For the first time George Pagan is not convinced by John Prindle’s military analogies. Maybe they have always been rhetoric to convince himself with, but his display of suffering might at least suffice to calm George’s own.
‘There is so much connection between us and her that it is not possible for us to be separated from her or lose sight of her.’
Stone’s voice fails him; it was a miracle it endured this far, splintering in a caw of coughing into silence. He looks to Mrs Stone for intervention and she provides it: ‘I have never felt to acknowledge her position as I have today. I never felt so much fellowship with her spirit.’
The children rush in, stop. Impressed by the grief, they modulate their movements, smirk nervously at one another as they fail to look appropriately solemn. They want to show the picture that little Bridie has drawn. A steamship on a river, two spindly smokestacks, a flag at the aft with stripes and as many stars as she can scrupulously place in the square at the top corner, another flag at the bow of a single lopsided blue star, the round faces of passengers at the windows, a single sailboat trailing in the wake, and the words ‘Mary E. Pagan’ neatly printed for perpetuity across the side above the paddle wheel.
But that time has gone, the communitarians fade, death is not overcome, George and Mary Pagan, John Prindle Stone, loyal Harriet, George E. Pagan, Henry Stone Pagan, Aunt Bridie, Wilber and ‘Pete’ and Tara, Mac Pagan, Fay Pagan, her white hair wild, her young face unlined, the overgrown roses planted by Mary Pagan.
23
In the parlour, Warren laid out wine and crackers and cream cheese and scallions. He brought in chairs for the family to sit on and it only became evident after the will had been read that he performed these acts in the role of host rather than servant.
‘We’ve been fucking disinherited,’ Frank said.
‘I don’t think that’s right. There’re the clear bequests to Paul and Michelle,’ Jerome said.
‘What’s Paul going to do at a debating society? She’s laughing at us. We’ll contest it.’
Warren had unobtrusively removed the wine glasses and replaced them with coffee cups. Hardly anyone had been drinking—only Lucille’s was drained, with scarlet, un-Association lipstick kissed to its rim—but now was probably the time to start. Edgar went into the kitchen and took a few nauseous slugs of wine from glasses standing by the sink. He returned to the parlour, giddy and vigilant.
‘The Mansion House does better out of this than we do!’
Jerome preferred to square off the sides of his papers than be provoked to answer.
‘And what’s the deal with this Eddie clause?! That’s a clear sign she’d gone la-la. It’s not even worth paying any attention to this. Come on, Lucille. Kids. We’re getting out of here. All this phoney language, “unto perpetuity” and “save the case of”, it’s self-evident, building in contact between a minor and a faggot. It’s not just mad, it’s fucking immoral. No court will allow it.’
Frank stood up and sat down and stood up again and turned in a circle, knocking over a side-table, which Paul caught reflexively with an outstretched foot, nudging it back into position.
‘Come on. We’re going.’
Michelle giggled. Paul stretched. Lucille looked lavishly the other way.
‘I’m not sure I understand any of this,’ Mon said, which was a good thing to say. It was what Fay would have said had she been in the room, had she been alive.
‘It’s very clear,’ Jerome said. ‘Fay and Warren had a legal arrangement. He cared for her and in return she bequeathed him the house.’
‘It’s robbery!’ Frank said.
‘I’d love to agree with you but I don’t think so. Fay needed constant care, none of her family was able to do the job. She would have had to sell the house to pay for a place in a residential home. Nothing has been lost.’
Edgar examines his enemy. Fay has bequeathed Warren the house. They had an arrangement that came into effect once his amount of care-hours equalled the value of the house. Edgar does not think it a coincidence that the Arrangement came into effect the day she died, the day of the Blackberry Festival.
Edgar is allowed free access to the place throughout his lifetime. Access but not control. His snooker room shall never be built.
‘Hey Eddie, how you feeling?’ Warren says.
‘I’m okay,’ Edgar says.
Michelle, cow-eyed, chews her sleeve. Jeffrey stretches, showing the line of hair that disappears from navel to below waistband. His house has gone, all their houses have gone, except Warren’s.
‘I’m sorry. Excuse me,’ Warren says, ‘but if everyone’s had enough I’ll clear the things away?’
‘So what are you going to do about this?’ Frank says to Jerome. ‘I’m going to contest it even if you’re not.’
‘Well be that as it may I’ve got some news to share. My researches have borne fruit and then some. I’ve discovered absolutely the most fascinating things! You won’t believe this but I’ve unearthed a complete record of the breeding-for-holiness programme! And there’s more! I think there’s a stash of papers that ‘Pete’ Stone saved right here in this very house!’
‘Really. Is that so?’ Lucille says.
Edgar adjusts his walk to match that of Fay’s grievers, slow steps, hands clasped behind his back, chin respectfully lowered, body leaning to the ground as he climbs the rise past the golf course, where portly men with baseball caps shout to each other on the breeze and blister hard low drives careening through the cherry trees over the heads of the mourners, perhaps by chance.
Mon leans on Edgar’s shoulder. One trestle table has been left on the Mansion House lawn from the Blackberry Festival. Flies and wasps buzz around a forgotten jug of lemonade.
‘I expect you’ll have to call off the wedding,’ Edgar said, carefully keeping the triumph out of his voice.
‘I wouldn’t hear of it! That’s not what Fay would have wanted!’
How could his mother presume to know what Fay wanted? Fay wanted people to be kind to one another, for the people she loved to look after each other.
At the graveside, a square-chinned Reverend Mr Prindle made the funeral address and Edgar moved from the family mourners past the Company mourners to the pockets of Creek mourners.
‘I’m sorry about your grandmother,’ Electa said.
‘Thank you,’ Edgar said.
Edgar—hard Edgar, pretending to be the soft, unprotected boy he used to be—took hold of Electa’s waist as if for consolation.
‘If there’s anything I can do …?’ she said.
He gulped bravely and pretended to consider. Death confers privileges. He may ask favours of her now, and she will perform them. ‘Maybe you can come over this evening? It gets kind of creepy there at night.’
‘I was going to be busy tonight. How about tomorrow?’
‘I’m going back home tomorrow. To London.’
She inspected him and made her decision. ‘Okay. I can bring food over. Pizza, maybe.’
‘No no no. Really no. No. Please don’t. We’ve got enough food. Come over later. Thank you.’
It is night-time in the Pagan House, and the house is emptying again, and his father hasn’t come, and won’t, and Electa and Edgar are lying close together, listening to the noises that the house makes, Warren’s footsteps, the low undercurrents of murmur, the sound of Frank and Lucille’s car as it leaves. On the back of Fay’s final picture are hundreds of lines of squiggles, faint blue ink spidering and stuttering across the paper.
‘It looks like code,’ Edgar says.
‘Let me see.’
Electa examines the document. She sits on the bed with her hands supporting her head. She pushes back the flap of hair that has fallen in front of her face.
‘Yeah it is a code. It’s called English. Look. There’s names here, and birthdates I think and suchlike.’
They look at the backs of Fay’s other pictures, which all have the same kind of writing. Edgar touches a page—one
long piece of writing, perhaps impassioned, with no paragraph breaks—where the impressions of the author’s pen have made a stronger mark through time than the thin blue ink.
‘This must be the stuff that Jerome’s been looking for. Do you think they’re important?’
‘What’s important?’ Electa says, as if she actually wants to know and hopes, despite herself, that Edgar might have the answer.
He makes a pile of them for Jerome, except the final painting that Fay gave him, which he looks at before sliding it away between the headboard and the wall. The blue field is occupied at last, by a heavy brown horse that strains sightlessly against the plough it pulls, and sex seems possible now and equally far away.
‘What’s going to happen to the house?’ Electa asks. She had always been inscrutable to him. He is fearful now that the mask is going to slip and reveal her greed.
‘Why? Do you want it too?’ Edgar says.
‘I hope I never own property as long as I live.’
‘Why’s that?’ Edgar asks.
‘It keeps everything fixed. I don’t want my life to be fixed.’
‘No. Me neither. And mine isn’t going to be. Italy though? Wouldn’t you like to have somewhere in Italy?’
‘Why would I want to live in Italy?’
He switches off the bedside light and Edgar and Electa lie in the dark, listening to the sounds, and Edgar wonders if she has fallen asleep, her breathing is so regular. His eyes have adjusted to the shadows now, and he sees the rise of her shoulders, the curve of her brow; he could put a hand out to touch her now, trace the contours of her face. Edgar’s hand moves to just above Electa; gently he disturbs the air over her shoulder; lovingly, tensely, he follows the shape of her body with the flat of his hand a fraction of an inch away.
‘Quit that,’ Electa says.
How Edgar wants only to stay here, like this, with Electa; he would be content not to touch her, just to look is sufficient, in the shadows and moonglow, the soft sound of the breeze in the trees, the nightjars singing, in the brief world they’re making.
24
Warren drove Mon and Jeffrey and Edgar to Syracuse airport in the station-wagon that belonged to him now. They were forced to slow down and halt on the approach to the thruway.
‘What’s going on here? I don’t want to miss our plane!’ Mon said.
Edgar did. Edgar wanted to defer their return as long as he could.
‘I don’t know, some kind of commotion,’ Warren said. ‘I guess we just have to wait it out.’
Warren switched off the ignition and opened his door and squinted to see what was holding up the line of cars waiting to get on to the thruway.
‘I’ll take a look,’ Edgar said.
‘No. Stay here. I don’t want to have to come looking for you when the traffic moves,’ Mon said, but Edgar was gone.
The Indians were building again on the scorched earth of the bingo hall. A banner made from a sheet was hung on sticks across a yellow dredger. An Onyataka Nation Enterprise.
The traffic was being held up by two of the Indian Fighters doing what they did best, lounging on the approach road to the site, drinking beer decanted into Tropicana cartons. Doug Ashton was blocking the path of a cement-mixer trying to get to the site and Sky was haranguing the driver. Edgar’s arrival coincided with the county police sheriff’s car. The sheriff scuffed out a line in the earth to show them where county jurisdiction stopped and Indian land began.
‘We’re going to hit them where it hurts, their wallet,’ Sky said.
‘Just keep it quiet boys, stay docile. We’re not unsympathetic to your cause.’
The cement-mixer trundled through. The traffic started to move again. Warren, always a considerate driver, beeped his horn lightly to bring Edgar back to the car.
THREE
Edgar in Creek and Vail, 2005
1
In a market place in Calcutta a traveler met a talking dog. The world is full of wonder, of glimpses of the infinite, the secret words that Moses was told on Sinai, the occult knowledge that Jesus kept from his disciples.
Notes from Niagara, John Prindle Stone, 1879
On the last day of Complex Marriage, John Prindle Stone was at his cottage in Niagara. The day had been spent proofreading his latest, his last, collection of Home Talks, and drinking the soup and tea that Mrs Stone had prepared to ease his again troubled throat. The affair is over, the grand event, the new dispensation. He walked with ghosts, Mary Pagan, Erasmus Hamilton, even the huckster Abram Carter, whose oily super-abundance of posture and rhetoric had served only to scorn itself and further strengthen John Prindle’s own authority. Of the founding fathers, and mothers, only the Fletchers and Mr and Mrs Stone and Seth Newhouse and poor silently aggrieved George Pagan were left.
The affair is over, worldly principalities have won, the Money-Spirit and the Property-Spirit and the Marriage-Spirit. Manifestations of Special Love have killed the sinless garden, which has been dying for some time, unwatered, unsunned in the waning of his own light, the diminution of his capacity, that had necessitated longer absences from the Association. Once, it was his body that pulled others into the fellowship of the spirit. For too long now, the blessings of the spirit had cloaked, imperfectly, the dissolution of his flesh.
Harriet had waited, attended, throughout, and her vigilance had grown hateful to him. He knew he was in danger of becoming peevish and querulous, an old man yearning for past conquests. Here, on the Canadian border, an Arctic wind drifts in and John Prindle Stone sits in the garden and looks at what grows and wraps a blanket around himself. Meanwhile, at the Mansion House, in summer warmth, members of the Association in its last days make assignations.
Old passions inflame, former loves, lost opportunities and half-forgotten flirtations—eyes across the communal table, the brush of cotton to silk; a hand rests upon a sleeve while picking apples in the orchard or binding copies of the Moralist in the print room. It is the twenty-seventh day of August 1879. On the twenty-ninth, they shall enter a new realm of chastity and marriage, the new Pauline dispensation (I Corinthians 7). John Prindle Stone abolished marriage thirty years ago. Now it will return. He never did abolish death. But for these last days, before couples settle into matrimony, before Babylon inherits the garden that the saints planted, all is banquet. Even leathery old Seth Newhouse, whose ingenious animal traps laid the foundations of the Association’s first prosperity, is the surprising object of several young women’s desires.
Assignations are made and executed, in the garden, the summer-house, in private bedchambers. Discretion, future domestic arrangements are, for these last days, forgotten. They finish early in the factory, in the fields, from which girls return with flowers in their hair, in the workshops and studios. Sam Fletcher, sunny open face, tousled yellow hair, whose muscles have grown hard in his enthusiasm for labour, walks with Libby Stone. George E. Pagan sits in a corner of the library with Abigail Prindle. Henry Pagan Stone walks to the summer-house arm in arm with Mary Newhouse.
On this last marriage supper of the Lamb every dish is free to every guest.
But George Pagan is not occupied with matters amative. In the company of a somewhat dandified architect from Syracuse he walks across recently levelled land that once held an Onyataka shack and after that a horse barn. The architect has his own fancies and designs, which George fails quite to follow. He reiterates his own scheme for the plot, which is where, more than a generation before, the builders of the first Mansion House pitched their tents, where Mary Pagan used to come to lie in long grass, or hold summer lessons with the very children whose own children are now turning away from the light.
‘I do not want these things, Mr Ward Jackson.’
George Pagan’s aged voice appals him, its quavery croak of disability, the dry froggish sound of decay. There are to be no looking-glasses in the Pagan House; instead, portraits of Mary shall reflect to him and his descendants a preferable, if unlived, aspect.
Jackson
Ward Jackson is of a type familiar from pre-Association days. George Pagan had met representatives of the tribe in New York and Boston. Lean, well-born and well-educated, with drawling vowels, the softening touches he employs do not soften him; the French-style cravat, his wistfully drooping moustache, the padded jacket do nothing to smooth out the sharp angles of nose or neck or shoulders. He has been designed with a set-square. Even his brow and jaw seem to obey the perpendicular rather than the curve.
The architect is young and prolific, and establishing an enviable reputation for being a man who gets things done, with some measure of style. But George Pagan does not require turrets or gargoyles or indeed any trappings of the neo-Gothic that Jackson Ward Jackson outlines with such languid enthusiasm on his sketch-pad. Perhaps the house that George Pagan first dreamed of in his blind-horse days is a dull steady house, but that is the house he has chosen to dream of.
Jackson Ward Jackson holds a bony fist to his mouth and coughs in boredom. George Pagan is interested to discover inside himself a mounting irritation that he has not felt since Abram Carter’s funeral. George has been Old Uncle Pagan for the past ten years or so. The name was awarded, in amiable mockery, by younger bloods of the Association, and he has grown into it. His peevishness, which John Prindle unkindly termed the Old-Granny-Spirit, has fallen away. It has taken nearly a lifetime but he has learned humility and quietude.
‘You need not take this commission, Mr Ward Jackson.’
‘No, I need not,’ the architect says.
The day is beautiful. Roses, red, white, yellow, are in full bloom. Frogs croak by the creek. A puppy barks, scattering to wing bluebirds and cardinals. Up the hill, lovers meet in the summer-house; there is nothing unseemly about these last days of Complex Marriage. In innocent hearts the greater innocence that George and Mary and John Prindle built is being passionately demolished.
The Pagan House Page 27
