Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  Standish looked at him in an excellent imitation of genuine wonderment. “Confusion?” After a bit he looked down at the objects in his hands. Thoughtfully he applied jam to the toast.

  “Certainly nothing that should cause you concern, Mr. Standish, for if it were you would not be here today. Butwell, I don’t think I am betraying confidences if I say that we had intimations of a conflict of some kind, though nothing ever seemed positively worrisome to us.”

  “Popham was a very small college,” Standish said. His underarms had become damp. “A small college is like a small town. Especially the English Department of a small college. There’s an unbelievable amount of gossip. In fact, when I arrived, people were still talking about something that had happened thirty years earlier between a student and an English professor named Chester—”

  “I see,” Wall said, smiling at him.

  “What happened was really very simple.” He closed his eyes and remembered how Jean had struggled on the steps to the ordinary little house in Iola, Popham’s larger neighbor, how she had given up on the doorstep when the nurse who was not a nurse had opened the door, how the purity of his hatred had moved him through days when sorrow or love would have killed him. “I saw things clearly,” he said, and cleared his throat. “A little more clearly than most of the other people on the faculty. It was obvious that most people in my department resented me. One man in particular, a false friend, behaved unspeakably. You could use the word betrayal. There was no unpleasantness, of course—”

  “No,” said Wall.

  “—but it just sort of became clearer and clearer that Popham and William Standish were not made for each other.”

  “They were jealous of you?”

  “Right. After a while we all understood that I’d be happier elsewhere. I think I’m still trying to find the right place for me. Zenith is all right, but I can’t spend the rest of my life there.”

  Wall now looked embarrassed to have brought the matter up. “Yes, I see,” he said, deftly separating the smoked fish’s flesh from its picket-like bones. For a time the two men ate their separate meals in silence. When Standish glanced up and caught Wall staring at him, he instantly dropped his eyes.

  “Yes,” Wall said. “Well, it’s of no real importance.”

  “I don’t see how it could be.” Standish felt a flash of hot impatience, another flash of memory too—of standing on a summery street swaddled in a Burberry and hat, looking up at a shaded window on the worst day of his life. “I could say a lot more, you know, but I don’t think—”

  “Nor do I,” Wall said, and the two men finished their breakfasts in a silence Standish attributed to the other man’s tact.

  “So today you begin,” Wall said as they pushed themselves away from the table.

  They walked side by side through the great rooms.

  Wall opened the library doors and for a moment both men stood mutely in the entrance. Like Standish’s bedroom, the library was filled with morning light. The brightness and splendor of the gold trim on the pillars and the furniture seemed utterly fresh in the sunlight, and the long carpet glowed. Standish heard himself sigh.

  “I know,” Wall said. “I feel that way every time I see it.”

  Through a window set between bookcases at the library’s far end, Standish could see Esswood’s terraces falling away into a hazy green distance. Stands of trees that might have been painted by Constable bent toward the pond at the bottom of the terraces. Everything, grass, trees, and pond, looked as if it had just been born. A windmill revolved in slow motion atop a distant hill.

  “Isobel’s never really been taken seriously before,” Wall said. “You’re convinced, are you, that she was a poet of the first rank? She was something other than a normal guest, you know.”

  Standish turned to face him, and the taller man edged sideways.

  “Perhaps it’s the wrong time for this discussion,” Wall said. “Let me show you where the Isobel Standish material is kept.”

  Standish was surprised by the extent of his desire to be left alone. Wall had insulted him twice, obscurely, and with ironic English good manners.

  “It’s in the first recess., straight through and on the right.” He hesitated, as if puzzled by Standish’s sudden diffidence. The “hungry” look was very clear on his face. “Well. I suppose there’s nothing left to do but wish you luck in your research.”

  Standish thanked him.

  “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

  “Fine, good, okay.”

  Wall seemed to decide not to say something that came into his mind. He nodded and walked away with what seemed a deliberate lack of hurry.

  Standish walked around the great room, trying to familiarize himself with the library as a whole. He peeked into the recesses but did not leave the central room until he thought he understood its basic organization.

  The Seneschals had laid down their library in almost geological layers. The first serious accumulation of books seemed to begin in the seventeenth century, with a strong preponderance toward religion. Shelf after shelf had been filled with theology, the Patristic writings in huge leather folios, Greek and Latin commentaries, and church histories. Bound volumes of sermons filled two shelves. In the eighteenth century, the focus of the collection shifted toward politics, geography, and natural history. The only items of literary interest amongst the volumes concerning Antipodean Flora and Parliamentary papers were complete collections of The Spectator, Johnson and Boswell, as well as various editions of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and other Elizabethan dramatists. In the nineteenth century Esswood’s library had nearly doubled in size, and for the first time became primarily concentrated on literature. Standish idled past books by Dickens from Sketches by Boz to The Mystery of Edwin Drood in the part-numbers in which some of them had first appeared, in individual volumes, and in bound sets; past complete collections of Trollope, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Cardinal Newman, Tennyson, Keats, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Browning, Mrs. Gaskell, and the Bronte sisters; past ranks of The Cornhill in brown leather bindings; and Swinburne and Dowson and Oscar Wilde; and Henry James— an astonishing amount of Henry James, which took Standish up to the twentieth-century collection.

  Edith Seneschall took over around the time of The Ambassadors, Standish reckoned, and continued as the main force behind the library until a few years after the publication of The Wasteland and Ulysses. Everything in between, Georgians, Edwardians, Vorticists, Imagists, Futurists, War poets and Modernists, in little magazines, broadsides, pamphlets, chapbooks, every sort of publication possible, was represented as only a passionate collector could manage it. The approximately thirty-five years of Edith’s reign occupied as much shelf space as the whole of the nineteenth century. Afterward, the collection dwindled away to a few almost randomly selected novels—on the library’s last shelves, looking far too contemporary and almost out of place, were books by Auden, Spender, MacNeice, Isherwood, E. F. Benson, P. G. Wodehouse, Waugh, Kingsley Amis. The last few books, thrust in almost carelessly, were Lunch Poems The Tennis Court Oath, and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. The Seneschal children had never seriously tried to augment the Esswood library in the way their ancestors had.

  Standish felt a pure and uncomplicated longing to be like Robert Wall. He yearned to live in this place, unencumbered by any other attachments, forever.

  Maybe he could become Robert Wall. Someone had to care for the library after Wall’s death. Why not a dedicated young American scholar?

  Robert Wall was aptly named: he was a wall.

  Standish walked to the window and looked down over the pond to the fields. The sun had grown higher. Everything before Standish was drenched in warmth and suffused with a relaxed quiet accumulating energy. A woman in a long dress of a pale green stood down at the bottom of the terraces on the far side of the long pond. She must have just emerged from the trees. Her face was a white smudge. Standish saw tension in her posture and the set of her legs and realized that she was angry or distresse
d. She turned from the house and began to pace down the length of the pond. In a moment she had vanished beneath the final terrace.

  Standish leaned forward and touched his forehead against the glass. The woman did not reappear. He supposed that she must have been old Miss Seneschal.

  He left the window and walked between two columns to the first recess.

  It was a wide alcove’ stacked with bookshelves on both sides. The vaulted ceiling in th,e recess was patterned with plaster pineapples, candlesticks, and scrolls. Soft even light filled the recess, illuminating the curved back of brown, green, and yellow boxes made from leather and thick board. Each of these boxes was stamped in gold with a single name.

  For a moment Standish felt almost reverent.

  The names stood like golden statuettes before the material hidden in the boxes. Everything in the boxes was alive because it had not been brought out to dry and harden in the air: what was contained in the boxes stayed alive because it was secret.

  For a second he saw Wall’s shadowy figure poised over an open file box, his face dripping red.

  Then at the end of the third shelf on the right hand side of the recess he saw his own last name stamped on three of the fat file boxes. He went up to the boxes stamped Standish and touched the first of them. It was of sturdy dark green ridged board.

  Standish slid the box, heavy as a carton of bricks, off the shelf.

  He set the box down on top of the desk in the center of the library. Standish lowered himself into the chair and tilted his head and looked up. In the central panel of the vault, surrounded by an oval of ornate white plaster, a stern bearded god leaned out of a whirling storm and leveled his index finger at Standish. Standish swallowed.

  He bent forward and sprung the catch to open the box. Loose sheets of paper immediately spilled out onto the desk. Tiny, impenetrable black handwriting, Isobel’s, covered the pages. Stan-dish’s heart began to thump. His trembling hands caused another waterfall of papers from the box.

  Standish peered at a dense page. Many words and lines had been crossed out, and every inch of the margins had been covered with additions and second thoughts. To Standish it looked very like a page from a manuscript of a novel. In the right-hand margin, encircled by scribbled words, was the number 142. Standish deciphered the words /, project, impossible. Another set of squiggles resolved themselves into immortality.

  Just for a moment Standish felt as if an invisible hand had seized his heart and given it a light but palpable squeeze.

  It is cruel, he read at the bottom of the page. The words that followed leaped into legibility. It is cruel, this bargain we make with the Land. Too cruel, but is not eternity cruel, and immortality, and art? Once chosen, you cannot refuse. Then the writing again dissolved into hieroglyphs and squiggles.

  He grunted and heaved the eighty-pound box from the desk and deposited it on the floor. He reached in and removed a thick handful of papers.

  The box contained as many as eight hundred loose pages and one manila folder. Standish removed the folder and opened it. The top page bore the initials B.P. Beneath them Isobel had written her own initials. The next page was numbered 65, and was no clearer than the other densely scrawled pages in the box.

  Standish sorted through the papers until his stomach growled. Afternoon light filled the library. He looked at his watch and found that it was nearly two. He was hungry again. Samples of Isobel’s tiny crowded writing lay across the desk like fragments of one great sentence fallen from the sky, dropped perhaps by the irritated god— with his frown and his pointing finger he was telling Standish to put all that stuff back together again.

  In the dining room, a golden cover kept a golden plate warm. Golden utensils were placed beside it. A bottle of wine stood in a golden ice bucket filled with cold water and floating chips of ice. Esswood’s invisible servants had declared him a wine drinker. Standish pulled the dripping bottle halfway out of the bucket. Puligny Montrachet, 1972. Presumably that was okay stuff. He raised the cover from the plate and found beneath it, as fragrant as the night before, slices of a loin of veal with morel sauce.

  Standish sat down and saw a note beneath the wineglass.

  Mr. Standish, I may be away from Esswood longer than anticipated. If you find that you require any thing in my absence simply leave a note listing your requirements outside the library door. Other guests have found that this arrangement permits them to work undisturbed.

  Luncheon will be served at approximately one o’clock and dinner is generally around eight.

  Until my return, RW

  After lunch Standish took “his” corridor back to the library and returned to his desk. He felt heavy and slow, but pleasantly numb. Impulsively, he wrote box of paper clips, 3 ballpoint pens, 3 manila folders, 3 notebooks on a sheet of legal paper, tore off the sheet, and carried it through the alabaster pillars to the entrance. He opened the door and set the long yellow sheet on the carpet.

  Back at his desk, he opened the folder and riffled through forty or fifty pages of B.P. The numbers were out of sequence; some pages had no numbers at all. Standish yawned, then amazed himself by farting hugely. The eighteenth-century Seneschal frowned down at him, the dyspeptic god threw a thunderbolt, as Standish fell into sleep as a stone falls down a well.

  Some time later he came to with a pounding in his head and an ache in his bladder. His mouth tasted like a sewer. He stood up shakily, and the stack of papers in the file spilled out of his lap onto the floor. He groaned and bent down to stuff them back into the file. He stood up and moved away from the desk. Now he had a clear view of the window. The shadows of the gnarled trees slanted toward the fields. His watch said that it was four-thirty. Then there was a movement near the trees, and Standish ignored his bladder long enough to move closer to the window. A woman in a soft close-fitting hat and a long pale dress had come out of the trees near the long pond. Around her the hedges and fields sizzled with that same irrational bursting emergy he had sensed earlier. The woman took a step forward, then hesitated and turned around. She looked as if she were arguing with someone who stood hidden in the trees. She looked up at Standish’s window, and he moved back even before he realized that he was frightened. Still holding the folder, he let himself out into the servants’ corridor.

  A huge spiderweb he had broken on his first night fluttered and rippled as he passed through it, sending out loose gray tendrils like fingers. At last Standish burst into his room, grimacing with effort and already unbuckling his belt. He got to the toilet just in time. Panting, he leaned backward and saw the folder on the shelf behind the tub, where he had dropped it. He picked it up and opened it.

  B.P., he thought. He ripped toiled paper from the roll.

  The Birth of the Poet,

  That was it—Standish felt as if he had heard it spoken in Isobel’s own voice. She had written an account of her experiences at Esswood and donated it with the rest of her papers.

  As he washed his hands he decided to read the memoir at night. It would be an invaluable backdrop to the poems. Then it seemed to him that the memoir too ought to be publishable. He foresaw another lengthy introduction, another crucial book, Isobel Standish at Esswood: A Poet at the Crossroads.

  Standish trotted down the curving staircase.

  This discovery meant that he would need much more than three weeks at Esswood. It would take another month to work his way through the hundreds of pages of Isobel’s handwriting. At the same time, he had to conduct a thorough investigation of her poetry. He wondered if Wall would give him another month. If he presented a well-argued case which alluded to the advantages to Esswood itself in publicizing Isobel’s account of her productive time here…And Jean would forgive him taking the extra time as long as he got back before she gave birth. A small, almost invisible flare of anger and humiliation went off in his chest at the thought of his wife. He imagined fat Jean squatting to give birth: blood and gore flopping out of her along with the child. Standish shook his hand at the flapping ten
drils of the spiderweb, dismissing these feelings as well as whatever lay behind them—he had no time now for destructive emotions. The stairs wound around and around, going farther and farther down, far past the point where he thought they ended. At length he reached the bottom of the stairs and rushed the short distance down the corridor and let himself in.

  He nearly sighed with pleasure. The desk was heaped with papers, the columns stood guard, the beautiful rows of books lined the walls. The portrait commanded him to sit and work. Then he remembered Wall’s note and his response to it, and turned to the main entrance.

  In a straight line on the carpet outside the doors, arranged like the corpses of mice brought in by a loving cat, were a box of number-one paper clips, three yellow Bic pens, three stenographic notebooks, and three manila folders.

  SEVEN

  The low sun was still visible when Standish had finished separating what appeared to be drafts of poems from the far more numerous pages of prose. The next day he could sort through the second box, and if he had time, begin to divide the pages of poetry into published and unpublished; after dinner tonight he could begin paginating and reading the memoir.

  There was an hour before dinner. He decided to walk down the terraces and enjoy the hazy light and long shadows.

  At the end of the screened passage he let himself out onto the wide terrace at the top of the marble stairs and inhaled air so sweet and heavy with fragrance that it was like a drug. No wonder literary Londoners had so readily trekked to Beaswick: after the smoky London of the early twentieth century, Esswood would have seemed a paradise. Standish went down the steps, his knees stiff from the day behind his desk. Four steps from the bottom he looked back up at the house. Americans always take a little time to learn our system.