneyland sweatshirts, striped pajamas—as a particularly American insanity. She didn’t like the international version any better.

  “I’ll ask you one of these days,” he said, fond and irritated. “When I get some things straightened out.”

  She was astonished he understood so little.

  After all the rain they had a beautiful night. The ground was muddy, but the stables were paved and covered and strung with fairy lights. There was no dancing—dancing was canceled, because it had been planned for the field and the field was muck. “Like the Somme,” observed Michael Valert to Sadie, daring her to get the reference, which she did not. There was no seating plan, just long tables laid out. It had been a small wedding.

  Eloise was weeping. She had seen the guest book that Jack and Sadie had bought.

  “It’s nicer,” she said to her father.

  “No, it’s not, I’m sure it’s not.”

  “It is!” she said. Then she was crying into his shoulder, and Fiona was there, too, and they were all comforting Eloise, whose grown gawn children hadn’t come.

  “It can be a different kind of guest book!” said Fiona. “Yours is lovely.” She looked at Sadie. “They’re both lovely!”

  Michael Valert had to play MC at the dinner, because Piet’s best man was a small shy Dutch woman named Kick who’d refused. Jack and Kick went off to smoke a cigarette, but Michael Valert didn’t care: he assumed his position at the microphone, and offered a toast that referenced, among other things, the morning shit that hadn’t flushed, a number of jokes about the Dutch, one about the French—it turned out that Eloise’s long-ago divorced husband had been French—and an unarmed American, who Sadie realized, with surprise, was her. “To the bride and groom!” said Michael Valert. She was at a table with the unmarrying sisters and their families. The two blond twins played mumblety peg with a butter knife and their sweet blue hands.

  “Which one’s Pie?” Sadie asked.

  “They both are,” said Katie. “Easier that way.”

  Instead of a cake there were three Dutch cheeses in graduated sizes. Where was Jack? Michael Valert announced into the microphone, “The bride and groom will now cut the cheese.”

  Now, that, thought Sadie, was funny, and she burst into delighted laughter.

  That was how she discovered that the euphemism was only American, and she the only American there. Jack was American, too, no matter how he denied it, but Jack was elsewhere. When Sadie realized that everyone in the stables was looking at her, she began to laugh harder. Her laughter was not silent. She could hear herself shriek.

  “What is it,” hissed Eloise, and Sadie could only manage to say, “It means f-f-fart.” Across the stable, Michael Valert stared at her with his exceptionally blue eyes, as amplified as his voice had been, and for a moment she felt ashamed but then, as though her soul had been turned over with a spade, the shame turned to jubilation. She could have stood and sung, she thought, though she could not sing. Indeed the bride and groom had cut the cheese. Fiona’s dress was scallion green and glorious. The Dutch had put too much gel in her hair.

  That night they slept in the room of the dead man—“What if he died in this bed,” asked Jack, and Sadie, brave for once, said, “People have died everywhere, you can hardly avoid it, come here,” and tomorrow they would drive to the Dingle Peninsula, and she would think, over and
over, I am going to drive off this road and ruin everything, but she never did, and she told him about the cat and dog, and explained to him that she’d thought his father had purposely made a funny joke—the bride and groom will now cut the cheese!—and they both laughed so hard she had to pull over to the side of the road, and when they recovered they drove out to Inch, where they were the only people on the beach, and so quickly and laughingly had sex, there on the damp sand, there was not a place in all of Ireland that wasn’t damp, but what else do you do when you are all alone, and liberated?

  For now, when he came back to the table, he found Sadie laughing so hard she couldn’t speak, and all his family arranged around her. She was crying with laughter, and every time she tried to explain, she laughed harder, and his family looked more appalled. “What is it?” asked Jack, who felt suddenly the depths of his love for her, like Pavlov’s dogs, all of them in love with Pavlov.

  “Why is that woman laughing,” Michael Valert said into the microphone.

  “Tell her to stop!” said Eloise. “Make her stop!”

  But he couldn’t, and she couldn’t either.

  Proof

  What beach this was, Louis wasn’t certain. Rock and sand, a harbor town, and everywhere the sort of broken pottery he’d combed for as a boy in the 1940s. Let his brothers fill their pockets with sticks and shells, ordinary sea glass: he knew how to look for the curved ridge on the underside of a slice of saucer. Flip it over and find the blue flowers of Holland or China, a century ago or more. Once, on the beach outside their summer cottage down the Cape, he had found two entire clay pipes, eighteenth century, while his six older brothers sharked and sealed and barked in the water; beyond them he could see, almost, the ghosts of the colonists who had used the harbor as a dump, casting their broken pottery out so he could find it in his own era and put it in his own pockets. But this wasn’t the Cape, or even Massachusetts. His brothers were mostly dead. That is, they were all of them dead but in his head only mostly; they washed up alive every now and then, and Louis would have to ask himself: Is Phillip alive? Is Julius, Sidney?

  Study the beach. Here, half-buried: a tiny terra-cotta cow with its head missing, otherwise intact, plaything for a child dead before the Industrial Revolution. The sea-worn bottom of a bottle that read EDINBU before the fracture. Lots of bits of plate, interesting glaze, violet and coppery brown. All his outgrown fixations had returned to him now that he was old. On an ordinary day in his bedroom at home he might hesitate to reach down for fear of falling over. Not here. He found the pottery and snatched it up. A teapot spout. A cocked handle from just where it had met cup. A round brown crockery seal with a crown and the word FIREPROOF. He thought: that which is fireproof is also waterproof, but he wasn’t sure whether that were true. Good picking anyhow. Some boy was calling far off for his father, “Dad! Dad!” He looked up. He was that father. There was his boy. Boy: a full-grown man, shouldering a plaid bag, standing on the steps that led from the storefronts of the harbor town down to the little beach. On the street above a man in a kilt passed by. A Lady from Hell. What they called the Black Watch. They were in Scotland. His son had brought him here, to this island.