A World Elsewhere

by Wayne Johnston

  Hours, days, weeks that I should have spent with my team of architects and engineers I spent instead walking the barely begun roads and paths of the estate, wondering if there remained any point to Vanderland, if I might not just as well abandon what was now the dream of many.

  Leave it, I told myself, leave the razed landscape, the heaping piles of stones and timber, mounds of stumps and miles of tangled roots, leave it as a monument to failed conviction and the bafflement of imagination.

  I eventually reacquired my belief in Vanderland, reminding myself that I was wholly alone when I first decided to give over my life to the raising up of my utopia, the most distinguished private residence on earth, far from the hurried, frenzied, riotous advance of Manhattan and the other cities of the North.

  So then, to answer your request: I have become accustomed to your absence from my life. Neither of us are who we were when I proposed that you follow me to Vanderland. Your presence now would upset my peace of mind, my hard-won equanimity. I would fret about what might have been, what would have been, but which now can never be.

  I could simply give you some money, enough to allow you to start afresh elsewhere. But I doubt that you could start afresh even were you not weighted down by that millstone of a child. You would ask for more money. You would never stop asking. And your letters alone would remind me of you and might cause me to fret in the very manner that you being here in person would do.

  We have hurt each other too deeply ever to reconcile. It is too late, Landish. You made a vow and must keep it from now on. You must make good on your promise that I would never hear from you again …

  Landish began another letter to Van:

  … Your letter finds us ensconced at Whileaway, which, as you may know, is modelled after the famous Attic on the Seine, perhaps the most architecturally distinctive one-room dwelling in the world, though worthy of at least a tip of the hat are Mudd Hutt Haus on the Rhine and Hovelhaven of East Anglia.

  You once wrote, “What man can claim to be civilized who doesn’t have a second residence?” How right you were we didn’t know until we began to winter in one room and summer in the other, our beloved Idlehours, which each September we must take our leave of to return to the irksome minutiae, the hustle bustle and congestion of “real life” in the adjoining room.

  You need not have gone to the trouble of writing in such detail of your safari and “the most magnificent beasts” whose heads you now have mounted on your wall to one as accustomed as I am to the thrill of bringing down a rabbit.

  As for hobbies, yes, of course, a man must have them, all work and no pay, etc. My avocation is the acquisition of knowledge. I have read that horses are your avocation. To tell you the truth, I read so much about horses that I have no time to ride, race, breed, hunt with or avoid being trampled by them, or run over in the street by the conveyances they pull. In truth, I have yet to pull myself away from reading about horses long enough to look into the purchasing of one, or to consider the question of how to get it up the stairs or decide which of our two rooms would best double as a stable.

  But how few they must be who, from reading about them, know horses as I do, know, for instance, that to horses the avocado is fatally toxic. When they were all but conquered, the Aztecs walked out against the conquistadors with nothing in their hands but avocados …

  “I don’t expect we’ll hear from Van again,” Landish told Deacon.

  Landish drank and began to sing.

  “Shhhh,” Deacon said. “Hogan will tell. The ’Stab will soon be here. They’ll take me back to Cluding Deacon. They’ll take you off to jail.”

  Landish nodded. He could hear Hogan down below, walking about as though ransacking his rooms in search of something that would make the singing stop. But then Landish stamped his feet and began to sing again, banging his fists on the table.

  Deacon threw his arms around his leg.

  “My dear old friend from my dear old days at Princeton. My pal. He said no. I’m glad.”

  “You don’t sound glad,” Deacon said.

  “Well, I am.”

  “You hate your father. I hate mine too.”

  “No, no,” Landish said. “Never say that you hate your father, Deacon. Never. He was a great man. Remember the story of Carson of the Gilbert. Never forget it.”

  “Because it’s true?”

  “That’s right.”

  Carson, long gone before he slid into the sea. Warm and peaceful at the frozen end. Alone but not lonely. Unafraid. Untroubled. No reason to doubt that he would soon see her again. And soon after that their child. A boy perhaps. Perhaps a girl. He would have felt for certain that everyone at home and all the men of his watch were safe and warm like him. No one to look out for now. No reason not to close his eyes. Dark. A pale of light around the rim. Zodiacal. Light from a sun long set, now shining elsewhere. He would not have known the word.

  “My next crossing of the Gulf will be the final one for me. The first for you. But the ninth and last for me.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not coming back. If I ever get away from here, I’m never coming back.”

  “I’m not either.”

  “The first and last crossing for you then.”

  “What will where we go be like?”

  “I don’t know. Nicer than here.”

  But they didn’t go, because they couldn’t.

  The nuns came by more often. They took Deacon aside and asked him if he liked Landish and did Landish treat him well. They took Landish aside and said that he and Deacon could not go on like this forever. Anyway, he had to go to school. If their situation didn’t soon improve, measures would be taken.

  Landish called the two nuns Nun One and Nun Too Soon: Landish said she’d become a nun when someone told her to and she was too young to know she could say no. He said that Nun One was in charge. The other nun was nice. Her face and hands were always red. Landish said she had an after-bath complexion and could have been Deacon’s not-much-older sister. She never piped up except when Nun One told her to. She smiled at the floor.

  Nun Too Soon brought him clothes that were donated to the Church. She carried a bag of them over her shoulder up the stairs and sorted through it while Nun One was talking to Landish. She found him shirts and trousers that fit. Nun One said they were from boys who were younger, but bigger, than him. Hand-me-ups, Landish called them. Nun Too Soon smiled at Deacon as he tried on the shirts and trousers.

  He knew that he must somehow keep the boy away from school. He told the nuns who were nurses too of his Princeton education, going along with their pretence that they never knew he had been to Princeton and didn’t know it was his father who had given to their Church the money that was buying food for them instead of for the boy whose circumstances so concerned them.

  Landish told them he could go on teaching the boy at home, being better educated than anyone in any school who taught the lower forms. Just for a few more years at least, he said, knowing that Nun One would not abide the dragging on forever of this or any other manner of defiance.

  He told them without invoking his last name that the boy would not survive a month, let alone a year, at school. He told them he was far too small, small in a way that no amount of food would fix, helpless in a way that other boys could smell, in a way that would have drawn them to pick on him even if he were twice their size.

  “It’s true,” Nun One said. “I wouldn’t give him a fighting chance against a girl half his age.”

  Nun One allowed that overcrowding was a problem, there being too few schools, so they would let him teach the boy at home until a place for him became available—a place for him to sit or stand, she might as well have said. Landish thought of Deacon cast adrift in such a place, the parentless, adopted son of a Druken who no longer had immunity, a powerless Druken who had no wealth to wield against the fathers of his classmates, the last of a line whose legendary wrath they could now avenge without fear of being blacklisted by the Drukens, a
nd so turned away from every door.

  The nuns who were nurses too began to give them a small amount of money each time they came to visit. They told Landish they would hear about it if he spent it on anything but food. Just before they gave Landish the money envelope, Nun One recited a prayer:

  For every Bane there is a Blessing

  For every Wound a Dressing

  For every Malady and Misery a Cure.

  On one occasion, Landish replied:

  But I think it, Sister, worth confessing—

  For it’s us you are assessing—

  That it’s you we find the hardest to endure.

  “I’m sure, Mr. Druken,” she said, “that you would find it no burden to do without your stipend for a month. But I think the boy would find it burdensome. Tell me, were you thinking of the boy or only of yourself when you made up that hurtful verse? Here is your stipend. I hope you’ll be more cordial the next time we stop by. You’re very clever, Mr. Druken, and you’re only in your twenties, but unless you turn it to some better use, your cleverness may outlive this little boy. You haven’t been poor long enough to truly understand what it means to be poor. But this child has lived in poverty since he was born.”

  Landish knew she was right, knew that he’d not only been hurtful but selfish and reckless to mock Nun One who held Deacon’s fate in her hands.

  A man they nicknamed the “wealth inspector,” of whom Hogan often spoke and who Landish thought meant well, began, at the behest of the nuns, to come by once a month to give them food vouchers and to see if the contents of the attic matched the list of their possessions, which he held in front of him on a clipboard as he walked about, ticking off each item with a pencil. He enumerated every object in the attic as if preparing for an auction. The table and two chairs. The bed. A few dishes and some cutlery. A few books. Gen of Eve and Captain Druken’s hat. Two washtubs.

  His job was to make sure that those to whom he gave vouchers that could be redeemed for food at certain stores had no secret sources of income. Landish told Deacon that some wealth inspectors would quibble over the smallest gift. They would count the number of trout you caught and dock you accordingly. Or the number of blueberries you still had strength enough to pick.

  But their wealth inspector never quibbled. He always made the same joke, pretending that Deacon was an item on his list, opposite whose name there was a box in which he put an X.

  “Just the one Deacon, same as last month?” he would say. “Good. No Deacon deduction then.”

  He sometimes gave Deacon a large candy called a peppermint knob.

  He measured off a wedge of vouchers from the roll he carried in his coat.

  They were required to allow him—or else forfeit their right to vouchers—to search through closets, cupboards, under beds, through bed linen, dresser drawers. He could do anything that might turn up what he referred to as “excess.”

  It was always roughly a month between visits, but they never knew for certain when the wealth inspector might arrive. As soon as you leave, Landish told him, we start roasting legs of lamb that we have hidden beneath the floorboards in the house.

  “Mine is a thankless job,” the wealth inspector said, “but one that I cannot afford to lose. You never give me any trouble, Mr. Druken, but some others, let me tell you.”

  So he did. He told Landish of the others while Deacon sat and listened to them talk. “What I see is what you have,” he said. “I never doubt it but I must go through the motions of making sure. This attic poses no great challenge to a man of my profession.”

  “What with it being so uncluttered,” Landish said, “and having only one porthole we can throw things out of when we hear you coming up the stairs.”

  “I know you like to joke with me,” the wealth inspector said. “I enjoy it, it helps me keep perspective, and I have always done right by the two of you. Truth be told to no one but you and me and the boy, I have sometimes allotted you an extra voucher or two.”

  Landish, well able to imagine the treatment that he received in certain houses—the threats and offers of God only knew what sorts of bribes, the avowals of revenge and of nighttime visits to his house, whose address would have been widely known—felt grateful to him. He wore a wedding ring, no doubt had children of his own of whom he never spoke.

  Landish suspected that no other wealth inspector would omit from his list as valuable an item as Captain Druken’s hat. But their inspector said it should stay in the family of the man whose great accomplishment it symbolized.

  Deacon liked the hat. It was the only new-looking thing they owned. The fur was like snow that never melted and was never spoiled. The wooden box shone like the polished tops of tables he had seen in the windows of a store on Water Street when they walked to the west end to watch the trains come and go. He could see himself in the golden clasps that gleamed like the doorknobs of some houses they passed when they went out for a walk.

  Deacon knew that the hat stood for something and that Landish liked it more than he let on. The hat stood for first, best, perfect. It looked nice and felt nice. It reminded Deacon of a pet dog he had seen a lady holding in her arms in a carriage that went by them on the road the day they went to see the Crosses.

  That winter, they felt so pent up in the attic that they went out in the daytime even in the worst of storms, Deacon astride his neck and hunkered down behind his head like a jockey as Landish barged, waisted, chested on through drifts he couldn’t see and Deacon shouted things he couldn’t hear. Once a storm stopped, the snow was quickly spoiled by walkers and horses and carriages. For a while the snow in the streets looked like mashed potatoes and gravy, but even that never lasted long. The streets got worse, all churned up by wheels and hooves, and what the horses, cows and goats—the “dungsters,” Landish called them—left behind from their behinds.

  Landish told Deacon he was lucky. He didn’t have to walk in it, and his nose was further from the smell of it than other noses were, including Landish’s.

  “To the manure born,” Landish said. “Ordure will out.”

  When they got home, Landish cleaned his boots as best he could before he went indoors. And then he had to climb up to the attic, boots in hand, his socks stuffed in his boots, his bare feet sticking to someone else’s stairs and floors while Deacon walked noisily ahead of him in boots as clean and dry as they were when he went out.

  When it snowed heavily, Landish was hired as one of the Snowmen, the brigade who were paid to shovel snow from the streets. Landish didn’t have a shovel, but he was hired because of the rate at which he shovelled snow, about twice as fast as anyone else. They gave him a shovel, and gave Deacon a spade that was used for digging in confined spaces. A back-breakingly short spade, unless you were the size of Deacon. The other Snowmen didn’t mind Deacon. They joked about how they might shovel him by accident and throw him up on someone’s roof. Deacon picked at the snow with his spade while the men worked around him. Landish looked back now and then to make sure he was keeping up, and was not too cold or tired or getting in the way.

  The Snowmen appeared in streets all over the city once the word went out that men were needed. No one was guaranteed a job. You could have shovelled the streets a hundred times before, but if you were late getting out you might not get hired. Each Snowman was given a piece of paper signed by one of the foremen that showed the exact time that the piece of paper had changed hands. When you brought it back to the foreman, he calculated how long you had been working, how much money or how many food vouchers you were due.

  It wasn’t necessarily true that the bigger the storm, the more money you made, because big storms brought out what Landish called the Snowpokes, who did almost no work and only came out because they wanted to be part of Something Big.

  Flailing shovels were everywhere as the Snowmen loaded wheelbarrows and horse-hauled carts with snow or simply threw it to one side.

  “We can’t have a boy in the middle of that,” one foreman said, and told Landis
h that unless he did something about the boy, he would have to give up his shovel and another man would take his place.

  “We’ll make sure nothing happens to the boy,” the oldest of the Snowmen said, but the foreman said no.

  Landish told Deacon to shovel doorsteps and stay off the streets. Deacon did as Landish said. Most of the time someone came out when he was done and gave him a piece of candy. A man gave him a steaming damper dog, a bun of pan-fried dough smothered in molasses that he quickly ate before it could get cold. He looked up from eating to see Landish smiling at him from among the Snowmen. His hands were cold and sticky when he put his mitts back on.

  He became tired and cold more quickly when he shovelled by himself. Landish told him not to wait until his feet and hands hurt to say that he was cold. When he thought that Landish wasn’t looking, he put his hands in his armpits and stamped his feet. But Landish always saw him and came running and hoisted him on his shoulders. “Time to call it a day,” Landish said.

  He gave the foreman back his shovel and took his pay in coins or vouchers. There was always what Landish called a shovel deduction. Less two vouchers for the shovel. Deacon hated it when, because of him, they had to go home early and Landish made less pay. But he couldn’t help stamping his feet once they got cold and wet. Landish would put him straight in the tub when they got home and examine his fingers and toes.

  “You lasted longer than some of the men,” Landish said.

  “I can stay here in the attic next time,” Deacon said. “Then you can shovel as long as everyone else.”

  “No, I’m not leaving you alone. Especially not at night.”

  “I won’t do anything wrong,” Deacon said. “You used to leave me alone with Lucy and Irene.”

  “I know, but I shouldn’t have. Something might happen downstairs. Or the nuns might come and find you by yourself.”

  “What might happen?”