The Pagan House

by David Flusfeder

  George’s violin joins in with John Prindle’s, more roughly played, and Mary’s voice: hymns for the New Jerusalem, borrowed from elsewhere or freshly composed, by Mary Pagan or by Erasmus Hamilton, with his ornamentalist aptitude for rhyme and metaphor. They perform a recital of ‘Jeannette and Jeannot’. George Pagan looks over the music stand to see Abram Carter, his one-time rival, dancing.

  Afterwards, George submits to family embraces as he makes his way outside. Just down the rise from the Mansion House, beside the horse barn, is an untamed meadow, which is Mary Pagan’s favourite spot. He sees his wife, already swelling with child, lying in her place between the cherry trees, flat on the prickly ground, arms stretched out wide, as still as she can make herself, practising not-doing, making herself content just to be. And Mr Pagan, watching unobserved, is envious of her solitude. His old fantasy returns, his hidden special love that he can never share, not with Mary, not even with Mrs Stone. On Mary’s seclude is where he should choose to build his house.

  JEANNETTE AND JEANNOT

  Or, when glory leads the way,

  You’ll be madly rushing on,

  Never thinking, if they kill you,

  That my happiness is gone!

  If you win the day, perhaps

  A General you’ll be;

  Though I’m proud to think of that,

  What will become of me?

  Oh! if I were Queen of France,

  Or, still better, Pope of Rome,

  I’d have no fighting men abroad,

  No weeping maids at home!

  All the world should be at peace;

  Or, if kings must show their might,

  Why, let them who made the quarrels

  Be the only men who fight!

  Yes, let them who made, etc.

  13

  The Wednesday-evening opera rehearsals would always begin in a loose sing-along, the wilder energies of the cast discharged in manic renditions of Motown and Stax and Atlantic, the Supremes, Otis Redding, Sitting on the dock of the bay, watching the tide ro-o-o-ll awayyyyy!, with Warren on piano or pedal-steam organ, pumping out the rhythms and the melody, overseeing it all with a thinly indulgent air, hardly ever wincing.

  ‘Now ladies,’ he would say, judging the moment when they could start in earnest, ‘might we now begin?’

  The disappointed women fetched out their sheet-music. Truth is, they liked this first bit the best, the free-form part of the evening, I was born to love yooooou! or Shake it up baby now twist and SHOUT!, vamping it up, acting to their notions of how showgirls might perform. They liked these communal sing-alongs, even if Marilou Weathers went madly out of tune, unrestrainable and uncontainable, even if two or three of them turned their voices and warmly expressive eyes to Warren, the only man in the room—but not the only male: Husky Marvin was here now, his effortless baritone having proved him a natural for the part of John Prindle Stone. And Edgar was here too, sitting invisibly by the doorway, frozen by the sight and sound of so many passionate unyoked women.

  After the disappointment of their conductor bringing them to only slightly rebellious order, after the songsheets (as they persisted in calling Warren’s tenderly written transcriptions) were brought out rustling on to music stands, after the gossip and high spirits quailed before their leader’s authority, the singers gave enthusiastic, orderly voice.

  It was the fact of re-creation that delighted Warren so, of music returning to where there had been silence, and Warren could put up, almost tirelessly, with all the irritations and the tiresomeness; what had once been community hymns and popular songs and Mary Pagan’s words, her letters and journal entries, black marks fading on a brittling page, had grown into song and it was he who had made it happen.

  Warren had wanted a part for Fay, and that of John Prindle’s sister suggested itself, seen always at committee work, so she wouldn’t even have to stand, and he had told her that her voice was up to this, as indeed it was. But she had refused all entreaties. She brought in refreshment halfway through the rehearsal, and how Warren argued that she shouldn’t—one of only three times Edgar would see them in open disagreement—and not just because of the effort that this cost her. The ensemble disintegrated into chattering neighbourhood hobbyists so readily. And Marvin came unstuck at these interruptions. When he was singing he forgot himself. Standing in a crowded living room with nothing to do, he was stricken, Edgar was pleased to see, by nerves and diffidence. Marvin’s voice was special. It outshone all the others, especially Marilou’s, whose attempts at the title character would have been embarrassing, had she any capacity for self-reflection.

  When they got to the performance—if they got to the performance—then a whole other set of problems and anxieties would expose themselves, but for the moment, this was difficult enough, coaching Marilou in her love duet with young Marvin, Warren trying somehow to instil in her some depth, some bottom. The aria was the most difficult one in the opera because, Warren suspected, it was the only one he had written from scratch himself. Mary has died, and John Prindle has a dream-vision in which the lost Magdalene appears to him, pale but vivacious, obliterating any wall between this life and the next. The way that Marvin and Marilou sang it, John Prindle was possessed of a transcendent humanity, invoking the depths and the stars, while Mary was a shrill creature, more annoying in death than Marilou had made her in life. It had taken a great struggle to persuade Marilou not to dance while she sang.

  ‘It makes me feel, you know, more free.’

  ‘This isn’t the point about you feeling free.’

  ‘Well, my understanding of Mary is that she is a free spirit. And now in death she is, like, released.’

  ‘But it’s his vision. And in his vision she’s neither dancing nor free.’

  ‘Oh, okay,’ she reluctantly said. But she continued to imply the possibilities of freedom by gaily lifting her arms up and down until Warren ordered her to stop doing so.

  Marilou plainly wasn’t up to the job. At the auditions Warren had been fooled by her shallow, slightly eczematic beauty and by her quietly self-contained manner into thinking that not only did she look right for the part but that she must also possess the spirit for it.

  ‘I didn’t realize that it was all to do with the Prozac or the Calmitol or whatever it was she was prescribed,’ he told Fay. ‘I blame her husband. Spiro’s a thug.’

  What Warren had initially taken for character in Marilou was in fact the disembodied slow cloudy panic that the drugs had induced in her. Coming off the medication had done wonders for her, she told him, and any other members of the cast she could get to listen, usually Guthrie. Warren had tried suggesting that maybe she had come off the drugs too quickly. He had even toyed with finding out what drug it was and mickeyfinning it into the sodas she habitually drank, despite the obvious ill-effects on her teeth.

  ‘Or maybe I could get Marvin to sing a bit worse. The disparity between their voices is horrible.’

  But Marvin didn’t know what he was doing any more than Marilou did. He just did it. It was best not to talk to Marvin at all in rehearsals. Once Warren had made an attempt to improve his ‘acting’ and that had done nothing to lessen his wood-puppet demeanour but for the rest of that rehearsal he had hopped about with his eyes tightly closed. Marvin’s was a talent not to be tampered or trifled with.

  Except he was still too good. Standing in the living room of the Pagan House, his large face pitted and pocked with acne, blinking as he often did, he released that effortless voice.

  I saw you in my dream, Mary

  I saw you in my dream.

  And Marilou, giggling (how much caffeine was in her perpetual soda bottle, or was this excess of personality the reason she had been prescribed drugs in the first place?), hurled herself at Warren’s most delicate melody:

  Is this me that you see or just what you want me to be?

  Which should be a profound moment, Mary Pagan punished, even in death, by the part she must play in John Prindle’s grandi
ose imagination, and which instead was performed as if she was a shrilly skittish ghost.

  Warren lifted his hands away from the piano. The singers turned his way.

  ‘You’re windmilling again.’

  ‘I’m what?’

  ‘Doing that flappy thing with your arms. Please don’t.’

  Marilou licked her lower lip. Her mouth was always damp and chafed from her habit of dipping her tongue over her lips. ‘I didn’t realize I was.’

  ‘Well you were. It’s bogus. Please stop it.’

  He had spoken more harshly than he intended. Even Marvin looked hurt on his co-star’s behalf.

  ‘Well what do you want me to do with them then?’

  ‘I don’t want you to do anything. Just keep them at your sides.’

  The cast was splintering, attention turning to Marilou now sobbing: pain and tears in her eyes, a scarecrow lurch from the living room, reproach on the faces of the remainder of the cast.

  ‘Let’s do a run-through of “Jeannette and Jeannot”. Guthrie, can you take the piano?’

  The cumbersome strains of the song that the community had sung on the jetty before Mary Pagan took her final voyage followed Warren out as he went to comfort his star.

  Warren was still so off-kilter at suppertime that he overcooked Edgar’s scrambled eggs.

  ‘It’s one of the things I usually do well,’ he said, pouring a refill of chocolate milk in apology. ‘The trick you see is to cook them very slowly, hardly at all, then it all comes together and you take the pan off the stove and the eggs finish cooking in their own heat. But this …’

  ‘It looks fine. It’s delicious,’ Edgar said.

  ‘Yes, well, that’s very nice of you.’

  ‘Have you thought,’ Fay asked, ‘that Marilou might be in love with you?’

  ‘I can’t really think about how I appear to my cast. I’m far too busy keeping them vaguely on track and in tune.’

  ‘I think it’s the only possible explanation,’ Fay said.

  ‘It’s a grisly thought,’ Warren said, shivering dramatically.

  So grisly that it was Edgar rather than Warren who remembered to remind Fay to take her evening medication.

  14

  Edgar enjoyed vocabulary. In his grandmother’s bathroom, his home from home (and Edgar would forever enjoy a sentimental and erotic attachment to bathrooms, particularly those of old ladies, bottles of lavender water on frosted-glass shelves, dark water rings around wash-basins, handles on the sides of tubs for the elderly and infirm to lift themselves away from the slurpy seduction of gravity, squeezed up tubes of denture-kind toothpaste lying belly up and nearly spent on the soap dish), having teased himself with the memory of sixteen female bottoms in denim, thirty-two breasts swaying under slogan T-shirts and knitted sweaters with cute animal faces, having rubbed himself into pleasure, release, and beyond, Edgar inspected his now shrunken, reddened, chafed penis.

  ‘Somewhat scraggy,’ he said.

  Looking into the mirror, he said,

  ‘Edgar said his penis was somewhat scraggy.’

  And,

  ‘Edgar announced his penis was somewhat scraggy.’

  And,

  ‘Edgar averred that his penis looked somewhat scraggy.’

  Which verbal formula he found pleasing, he then went to work on pitch and delivery,

  ‘Edgah averrrrrred his penis looked somewhat scraaaaaggy.’

  ‘Ed-gah a-verred his pee-nus looked somewhat scraaaaaaaaGGY!’

  His penis did indeed look, as Edgar averred, somewhat scraggy. He’d rubbed it raw on the underside, made the foreskin into a ragged puffball skirt, scrubbed the head swollen. He feared he’d ruined it for ever. He’d done the same with a vintage clockwork tin train that a pre-Jeffrey boyfriend of Mon’s called Rufus had given him for his sixth birthday, and in his pleasure at the toy he’d overused it, given it fresh challenges, sent it over higher and higher precipices, until the train was tinny pieces of rubble and his birthday had hardly started yet and his best thing ever was destroyed.

  ‘Ed-gah a-verred his pee-nus looked somewhat scraggy.’

  Could it be that delicate? Maybe that accounted for the bad moods and bad manners of men. Teachers, bus drivers, dentists, walking around with a ruined flap of gristle between their legs, hating themselves for not having looked after it better. Who could he ask? Warren? His father? Was there a book on penile care and grooming available from the library, from bookshops? Maybe this was the knowledge that Jewish boys were rewarded with on their bar mitzvahs. Were there exercises you could do? He would have to look it up somehow.

  ‘Ed-gah a-verred his pee-nusss looked, somewhat, scrag-gay.’

  He wiped away a final leaking tear of his stuff. Was this it? Over? He hadn’t even reached his prime, and in his eagerness, his stupid impetuous eagerness, he’d spoiled it all for ever.

  ‘Ed-gah a-verred his pee-nusssss looked, somewhat, scrag-gay.’

  And yet he did not feel entirely disconsolate. There was the magic of words that lifted him from the mud of feeling bad, but he was nonetheless almost sure that he hadn’t ruined it, that everything was all right, temporary malfunction only. Looking into the mirror, a boy imagined himself a man, painted a dark moustache under his nose, gave a sneer to his lips, which, when he was a man, would be like the rest of him, muscular and suave and hard. Briskly, he said,

  ‘Edgar averred his—’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Oh? What? Sorry. Nothing.’

  A girl stood in the doorway of the unlocked bathroom. She was not the kind of girl he would normally think of as beautiful, preferring, he would have thought, slim athletic girls with straight black hair who knew how to sneer, but there was something beautiful about her all the same. Her face was freckled and sort of smudgy and she looked like a sleepy plump squirrel who had been disturbed from hibernation; her hair was reddish and her body was a mystery under her bulky sweater and baggy blue jeans that were, excitingly, dirty.

  It was only when she had slipped past him and closed the bathroom door behind her, after allowing him a glimpse of hipbone and baggy elastic of knicker-top as she began pushing her jeans down, that he realized his penis (scraggy) still protruded from his trousers.

  Zipping himself up, he did the stairs in a kind of daze. Fay had company, so Edgar would compose himself by practising his catching on the front lawn.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she said.

  She had found him, as he expected her to, as he had in some respect ordered her to. Edgar tossed the ball against the house wall, reached for it rising on the bounce and palmed it one-handed most nonchalantly.

  ‘Edgar,’ he said suavely. ‘What’s yours?’

  He made the mistake of attempting the nonchalant catch again, and this time gave the throw too much weight, and the ball hurtled in a heart-stopping moment against a downstairs window, which rejected the ball without being affected by it and sent it bouncing past his hand into the density of an overgrown flowerbed.

  ‘Michelle,’ she said.

  She laughed, clearly at him. Usually he didn’t like it when people laughed at him, but with her there didn’t seem to be anything aggressive about the act: it was all an overflow of generous feeling.

  Michelle didn’t offer to help him. He had hoped she might. Edgar on his knees pushed through heavy heads of flowers, monstrous snaky clumps of leaves. He didn’t want to lose this ball. He supposed he would, eventually, because he always did, but it represented London to him and he didn’t know where he could find a replacement, and he certainly couldn’t ruin the impression he was making in this neighbourhood by asking where the nearest toy shop was.

  Maybe though, he thought, scrabbling, cutting his palms on biblical thorns, pricking and burning his knees, everything was different now. Boys lose toys. To be a thing in a boy’s life is a precarious short-lived existence. Boyhood things get ruined and smashed. The train he had been given on his birthday changed direction whenever it en
countered a solid barrier—a chair leg, a boy’s foot, a door—but then he had placed it on top of a table to see if it was as clever with abysses as it was with obstacles, and it had shattered into a hundred tin pieces on the floor and made him cry, and the memory of its fragments still had the sentimental power to arouse in him something stronger than pity. But life now had changed for him, in a qualitative way. A fuzz of hair under his arms, soon the beginning of down on his face. Potency and capacity.

  In the undergrowth, the skin memory of Michelle’s hand brushing against him as she went into the bathroom and he went out, the way she stood with her hands in the pockets of her jeans, these were all stimuli that he responded to manfully with a twitch of blood, a creak of internal hydraulics, a lengthening and consequent hardening of his penis. He had ruined nothing after all. This was a most perfect resource.

  A boy, a man, could go missing for lifetimes in here. He wondered how many gardeners had gone to their deaths in his grandmother’s garden. As he crawled, hands and knees against sharp stony earth, he became fearful of skeleton bones, empty wellington boots in the shrubbery or, worse, their blind rubbery feel against his hands.

  What Edgar found: an unopened packet of birdseed, a crucifix, a tattered leather dog lead and collar, a silk scarf, which the mud brushed off of to reveal as purple, a mulchy cigarette packet that he was disappointed to find empty, because he had contemplated smoking as his next accomplishment, a plastic magnifying-glass, and, penultimately, just past the corpses of two bees curled by each other, something familiar and orange that became more apparent as he dug away at the loose soil. He dug further until Tom the cat lay half disinterred. His glaucomic eyes were open and blanketed with earth. His head lay at a horrible angle showing the wound in his neck that must have killed him, the slash of a kitchen knife, the scythe of a garden trowel. Edgar’s list of suspects shrank to two, the cook Warren, the gardener Jerome. He pushed the earth back over the cat again while avoiding touching its dead body.