The Pagan House

by David Flusfeder

  ‘You look so glamorous,’ Fay said.

  ‘Oh, really, no. I got you this,’ Mon said.

  ‘Thank you very much, Monica. You really shouldn’t have,’ Fay said, looking doubtfully at a red and silver box of chocolates.

  ‘And these. But be careful with the little one, it’s quite fragile, I had a nightmare bringing it over and—EDDIE!’

  He had thought to make his appearance quietly, as background. Imprint his presence on his mother’s consciousness without any fuss or show; he had almost managed to persuade himself that she had known he was here all along, that the imaginary travels with his father he had reported on the telephone had been just a game they were playing, understood by both of them without needing to refer to its facticity, like the perfect house they used to invent for themselves to live in in an impossible preferred future. Clearly, though, despite the wildness of his reports, she had believed them all, Dave the inventor and the Amish, the motel forecourts, the episode with the hoodlums and the nun, the monogrammed swimming-pool, all the unlikely hotels and motels and mansions and friends. She lifted her sunglasses to stare at her son.

  ‘Hello,’ Edgar said, with, he thought, an appropriate simplicity.

  He smiled wisely, hoping to imply the peculiar workings of the world, the unlikely events that transpire, the way Providence spins things in unpredictable, perhaps delightful ways—this the joy of being alive, of being a human in the world. It was not a joy that Mon could immediately grasp.

  ‘Excuse us, I just need to have a word with my son.’

  ‘I’ll carry your bags up to your room,’ Warren said.

  ‘That’s so kind of you. Edward, come with me. We need to talk.’

  ‘It’s very nice to see you too,’ Edgar said.

  They sat by the landing window.

  ‘Well?’

  How to go about it?—the mood she was in made her unreceptive to narrative. He would try. ‘I’ve made some discoveries.’

  ‘Edward. Listen. I want to get to the bottom of all this.’

  ‘Do you remember the cat they used to have here?’

  Mon puffed herself up to be her most pompous. ‘I haven’t come all this way to talk about cats.’

  Edgar’s pride shrank beneath his mother’s intransigence. He shook his head.

  ‘Look. Where is your father? It’s very noble of you to try to protect him with your blather but it’s just one of his typical derelictions of duty. Do you even know where he is?’

  ‘I think he might be—’

  ‘Exactly. That’s what I thought.’

  ‘He did come. And we did go off together. You can ask. But we had to come back. Fay got ill. She was in the hospital. Warren was away. And Uncle Frank couldn’t cope. Lucille drinks too much, I’d say, and have you ever seen her in winter? Does she wear the same kinds of things? Doesn’t her cleavage get cold? Fay’s a little better now. I brush her hair. She likes that.’

  ‘Look,’ Mon said. ‘All I know is that it’s awfully inconsiderate to foist yourself on your grandmother like this and we’ll go into that another time, but you’re here and if I’d known that, I’d have—’

  ‘You’d’ve what?’ Edgar coldly asked, furious at the unfairness of his mother’s remarks, foisting himself on his grandmother, when in fact he’d been heroically defending her. The worst thing about unspoken heroism is that you can’t tell anyone about it and if you try to they don’t understand anyway. He felt like crying. He hadn’t felt so alone since, he reflected, the last time he’d seen his mother, which meant that the two of them just did not go together well, in some chemical elemental way.

  ‘Never mind what I’d’ve done. That’s hardly the point. I’m just glad I’m here now. Eddie, this just isn’t funny, you know, and I only hope that when Jeffrey gets here—’

  He had instructed himself not to speak another word. Dumb nobility was the only decent option. But he couldn’t help himself. ‘Jeffrey!’

  The small consolation was that his mother was on the defensive now. She pretended she wasn’t, with little exasperated waves of her hand and a worried crinkling of her brow, but he could see through that.

  ‘Jeffrey!’ he said. ‘Jeffrey. Jeffrey. Jeffrey—’

  ‘I’d really appreciate it if you’d stop saying that.’

  ‘Jeffrey. Jeffrey Jeffrey Jeffrey.’

  ‘Look. I know he brings out the worst in you but when Jeffrey comes I’d like it if you were on best behaviour. I really would. For my sake. Oh Eddie. I’ve missed you I really have.’

  He consented to be hugged by her and tried not to show the pleasure he found in her arms. Warren, wiping his hands, announced that all Mon’s bags were in her room and winked at Edgar as he went down the stairs, elegantly taking them two at a time. Mon went into the room that Frank and Lucille had recently occupied. Edgar followed her in. As he sat on the bed, wondering if this was Lucille’s side, and Mon unpacked her bags, he heard what she called her news. Bashful, blushing, she showed him the silver ring she wore. ‘It’s an engagement ring.’

  He had been making his calls in order, he thought, to protect his father and instead had just given licence to his mother. It was unthinkable and vulgar and obscene and there was no way he was going to tell her anything of what he knew. She was going to marry Jeffrey and that was horrible and it was Edgar’s fault.

  ‘There’ll be some changes of course, at home, but there’s plenty of time to work those out. Where we’re going to live and so forth.’

  To Edgar that felt like the wrong question: it wasn’t where to live, but how.

  ‘And we’ll have a big party. You can be a page boy or something like that.’

  Edgar stared at her. He had lost his mother. He was an orphan.

  ‘So be nice. Jeffrey likes you, he really does, all he wants is to be friends with you. And you know,’ she added, as if this was going to be the clincher, ‘if you knew half the things about him, you’d have a lot more sympathy. He had a very difficult childhood.’

  Edgar blinked at the mad unfairness of this. As Mon broke their embrace to return downstairs to resume her gift-giving, he couldn’t stop himself calling after her, ‘But I’m having my childhood right here and now! And IT’S VERY DIFFICULT INDEED!’

  16

  Jeffrey arrived wearing open-toed sandals, a tartan cap and a yellow Fred Perry shirt under a blue linen suit. He looked even worse in the hairy-toed flesh than he did in Edgar’s memory, which was therefore proved to be generous and charitable.

  ‘Geezah!’ said Jeffrey, blinking in sunlight, adjusting his cap.

  It was reassuring in a grisly sort of way to hear the first London-accented twinge of Jeffrey’s affectation. Edgar hoped he wasn’t becoming sentimental. ‘Jeffrey,’ said Edgar, as coldly as he might.

  Edgar was reassured in the solidity of his feelings to Jeffrey when Mon offered his tour-guide services to show the new arrival around the house and he felt the instant rise of his own proprietorial irritation. He would have hated to think that in this new place and in their new supposed attachment, he and Jeffrey might find a more relaxed footing.

  ‘And that’s one of Bridie Stone’s braidings. The colours have faded of course but they still have a certain sharpness.’

  ‘How’s it all going?’ Jeffrey asked, trying to deflect Edgar from unrelentingly pointing out uninteresting detail after detail.

  ‘I’m making out like a bandit,’ Edgar said. ‘And over there you’ll see some examples of early Association plate. The Commonwealth line, I think you’ll find.’

  ‘And your father? How’s he doing?’

  ‘He’s well. Copasetic. On a clear day if you look out you can see all the way to Onyataka Depot. And that’s the downstairs toilet. It’s got the original plumbing, that’s what Warren says.’

  ‘Does he indeed? And your grandmother? How is she?’

  Here Jeffrey performed the manoeuvre with his voice that most adults used when enquiring after Fay: it went solemn and whispery, with intima
tions of hospital and graveyard.

  ‘She’s okay. She gets by. She’ll outlive us all,’ Edgar said, quoting his father and hoping his less versatile voice could connote the same obvious world-weariness, a readiness to be surprised by the twists and turns of human events, and a lightly displayed love.

  It might not have worked, not all is connoted: Jeffrey looked at him curiously and told him he’d grown a lot in the time he’d been away.

  ‘Yes, I do that. Maybe it’s the sunshine,’ Edgar said, and was pleased to note that his voice at least was becoming reliable, and indisputably male.

  That night they went in so-called celebration to the Campanile, despite the protests of Edgar and the less frenzied ones of Warren, who claimed Fay wasn’t up to a restaurant outing. But Jeffrey and Mon insisted (It’s our treat. It’s the least we can do, you having had Eddie here all this time) and Jerome and Guthrie were invited to join them and Edgar helped Fay to creak herself into the station-wagon.

  They arrived early and they were the only diners, and Mon was the first person he’d heard to pronounce the name of the restaurant in an Italian way. Did she do these things just to embarrass him? Why couldn’t she be content just like everybody else to call it the Camper-Nile, like an Egyptian minibus? It got worse. Mon entertained the table with early anecdotes about Edgar that he could only escape by pretending to go to the toilet but in fact throwing himself on Electa’s mercies.

  ‘Is that your dad?’ Electa said to him, arching an eyebrow towards Jeffrey, which was the single most malicious question she could have asked.

  Edgar had not ordered a first course. He couldn’t afford to. The rest ate pasta and garlic bread and salads with blue-cheese dressing, and Jeffrey treated them to a lecture on Edgar’s ancestor, the poet Pagan Stone.

  ‘He was a great poet,’ Jerome said. ‘His stuff is way too deep for me but that’s what I understand.’

  Jeffrey looked at him with some measure of scorn. Guthrie coughed, and Warren shifted his attention from Fay to her friend, and Edgar watched his grandmother grab it back by wincing with pain, real or affected. Jeffrey lectured, oblivious.

  ‘No he was not a great poet. He was a very mediocre poet, that’s one of the points about him. He was the archetypal mediocre poet of the twentieth century. Which is why he is such a rewarding case to study. He was capable, I grant you, of some startling lines. “The bread is kind.” What’s that about?’

  ‘I like that. It’s nice. I like the idea of kind bread,’ said Fay.

  ‘Yes. I do too,’ said Edgar, pleased to have an opportunity to ally himself with Fay against Jeffrey.

  Warren shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I might be a little slow on the uptake but what does that mean? How can bread be kind?’

  ‘I know what he means by it,’ Fay said.

  ‘And it does you credit,’ said Jeffrey. ‘But all the same Warr’s right, it’s nonsense, reaching for some sort of high demotic diction that he didn’t have the linguistic apparatus to express or even—and here of course we lurch dangerously close to romanticism—the heart to feel. But Stone lived the life of the exemplary twentieth-century poet. He did all the right things, Montparnasse in the thirties, knew the right people, Drunk On Life, that memoir which I’m sure you’re all familiar with … No? Huh. And he was queer of course, but no one knew about that at the time, or hardly anyone, least of all himself. Then, later, back here, he just kept at it, there wasn’t much competition, he became a minor regional figure, churning out his pastoral lyrics. And why do people study him today?’

  Innocent audience that they were, most at the table didn’t realize that this was a rhetorical question. Warren shook his head. Fay looked at Jeffrey in a strange combination of benevolent and alarmed. Guthrie coughed. Jerome tried to answer: ‘Because he was a great—’

  Jeffrey brushed him away with a stuttery imperious wave. ‘I’ll tell you why. Because of his pornography. The Governess’s Rod, it’s on everyone’s list of the major erotic texts. He wrote it—and the later one, Squire Rodman—anonymously, for money, a Parisian lark, Victorian pastiche. But in their own terms they’re certainly more satisfactory aesthetic documents than his so-called serious work. And of course they revealed more of his self than his poetry did, if you’re the kind of reader who looks to touch and shake hands with the author through his words, then the porn’s the stuff for you—although of course he’d prefer you to be touching him with a cane or the bare palm of your hand, and him crouching, the sissy-boy punished for his desires, naked rump in the air, knees hurting on the nursery floor—’

  ‘Jeffrey!’ warned Mon.

  ‘Of course the irony now is that the only reason he’s studied is for his marginal activities. His life’s work, kind bread and all, those interminable lyric cycles, his monumental Syracuse Songs, which, let me tell you, is even more turgid than it sounds, all that’s been pushed to the margins, and the only reason any of us would have heard of him is through his pornography. Well I’m going to change that. Everyone I’ve spoken to in departments is in love with the idea. And you live in his house. It’s wonderful. I’m going to rehabilitate him, reappropriate him. My work is to bring the centre back in from the margins.’

  ‘Why?’ Warren asked doggedly.

  ‘In an act of recusal of course!’ said Jeffrey triumphantly.

  No one dared ask what recusal meant. They gratefully watched Electa advancing with the main courses.

  ‘Pizza sir?’ Electa said.

  ‘Yes, that’s for me,’ Edgar said, trying to sound jaunty and matter-of-fact as the giant steel tray was placed hideously in front of him.

  Eventually they talked of the house again. Jeffrey showed his enthusiasm for the Pagan House, with his swimmy blue eyes blinking behind his glasses and his pale tongue wriggling and his lips splashed red from tomato sauce. Edgar took no part in the conversation and ignored the questions pushed his way, as he sank beneath the pity and astonishment directed at him for his ordeal of pizza.

  Dimly, through endless threads of cheese and glut of dough, Edgar heard Warren observe that recusal was an anagram of secular. Jeffrey, with some spite in his voice, said that was a clever thing to have noticed.

  ‘Warren is very clever,’ Fay said. ‘He’s producing an opera. And writing it.’

  ‘It’s small-potatoes stuff,’ Warren said. ‘Amateur production with all that that implies. It’s not serious, like your work.’

  ‘Oh it’s very serious. It’s really quite beautiful,’ Fay said.

  ‘I’d like to hear about it,’ Jeffrey said reluctantly.

  ‘It’s in disarray,’ Warren said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Fay said. ‘All the best productions have difficult rehearsals. That’s well known.’

  ‘I wish that’s all it is. Marvin has been taken in for questioning by the police. He’s been released but his confidence is fragile at the best of times. Seems a friend of his confessed to burning down the bingo hall. And that’s not all. I don’t have a Mary any more. Marilou has just stopped turning up. Although that might be more good than bad, I don’t know.’

  ‘I know we can find you another Mary,’ Fay said, ‘who I’m sure will be better than Marilou.’

  ‘She could hardly be worse,’ Warren said. ‘But it goes on. I’ve just been told that the Mansion House is double-booked and I’ve got to find another venue.’

  ‘But Warren that’s terrible!’ Fay said.

  ‘Without even a word of warning.’

  ‘Jerry will make sure you get your hall. Won’t you?’

  ‘Will I?’ Jerome asked.

  ‘Of course you will.’

  Jeffrey took back the conversation. He had been listening to other people for longer than made him comfortable. Jeffrey was on a triumphant (he hoped) interview tour of East Coast campuses. Fast-track academic appointments, tenure guaranteed, a research budget. So far, the University of Ottawa was the only one to have offered him a job, but he expected better than that, and this house was the perfect stage f
or his academic performances—perfect, echoed Mon, catlike—he’d maintain an apartment on campus, he supposed, at Brown or Columbia or Cornell, but this would be his residence, where he would compose his intertextual metatextual poly-sexual groundbreaking gravity-defying performance of a book. Here he would retreat to write, to think, to create, sitting in the garden, in a pair of shorts, Birkenstocks, a hat of some kind, possibly straw, bare chest, tanned; and here he would throw the house open for wild transgressive parties. Jeffrey liked this house.

  Edgar chose to walk back from the Campanile. He had wildly hoped for further discussion with Electa, but Electa was unavailable to him, viciously filling baskets with rolls. He tried to go to Dino’s, but Dino’s was closed. A homemade poster filled the door. It pictured a saintly, spotty teenager, half naked, clearly based on Ray Newhouse, who was strapped to an iron cross, while a dark house that might have been intended to be the bingo hall burned beneath his ennobled, tormented body.

  The evening pulled around the house. It was the sort of evening where ghost stories should be told, or confessions made. Edgar sat in his room, staring into the night outside, shadow images on the glass, the consolation of stars.

  He went through his gallery of erotic images. Lisa was there, with her halter-top and ping-pong bat. Marilou Weathers was always a reliable provocation. Electa he had always kept separate, and pure. But he did not always have control over the gallery: one awful night, he had been unable to obliterate the image of his aunt Lucille and cousin Michelle, speculatively naked, playing football. In desperation he had turned to The History of the Onyataka Association that Warren had given him. On a black-and-white page he had found a photograph of a woman who had given him hope. He found qualities of life and possibility in her unsmiling narrow face, her short hair with its sleek centre parting. He had saved an airplane with his capacity. Is it so unlikely that he can keep one woman alive?

  He stepped silently along the corridor. Someone seemed to be drumming in the guest bedroom. The glimpse he caught of Jeffrey’s feet twitching by the bed made Edgar shiver. Fay’s door was ajar. There had been a change in the odour of his grandmother’s room over the past week or so; something bitter-sickly and new rose above the airless scent of ancient unguents. It was like the smell of violet creams melting in the sun.