The Pagan House

by David Flusfeder

  ‘But this is nothing like that. Fay didn’t have pneumonia.’

  ‘Put it this way then. I know there’s doctors who will give the patient an extra dose of morphine to help her on her way, there’s others that won’t. What would you do? Say you’re a doctor and your patient is in awful pain, there’s not long to go, the dying lady wants this over, the family is desperate for the loved one’s suffering to come to an end. If you were a doctor, would you withhold it? I don’t think you would. Not if all hope had gone. I think you’re too kind not to.’

  Edgar brushed aside the flattery. ‘It’s not that simple.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘It can’t be. Not if the doctor’s going to be rewarded when the patient dies.’

  ‘I know there are people who see it like that. I didn’t think you would. I’m not a saint. I like doing what I do, my life is very congenial, but I couldn’t do it unless I was being paid.’

  ‘How many houses do you own?’ Edgar asked.

  ‘I have six.’

  One for each framed photograph on the mantelpiece. For a moment Edgar was silent. He hadn’t been expecting Warren to answer so simply.

  ‘Look. I understand what you’ve been saying. The theory of it makes sense. But let’s talk about the real thing. Fay wasn’t ready to go yet.’

  ‘That’s debatable.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s my point. It’s debatable. You can’t know for certain. Maybe she was feeling awful one day, maybe she was feeling like she wanted it over the day she died, but what if she had improved the next day, found pleasure in things again, was glad to be alive? It would be wrong to deny her that chance.’

  ‘Yes. I can see that.’

  ‘So that’s it, isn’t it? Your time was reached, your two and a half years or whatever, and—pop, bang—she’s gone and you’ve got the house. Don’t tell me that the profit motive isn’t involved. You can’t.’

  ‘I take your point. There may always be doubt. So I make sure that there’s as little doubt as possible. If it’s time to move on, we can talk about that, but you’d never take matters into your own hands.’

  ‘But that’s just what you did! You went ahead and did it. Did you promise Fay she would join her cat and all the saints in the afterlife? She’d get to pick blackberries in heaven with Mary Pagan?’

  ‘The Perfectionists didn’t think that Mary Pagan was in heaven. They had her in Hades, which is the next one along. It was a kind of second martyrdom for her. She had to wait for John Prindle to abolish death on earth before she could move on.’

  ‘How did you do it, Warren? Did Doctor X pass over the morphine?’

  ‘That’s not exactly how it happened.’

  ‘Then tell me. How did it happen?’

  ‘I don’t think you really want to hear.’

  ‘Of course I want to hear! I’ve come all this way just to hear it!’

  ‘And what are you going to do with the information when you have it? Have you thought about that?’

  The Campanile staff had finished their work. The last pizzas and jugs of lemonade had been served. Electa’s brother joined the other restaurateurs. Electa removed her apron and lit a cigarette and sat down at the empty table that had been reserved for the Onyatakas.

  ‘Just tell me, please. How did you kill her?’

  ‘I don’t think in this case I’d use the word “kill”.’ To express the quotation marks around ‘kill’, Warren crooked his fingers in the air and made a double clicking sound. It was the sort of thing that Jeffrey might have done and Edgar hated him for it.

  ‘Well I would. I’m using it now. How did you [click click] “kill” her? Was it morphine?’

  ‘It wasn’t morphine. And it wasn’t me who killed her, if you have to use that word.’

  ‘Well who did then?’

  A very gentle, tender look appeared on Warren’s face. It must be the sort of look that his old ladies adore, registering infinite patience, infinite understanding; it’s the sort of look that saints and redeemers wear in religious paintings: Christ stands at a crossroads and he gazes upon his onlookers with Warrenish love. John Prindle Stone, in infinite loving wisdom, with Warrenish love, gathers his family for a session of Mutual Criticism in the big hall.

  ‘You did, Edgar.’

  Edgar’s hands held still in the disturbed air, mid-drum. He wished he could say something beyond ‘Whaaat?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Warren said.

  Slowly, Edgar made his hands lie flat upon the table. He did not have to accept this. The killer blames the victim. The killer blames the witness. The killer blames everyone but himself.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Edgar said.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Edgar laughed to show he was in control of this situation, that he was unfazed by Warren’s madness—although if he could make this kind of accusation, then what else might he be capable of? The museum director’s boyfriend, startled by Edgar’s laugh, tried to find a way into their conversation, but Guthrie ruthlessly pulled him back with her explanation of the concept of good and bad Onyatakas. The bad Onyatakas are the ones who run the casino, who send their children to private schools, who sit on the board of the Onyataka Nation Enterprise, who make money out of the contracts to build the new villages, the extensions to the casino, the ONE schools and ONE hospitals. The bad Onyatakas have law degrees and Italian suits and PR smiles, protected by foreign money and their lackeys in government. The good Onyatakas live in unimproved trailers, they sing traditional hymns and laments. Guthrie liked the good Onyatakas.

  Was she next? In the old days she had never allowed Warren into her house, probably worried that he would like it too much. Janice wasn’t here. Edgar had assumed that she had let Bob go too, but maybe there was another, darker explanation.

  ‘Go ahead. Tell me how,’ Edgar said, hoping he’d found the right tone of sceptical good humour.

  ‘It was her hair.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘You brushing her hair.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fay had this, I don’t know, you could call it superstition I suppose, but I’m not sure if that’s quite the right word. I’ve come across this sort of thing before. It’s got a little bit of vanity to it and a sense of what is right and proper. I don’t know if elderly men have it, I couldn’t say, I don’t have the experience—but when they’re, you know, approaching their end, there’s a lot of these ladies they want to look just right. And Fay had this thing about her hair, you know.’

  Heart sinking, feeling his face blushing, Edgar mumbled, ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘It wasn’t so much to do with God, although that may have been part of it. But she was concerned with how she would look when she was found. There was a solicitation about it, and a propriety. A little vanity too. And she did believe in an afterlife, it was one of the only things we ever argued about.’

  ‘What else did you argue about?’

  ‘Telling the family about our arrangement. I wanted everything to be known and above board. But Fay, I don’t know, I think she was trying to give her family a chance to behave differently, she didn’t want people to know. I thought that was wrong. Where was I? I’ve lost my train of thought.’

  Edgar shook his head. He wasn’t going to help him.

  ‘Oh that’s right. She wanted to look her best. When she met Death she wanted Death to see her as she saw herself. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘I think so,’ Edgar said, choking back a bitter, raw taste in his throat and wondering, pointlessly, if these were the longest speeches he had heard Warren make.

  ‘So when she died it was important that her hair was right, all neatly brushed and combed, the way she liked it. I’ve seen this with other ladies, with clothes usually, Sunday best. But it got with Fay, this was so important to her, that in some weird way she couldn’t die or wouldn’t die if her hair wasn’t right. Do you follow me?’

  Edgar nodded. He wished he wasn’t, but he was following.
>
  ‘So I used to do this thing in the night. I’d go into her room while she was sleeping and mess up her hair. It was just a precaution at first, which developed into a sort of game. I thought at first it was Fay who was waking up to comb her hair, making it all neat again, that she was playing the same game too, but then it began to feel more important than a game. She was making herself more imminent than she needed to be, brushing her hair, brushing it all neat again, which made it possible for her to pass on, as she would say. So I thought it was a game and I was wrong and I thought it was Fay who was doing it and I was wrong, and usually I’d be able to go in later to mess it up again, but that last night, with the opera and everything, I was distracted, I didn’t check on her like I usually did. But how were you to know? That’s why I wouldn’t say “kill”. That’s why I wouldn’t use that word.’

  Warren’s victory complete, he had the solicitation, as he would call it, not to say anything more. With the same tenderness with which he had been talking, he stacked up the dishes from the table and carried them to the Mansion House kitchen as the rain came.

  9

  A perpetually smiling Onyataka, who is one of the casino managers, has bought the Pagan House.

  Edgar and Electa helped him carry his possessions from where the moving truck had dumped them on the drive. They brought in thrift-store furniture, green plastic sofas with rips in their backs, stacks of tables with chipped wood veneer. They toted boxes of books bought by the yard, laminated posters, smeared with grime and pizza grease, advertising Italian holiday resorts, which used to be on the walls of the Campanile.

  ‘I’ll put these boxes down here, shall I?’

  ‘That’ll be fine. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.’

  ‘Could you give us a couple of hours? I want to sort through a few things.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You might enjoy a meal at the Mansion House some night,’ Edgar said, trying to offer a Warrenish kind of hospitality. ‘The food’s not very good, but it’s got some of the history of the place, and it’ll give you a chance to meet your new neighbours.’

  ‘I’m not intending to live here,’ the Onyataka said. ‘I only bought the house out of spite.’

  Still smiling, he gripped Edgar’s and then Electa’s hand warmly.

  McGwire stood on the lawn looking at his new house with his hands in the trouser pockets of his suit. His grandmother had been a maid at this house, or at one like it, his great-aunt Tara used to keep house here. He had grown up nearby, been allowed to work in construction because Indians are famously good at heights, and even if that were true—which he doubted—he was as much Irish or Scottish as Onyataka, but that didn’t seem to enter the locals’ reckoning: he had been constantly reminded of the Perfectionists’ kindness to his people, the jobs they had given, the alms distributed. And You know, your grandmother used to clean for my mother! As if that was a good thing, something to bring them together, he born into servitude and they into power.

  Jeffrey could argue, and Jeffrey has argued, that ‘Pete’ Pagan Stone was ahead of his time as well as behind it. Every beat of his housemaid’s hand against his reddening quivering rump was a reparation to history. No one believes this, least of all Jeffrey, but the symbol is a powerful one and therefore valid.

  10

  On Edgar’s last day in the Pagan House, Electa helped him to sort through the piles of documents and remnants that Jerome had collected and then abandoned. Warren was gone, back to his friend’s house, and Edgar was looking for at least one souvenir that he would take away with him to London.

  ‘What about this?’ she asked, holding up a photograph of the Perfectionists enjoying their leisure on the south lawn of the Mansion House. They’re playing croquet in straw hats and summer suits. John Prindle Stone stands in profile at the centre of the lawn, holding a mallet ready to address the ball. The other men are looking down at the grass or up at the sky, while all the women are gazing, in passion or hope, at John Prindle Stone.

  ‘Chuck it.’

  Everything rejected was going back into Jerome’s old archive boxes that Edgar would donate to the Mansion House library. Accounts of séances were there, the Perfectionists’ attempts at conference with the immaterial dead; and letters from Mary confessing to doubts and joys; and the record of the breeding programme, almost in its entirety, the carefully tabulated details of the parents’ features and faculties, the children’s physical and spiritual dispositions.

  Dusty from the past, they took a break, sitting on the sun-porch bed that the new owner had consented to keep.

  Electa had always been interested in history. He told her about the breeding programme, which the Perfectionists called stirpiculture.

  ‘You know they did this burning in the 1940s. A respectable little group of Company widows decided to redo the past. We found copies of some of what they burned, and Jerome transcribed them. The dowagers didn’t mind about the breeding programme. There was no shame in it for them. They liked it, it made them feel special, sort of aristocratic, like pedigree dogs. But what they didn’t like was all the sexual stuff. It was a flaw, which they needed to protect John Prindle’s memory from, all the fucking, the ascent in fellowship. They even rewrote things so that George Pagan started Complex Marriage, not John Prindle.’

  He was telling her this in courtship. John Prindle’s sexual energies were his own. He had been bred to them. But she did not take the opportunity to yield to him, to invite him to penetrate her with his spirit. Instead, she told him finally about her history. How her grandparents, tired of social-security food stamps and domestic labour and construction work, had left the reservation and opened the ‘Italian’ restaurant, and somewhere along the way it was chosen to forget that they were Onyataka.

  ‘Wow,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah. Isn’t it terrific? We can play Perfectionists and Indians together.’

  He is ‘Pete’ Pagan Stone’s descendant, she might be Tara’s, and this compels them naught. She does not need to beat him, he does not need to beat her. The secret is not in the soil. That’s not what grew them. And the water tap continues to drip.

  ‘You can come to London with me.’

  ‘I can go to a lot of places. I’m just not sure how.’

  ‘You buy a ticket.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘That’s almost wise, I mean it. But I know one thing, I’m not going anywhere because someone wants me to.’

  ‘Okay. I don’t want you to.’

  ‘Good then. You won’t be disappointed.’

  By the bed, between the headboard and the wall, Edgar pulls out Fay’s last painting, which has been waiting for him, for this unforgetting, ever since she died.

  In a blue field, a horse slowly pulls a plough. Except it is not moving, because movement is impossible in a picture. This is what Edgar will take as his memento of Creek and Vail. Out of all of it, this is what endures: Mary Pagan died, George Pagan died, the Association is gone; the Company, except in Bob’s court case, is finished; the house is sold; and the spirit of Blind Jess is what sustains.

  In a painting, time is abolished. Christ and his disciples stand on a roadside. A horse stands in a field. A ploughman trudges his endless progress. The artist’s mother stares in wonder at her son; even there a miracle is in endless progress, the sunset a perpetual slash of red.

  Edgar didn’t return for the final sessions of the summer school. The last two days went by in the usual delirium of falsely induced hope (most of the students) and the longing to get away (me, and some of the students). He had left a lot of material, or his ‘stuff’, as he had called it, with me. I had no compunction about using it, although that would come later, but I did about keeping it: much of it was hand-or typewritten and I felt fairly sure that what I had was his only copy.

  After reading it and talking with him, I’d become more than interested in his work and—and this seldom necessarily follows—in Edgar. I repackaged it in its padded brown envelope and
called my family to tell them I’d be late coming home and waited for him in the pub on the corner. I had decided that his Warrenish tact would enable him to understand that this would be our meeting-point. It grew dark. The place became full of office workers, then empty of them. The envelope had an address on it, of a street not far away from the college. I went to it.

  The house was part of an Edwardian crescent that, in its solemnity and size, was out of keeping with the rest of that part of Waterloo, which is mostly made up of blocks of flats built to replace tenements and houses that had been flattened by bombs in the war or by the county council in the 1960s. It was on a terrace that curved around a small private park, an enclave that implied gas-lights, mists, a London that has gone. I walked up the stairs to the front door and rang the bell. There was only one bell but all the same I assumed the building was divided into flats because most buildings of this size are. I pictured Edgar living in the basement or on the ground floor in high-ceilinged, weirdly partitioned, brown-carpeted rooms with his ‘friend’, whom I hoped was Electa, having made her escape from Creek and Vail to be with him.

  An elderly lady answered the door and I realized I’d mispictured the whole thing. Just because someone gives you an envelope with an address on it doesn’t mean that he lives at that address.

  – I’m sorry, I said. I think I’ve got the wrong house.

  The lady seemed amused by me. She carried herself very still and very straight. She wore a red knitted cardigan over a pale dress and her eyes and voice were very youthful.

  – Are you looking for someone? she asked.

  – A friend of mine, a sort of friend. He’s called Edgar.

  – You don’t have the wrong house at all. I didn’t think you had. Edgar lives here. Won’t you come in?

  She invited me into what she called the small sitting room, which was an immense room wallpapered in a Liberty pattern and quietly, unobtrusively filled with delicate silver objects. On the wall over the fireplace hung a painting of a ploughman and a horse in a small blue field.