The Pagan House

by David Flusfeder

  The sink was deep white. Like the bathtub, it perched on little bronze scaled feet. Edgar switched off his music and looked sternly into the mirror, pressing his chin down against his chest, crinkling his forehead to squash his eyebrows together, and said, most disapprovingly, ‘Edgar. Ed-gah! Ed-GAH! I’m surprised at you.’ Then he rolled his eyes and held his breath until he had to let it go.

  ‘Edward!’

  ‘Yes. Yes yes yes.’

  Preparing for his return into the social world, the gentleman at his toilet washed his hands, failed to arch a solitary eyebrow, muttered in his fruitiest tone of warm approbation, ‘Ed-gaah’, and vacated the bathroom with his hands demurely in front of his groin, which was when he realized he’d neglected to zip himself back up, and hurriedly did so.

  ‘Did you get lost in there?’ Mon said.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Edgar, with one hand in a trouser pocket discreetly wiping down a damp patch on his thigh.

  ‘Go to the dining room. The guests will be here soon.’

  Waiting for their guests, they sat on high-backed chairs. Mon checked the contents of her handbag once and then again while she told Warren that after what had happened on the 747 she didn’t know how she would ever be able to fly again, which Edgar thought was a disrespectful way of thinking about the experience. Fay tried to explain to Edgar about how the state governor was doing such a poor job—The unemployment rate in this region is scandalous!—and then she and Warren talked about the faucet in the bathroom and time dripped slowly away. Edgar wondered if this was what the prelude to a funeral felt like. He had not been allowed his Walkman. He sat, as slouchily as he could get away with, then got up to read the mottoes and legends in the faded silk tapestries on the walls (‘Braidings, they’re called braidings,’ Mon corrected him when dutifully he admired them to his grandmother)—Followed her far and lone/The ways that we have gone braided in gold below a purple tree, beneath which some kind of Oriental lady seemed to be pursued by a sheep and a lamb, and a town scene, of church streets and high-necked pedestrians following an alarming little black terrier, See the gay people/Flaunting like flags/Belle in the steeple/Sky all in rags. When he had tired of that, he invented horrific injuries to the faces in the photographs on the mantelpiece: the square-faced bearded men acquired scything scars, and arrows through their eyes; the still women with their centre partings died horrific deaths with their heads split open by a vengeful woodsman’s axe. And time dripped, and Mon told him to come back to the table and Edgar found himself sitting straighter than he would have chosen, and he was far too enervated even to drum.

  Fay had said it might be an amusing evening. Edgar doubted this, but the first guests to arrive did seem built for amusement. Company Bob was a vice-president of the Company or a vice-vice-president, rubicund like a clown, loud and aggressively amiable in a checked shirt that clashed madly with his ferocious skin. His wife was a plump woman with red hair who had tented herself inside a white dress. She stood impatiently at the sideboard that held the glasses and wine bottles until Warren poured her a drink, whereupon she sat at the table guarding herself with a quietly angry dignity that seemed there just to be lost.

  ‘We’re cousins,’ Company Bob told Edgar. ‘Through the Pagan side. And I think through the Stone side also. So’s Janice.’

  ‘Who’s Janice?’ Edgar asked.

  ‘I’m Janice,’ Mrs Company Bob said.

  Guthrie, who was the next to arrive, was nicer. She was a spry white-haired woman with brilliant blue eyes that she enjoyed shining on people with an intimately enthusiastic attention. She kissed Fay and told the company that this was my very best friend! Guthrie questioned Edgar on the length of his stay and held his wrists to emphasize the shame of him not staying longer, and Edgar responded to her touch with a stiffening that indeed shamed him, but which was nothing compared to his response to Marilou Weathers. Marilou Weathers had wide eyes and a prettily thin chapped mouth and pale freckled skin that was redder around her eyes and mouth, and brown hair pulled back into a pony-tail. She entered the room, giggling timidly behind her husband, whom everyone called Coach. Edgar arranged his napkin over his lap and dared to look at her again. Marilou Weathers was tall and wore a big green jumper with the face of a dog embroidered on the front; its eyes protruded by her breasts, its red mouth hanging appealingly open. Edgar had to look away and inadvertently caught the attention of Coach Weathers, who had a tanned skin and sharp features and carried himself like an off-duty soldier, vigilant and coiled. He wore sunglasses and a peaked cap and baggy shorts and a faded college sweatshirt and spoke the fewest words required of him, as if life were a constant test behind enemy lines. His first name was Spiro. Edgar immediately admired and feared him.

  ‘I got to tell you Warren,’ Company Bob said, ‘we’re all totally behind this musical of yours.’ The way he said this made Edgar suspect that one of the secrets of adult life was that everyone said the reverse of what they really thought.

  ‘It’s an opera,’ Marilou said.

  ‘That’s what I mean. And you’ve got permission to put it on in the Mansion House?’

  ‘That’s the plan.’

  ‘I love history, don’t you?’ Guthrie said to Mon.

  ‘Just adore it,’ Mon said, making Edgar wince, but the sarcasm seemed to pass everyone else by.

  ‘Bob sometimes says that this place has got too much history,’ Janice said.

  ‘You can never have too much history,’ Mon said.

  ‘That’s exactly what I say,’ said Guthrie.

  ‘Bob doesn’t agree,’ Janice said.

  ‘It’s not that I disagree,’ the vice-president said, ‘just that you have to separate the business and the personal. All that nineteenth-century lovey-dovey business doesn’t sit well with the issues of corporate life.’

  ‘What’s the lovey-dovey business?’ Edgar asked, getting interested, his imagination providing an orgy of unlikely images that involved office desks on which were mounted bizarre contraptions that screwed into the barrels of telephone receivers.

  ‘What are the issues of corporate life?’ Mon annoyingly asked.

  ‘Leadership, responsibility, profitability,’ Bob said promptly. He then went through the flatware and silverware on the table, lifting up each knife, fork, spoon, plate and bowl and reporting its provenance. ‘Oh, and this is a very nice piece,’ he said, weighing a sauce-boat in his hand, which was soon splashed with Warren’s béarnaise sauce. ‘This is the Commonwealth line, isn’t it? Nineteen fifty or ’fifty-one or thereabouts.’

  ‘That’s really, really impressive,’ Marilou said, licking and then touching her chapped lips, as if she was reminding herself of a secret.

  ‘Oh I don’t know,’ Bob said modestly.

  ‘That to me is history also,’ Janice said.

  ‘It’s the history of the Company, not its pre-history. Whenever we have a new employee I send them down to the display room. I say, look at our product lines, memorize them. We make what we sell and we sell what we make. That’s how business works. The shareholders are very happy. And that’s what I try to explain to Malcolm.’

  ‘The new CEO’s an outsider,’ Janice said to Edgar, who was wondering if pretending to faint was a viable way out of this occasion.

  ‘That’s history for you,’ Mon was saying.

  ‘That’s what I say,’ Company Bob said. ‘Took someone like Mac to bring the whole shooting-match into the twentieth century.’ He turned to Edgar. ‘Your granddad was certainly a character. The stories I could tell you about him!’

  ‘I’ve had quite enough of Mac stories,’ Fay said.

  ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Guthrie said, patting her best friend’s hand. ‘But it’s true that Mac was such a larger than life character. Mike is just like him in some ways. Do you remember that time on Marble Hill—’

  ‘This meat’s very good, Warren. It’s extremely tender,’ Fay said.

  ‘The soup was good also,’ Marilou said.
/>   ‘I’ll give you the recipe,’ Warren said.

  ‘I think she knows how to cook succotash,’ said Janice.

  Everyone else had finished the main course. Edgar attempted a larger mouthful of meat in an effort to clear his unfinishable plate. But it was far too ambitious a portion and took an eternity to chew through and he was sure his cheeks were bulging like a cartoon squirrel’s. Warren and then Fay, kindly, to include him, asked him questions and all he could do was mumble and retch.

  ‘Don’t ever lose that accent. It’s terrific!’ Bob said.

  Plates departed and bowls arrived, all identified by Bob with their brand name and year of manufacture. Bob drank more beer. Guthrie drank more wine and became flushed and talkative. Janice drank more wine and grew sober and quiet. Fay was engaged in a political debate with Company Bob. They were arguing about the Mansion House. Bob had suggested that the Mansion House should be sold off and little pinpricks of deep red appeared on Fay’s cheeks. Edgar had not seen his grandmother angry before. Her voice became stern. ‘If it wasn’t for the Mansion House then this could be anywhere else.’

  ‘Market forces. Place got to pay its way. Here’s a building where all the guest rooms are empty, a few old fellows living upstairs on peppercorn rent, and no one visits the museum. If we ran the Company like that we’d soon all be in the street. Got to remember who pays the piper. It’s the Company that keeps everything else afloat.’

  ‘Not market forces. Absolutely not. Where did the Company come from?’

  ‘Ancient history, Fay.’

  ‘That’s not the point. People around here used to live differently. They chose to live differently. It may not have lasted for ever and it didn’t bring heaven on earth but it was a very decent time, people looked after one other, worked with one other. It doesn’t matter so much what they believed but what they did, and what they did is find a new way of living.’

  The conversation went on and others joined in and Edgar stopped being able to follow what they were talking about but he was sure that what Fay was saying was decent and right, as Bob’s skin became even redder than before and he kept saying, ‘That’s all very well but who’s going to pay for it?’ and ‘That sounds a lot like Communism to me and we know what happened to that!’ The debate collapsed under the force of Bob’s repetitions and the table returned to its separate groups. Mon flirted with Coach Weathers, who uncoiled a little under her attentions. Every time he looked to check what his wife was doing, Marilou Weathers held a spoon (1920s, Presidential line) defensively in front of her face.

  ‘So has he got you into this musical of his?’ Bob said to Fay, reaching for a conciliatory conversation. ‘He seems to’ve corralled half the women in town.’

  Fay shook her head and slowly focused on Bob’s redness. ‘I don’t really have the voice for it.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Warren said.

  ‘You’ve got a much better voice than I do!’ Guthrie said.

  ‘You’re not one of his victims too, are you?’ Bob asked, grinning at Warren as if he might be making a joke.

  ‘Harriet Stone at your service.’

  ‘I’m surprised at that,’ Bob said. ‘I’d’ve thought your hands would be full with the Blackberry Festival and whatnot. Which seems to be a much better use of your time. That to me is good history.’

  ‘Bob likes to divide things into good and bad,’ Janice said.

  When a knock came on the front door, Warren sighed. ‘We know who that’ll be, don’t we?’ he said.

  ‘You’re too hard on Jerry. You shouldn’t be,’ Fay said.

  ‘Jerry?’ said Bob. ‘Jerome Prindle? Is he ambulatory?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ Warren said. ‘He’s wooing Fay.’

  ‘Warren!’ Fay said, and the blush on her cheek could have signified shyness or embarrassment or pleasure, or just the spreading of the rash that Edgar guiltily associated with the disinfectant-doused flannel he had used to clean the bathroom.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the wreckage of the man in the doorway said. ‘I didn’t know you had company. I brought a seed-cake. I’ll go.’

  ‘You will not. You’ll sit down and join us,’ Fay said.

  The latest guest was an old man, who seemed to have outlived his body and his clothes. His skin was mottled red and white, his trousers and shirt were brown and stained. His face was decorated with patches of stubble. His mouth hung open, showing his tongue, which was the same pale colour as his lips. He watched Fay through blue eyes that were glazed and swimming, while his hands clawed slowly at the tablecloth. He sat between Mon and Coach Spiro, who both angled their chairs away from him.

  ‘Tom’s looking well,’ Jerome said.

  ‘He’s on a new diet,’ Fay said. ‘Dry food only. It seems to have cleared up some of his catarrh. But he sleeps all of the time. Sometimes I think it would be a mercy—’

  Warren interrupted: ‘Maybe Ed should be trying out for your soccer team.’

  ‘Are you a player?’ Coach asked, to which Edgar could only shake his head for an answer.

  ‘He’s very good at it,’ Mon brazenly lied, in misjudged loyalty.

  ‘I’m really not,’ Edgar managed to say.

  ‘Better to underestimate yourself than the other. Marilou for example thinks she can sing,’ Coach said accusingly at Warren.

  ‘I’m sure she’s going to make an adorable Mary Pagan,’ Guthrie said.

  ‘Do we need that stuff, is what I’m asking,’ Bob said. ‘It’s all kind of weird to my way of thinking.’

  ‘She was a fascinating character,’ Warren said.

  ‘A little too fascinating, if you know what I mean. I think those dowagers from the forties had the right idea.’

  ‘What they did was awful,’ Fay said. ‘Pete was so furious.’

  ‘Yeah. Well. Pete,’ Bob said, winking at Coach.

  ‘He was a good man,’ Jerome said.

  ‘He was a very good man,’ Fay said.

  ‘I guess. But I wouldn’t have had Spanky Pete be my judge of right and wrong. You know what I’m saying? Those ladies were protecting the families and the Company. That’s not so awful in my book. But tell me, who’s playing my wife’s most illustrious ancestor?’

  ‘He still can’t find a John Prindle Stone,’ Fay said. ‘Who would have thought it so difficult to find a good baritone?’

  ‘We’re running out of time,’ Warren said.

  ‘I hope I’ll still be around to see it,’ Fay said, with a surprising cheerfulness.

  ‘Is it only me or does this cream taste sour?’ said Janice.

  ‘It’s crème fraîche,’ Warren said.

  ‘That’s what I’m asking and I don’t think it is.’

  ‘What I’d absolutely love to know,’ Marilou said fascinatingly, leaning towards Warren, the rough shoulder of her sweater scratching Edgar’s arm, ‘is Mary’s motivation. Do you think much of it is religious or does it all come down to love?’

  ‘What on earth has happened to the azalea?’ Jerome demanded to know.

  Warren was being besieged on all sides. Janice was waving her spoon (Community plate, 1933) of suspicious cream. Marilou had rested her chin on her fist and was nodding encouragingly to pull Warren’s required response out of him. Edgar decided to help. ‘We saw some Indians yesterday,’ he said.

  After watching the drip of cream from Janice’s spoon on to the table, Warren, in reciprocation, said, helpfully, ‘The bingo hall.’

  ‘It’s ironic, isn’t it?’ Fay said. ‘They’re making these little amounts of money from gambling when they’re such an unlucky people. Warren’s thinking of donating the profits from the opera to help them.’

  ‘That’s a lovely idea. I think the Indians are tragic,’ Marilou said. ‘In the true sense of the word.’

  ‘Talk of profits is somewhat optimistic,’ Warren said, ‘but we’re going to try to make some kind of donation to their education fund.’

  ‘Yeah right. Wigwam College,’ Bob said.

/>   ‘I don’t think that gives entirely the right impression to our visitors,’ Guthrie said.

  ‘With all due respect, I don’t think our visitors will ever understand this place until they’ve been here as long as I have. But the Onyatakas have got to face up to things. The trouble with history, it’s like everything else, there’s winners and losers and the Indians are the losers. It’s unfortunate, but if it wasn’t for rain you wouldn’t have rainbows, you know what I’m saying?’

  ‘Now they’re talking about building a casino,’ Guthrie said.

  ‘Pie in the sky,’ Bob said.

  ‘Bob says it’s never going to happen,’ Janice said.

  ‘It never is going to happen,’ Bob said. ‘The Onyatakas think it’s going to be a licence to print money, but they’ll never get it together. They never do. I remember something really choice that Mac said to me once. There was this Onyataka who worked as a gardener at the Mansion House—do you remember him, Fay? Kind of scruffy fellow, wore a straw hat. Liked his booze.’

  ‘His name was Ronald,’ Jerome said.

  ‘That’s right, I think it was. He used to drive this beat-up tractor really super slow around the grounds. And I remember Mac saying to me, “There’s progress for you, look at Ronald, a hundred years ago his ancestors were eating each other and here he is now, master of the internal combustion engine.” You got to laugh.’