“Should’ve stood up for the draft when they first asked me,” he would say, settling in on the sofa with a beer and the TV remote. “They get pissed off if you don’t take ‘em up right off the bat.”
We were meant to assume, I think, that he meant the NFL, but Aengus always insisted that he was referring to a team of draft horses. He said it aloud to Goose once, alas, and so we did not, as Goose would put it, hang out much with them. I missed my sister. Sometimes we met in Atlanta for lunch, but not often.
I thought that they would be leaving Lytton today as soon as Lily felt they could decently do so. Then there would be only my mother there. That fact seemed somehow skewed and wrong to me. For the first time I realized that for a long time I had thought of River House as Grand’s house.
Before we left Bell’s Ferry Road, Aengus had asked me if I’d like to go back down to Sea Island.
“We’ve technically got six more days,” he said. “I hate to do you out of a honeymoon. It seems like a bad omen.”
“I couldn’t go cavort around on a honeymoon with Grand just dead,” I said. “Let’s just go back to school and see what we need to do next. I’d say we ought to go straight to work, but… now there’s the house.”
“Now there’s the house,” he echoed.
“I think I have to live in it, Aengus.”
“Of course we’re going to live in it,” he said. “I could never have given you anything like that. It’ll be a wonderful life. I can teach at any one of the Atlanta colleges and you could have your choice of kindergartens. Or maybe just write your stories, if you want to. It’s a dream come true. I always knew you’d bring me my dreams.”
“It may not be as easy as all that,” I said. “You can’t just walk into a school and say, ‘I want to teach here.’ Neither can I, for that matter.”
“Wanna bet?” He smiled. And at that moment, drunk on my stone house with blue doors and the whitewater river below it, I wouldn’t have bet against Aengus for anything in the world.
Our life on the Mountain was in order. We had rented a top-floor apartment in a house in the village where we would live for the first few months, while we decided what sort of life we wanted to make in the Domain. His classes on the Irish Celts had blossomed into a full series of mythologies among the world’s literatures, though none of them laid hold of him like the Celts did.
“It’s because they ran around naked and lopped off everybody’s heads,” I said. “I know you. You’d be naked as a jaybird all the time if you could get away with it, and boy, would you love to lop heads!”
“Starting with Goose’s, had he a neck, but alas,” Aengus said, “he has none. No, the main reason I love the Celts is that they figured out how to live forever. They didn’t have to grow old. They didn’t have to die.”
“Why aren’t there more of them, then?”
“Well, it was a little tricky.” He grinned. “There’s supposed to be an old land called Tir Na Nog. You lived forever there. Only Celts allowed, I’m guessing. I don’t know how you got there. Nothing I’ve read about them has mentioned it, except one book, and that was in passing. I’m determined to find out, though.”
So Aengus was well set to continue in the Domain, and I had landed a part-time job working with kindergartners in a small private school just off campus. Our apartment windows overlooked the chapel and across to the Steep, and when we looked out we saw what we had seen for years: flying academic gowns open over blue jeans and tee shirts; gray stone; green treetops; cars and the occasional motorcycle; every sort of flower that bloomed in the southern mountains. My kindergarten classroom opened into the chapel close, and Aengus, who had the run of the English department now, saw nothing out his various windows that did not charm the eye. I could have wished for nothing more, wished to live no other place but with Aengus in the Domain.
But now there was the house… my house… and I would live my life in it. Of that there was no question. Aengus had none, either.
We only slept three nights in our apartment on the Mountain. It only took Aengus that long to talk with Vice-Chancellor Martinson, make a few phone calls to people he knew who might be suitable for his post, collect his belongings from hither and yon about the campus, load up his old Volvo station wagon, and park the car the last night with its nose pointing down the Mountain toward Atlanta. On that last night we made love once more in the little circle of birches on the Steep, as well as in the alien sheets of our newly rented bed, and the next morning before seven we were passing under the stone arch that read The Domain, this time going away.
“Will you miss it?” I said, tears thick in my throat.
“Of course I’ll miss it. It gave me the best things I’ll ever have in my life. But I’m taking them with me.”
I said no more, tipping my head back to look at the last letters as we left them behind, and then turned my eyes forward, toward the road down the mountain toward Atlanta. I did not look back.
It was a long time before I was on the Mountain again. That mountain, anyway.
We drove straight to the house on Bell’s Ferry Road. I had not gone back to Lytton to collect any more of my things. Lily had said she would bring them up before she and Goose left for home; she wanted to see the house anyway. She said she figured it must be the house to end all houses, since Mother would not discuss it.
“She got a bundle from Grand,” Lily said discontentedly. “She could buy herself any house she wanted. I don’t know why she’s so bent out of shape about that one.”
“Because she couldn’t buy this one,” I said, knowing I was right but not happy in the knowing. There would always be a rift between my mother and me; I knew that, too. Partly perhaps because I had so failed some of her expectations and so exceeded others. Lily had derailed herself off my mother’s track earlier on, by marrying Goose. Mother had been spared a son-in-law named Abrams, but I, too, jumped off the track, and into the arms of an Irish O’Neill, and had been married to him by a witch to boot. Mother wasn’t long in picking that up. Of it she would only say, “Well, of course, you’re not legally married. Everybody knows that. Perhaps you don’t care, but I have taken my share of persecution because of it.”
“What do you suppose people do?” I said. “Leave broomsticks on the front porch?”
“We really should give her a black cat,” Aengus said.
When we reached the Bell’s Ferry house from Sewanee, Aengus pulled the Volvo up next to the front steps on the circular drive and we unpacked it and set our worldly possessions on the small portico. Its pillars were slender and painted Norman blue to match the other woodwork, and there were two stone benches flanking the door. Terra-cotta pots of ivy sat beside each. Grand had had someone hang ferns on either side of the door. The afternoon light filtered through the latticed roof and the overhanging trees gave the entrance a subaqueous feeling, as though we were entering an underwater chamber. When the big door swung open, Aengus picked me up and carried me over the threshold into our new house.
Inside, every room glowed with greenish summer light. It pooled in from banks of high windows set over the large, wide bayed ones in the two front rooms. At the back of the house French doors opened onto a broad stone veranda with faded sail red awnings over it, and trellises thick with blooming roses at each end. They were small, old-fashioned, and intensely scarlet. Later I learned they were called Paul Scarlets, and knew in my heart that Grand had had something to do with that. An extra touch of enchantment, to supplement all the others. The whole house spoke of Grand. It did not disturb me. We spoke in one tongue, Grand and I.
The large living room was stucco, with a wall of the outside stone that held a huge fireplace. The ceiling was beamed and the windows cut deep in the stucco. The one at the end of the house held a padded seat. I remembered much of the furniture from Grand’s house, the long, faded brocade sofa and the striped velvet love seat, the deep, high-backed chintz wing chairs beside the fireplace, the low Oriental coffee table and the delicate Chin
ese side chairs that flanked it. The high, curly old secretary that had been Grand’s mother’s sat beside the door, and on the other side the little mahogany table where, she had always said, General Washington played chess with General Lafayette on his way to the battle of Monmouth. The huge, gilt-framed paintings in the room, interiors and land- and seascapes, had come, I knew, from Europe, and were said to be “good.” I forgot who said that… probably my mother. And they were good. To me they were glorious. They shone like jewels in the green light.
The room across the hall from it was obviously the library, its wall-to-wall shelving crammed untidily with books. There was another fireplace, deep armchairs beside it, and an immense library table.
“I’m going to get at those books and put them in order,” Aengus said, but I liked them as they were, threatening to spill out and engulf whoever did not value them. I thought that they would have eaten my mother alive, and grinned at the thought. I don’t think my mother’s reading extended much past the Ladies’ Home Journal and Vogue.
Up the old polished stairs three bedrooms and bathrooms invited repose; I could not seem to pick the one I wanted for ours. The last flight led up to an enormous room, the length and width of the entire house, again beamed and stuccoed and floored in glowing old heart pine. There was a big old Kirman in the middle of the floor, faded almost to pale gold and pewter and shell colors, and open bookshelves divided the room at one end. Through its opening you could see that it made a small, beamed room with windows on all sides, looking straight out into the trees. Over them, and over the roofs of three or four other houses, I could see the river, sun fire struck from its white rapids.
“That’s where I am going to write,” Aengus said.
“That’s where I’m going to… do whatever I do,” I said, looking into the little room with joy. “You’ll have to share. And we’re sleeping in this end of it.”
“Absolutely. And everything else, too. Want to give the rug a try?” he said.
I am not at all ashamed to say that we did.
“Not bad for a first-house fuck,” he said sleepily into my hair as we lay in the waning sun on the Kirman.
“Might be even better with a bed,” I said, absently rubbing the carpet abrasions on my hip.
“Always bitching. Can’t even appreciate a great lay in a great house.”
“Can, too,” I said. “I just meant—”
I never did remember what I meant. At that moment there was a loud crash from downstairs—the kitchen, I thought—followed by the tinkling of glass and an angry, indistinct expletive in a woman’s voice. Aengus and I looked at each other, scrambled up adjusting our clothes, and ran downstairs.
We reached the bottom step just as a small woman came into the foyer, leading a struggling little boy by the arm. In her other arm a basketball was cradled. We all stopped and looked at one another.
“Oh, Lord,” the woman said in a clipped eastern voice. Her face was flushed red and her short blond hair flew all over her head as if it had been electrified.
“At least you’re not patrician and blue haired and eighty years old. I’m Carol Partridge from next door and this is my son Bummer, who just took out your kitchen window with a basketball. I am so sorry, but not nearly as sorry as Bummer is going to be.”
The little boy began to cry.
I began to laugh.
“I never liked that window anyway,” I said. She stared at me and then began to laugh, too. So did Aengus. Bummer did not laugh, but he gave me a watery, hopeful smile.
While I swept up the broken glass Carol Partridge held the dustpan, promising to pay for the damage and admiring the house in a nonstop patter-fire of words. Mostly I laughed. I liked her instantly. Aengus had taken little Bummer, still hiccupping, out onto the veranda, and when we joined them with a pitcher of iced tea and cookies Bummer looked up at his mother, his great hazel eyes shining, and said, “Mama, Aengus knows a goat that farts ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’!”
“That goat must be better than the rest of us, then,” Carol said, laughter welling up in her throat. “I can’t even sing it.”
I fixed Aengus with a long look, and he shrugged and held up his hands: “Well, what can you do?”
We all laughed.
It was the start of a lot of laughter shared with Carol Partridge.
We sat on the veranda watching the long shadows of our trees fall over the velvety lawn. Carol told us a little about herself: born in New Haven; met her husband, Walter, at Yale; divorced him four years before when he had run off with the daughter of a major Midwestern industrialist and married both her and her father’s hubcap empire; lived now in the house where he had grown up. (His family had known the Wentworths and his father had been a friend of my father in grammar school; both she and Walter had known and loved Grand and wondered who her house would go to.) Carol had two older sons, Chris, twelve, and Benjamin, ten, in addition to Bummer (Buxton, but who would call a child that?). The boys all loved river rafting; perhaps Aengus and I…?
“Aengus could go on my raft!” shouted Bummer, who had obviously taken a great fancy to Aengus. A farting goat, after all…
” ‘Mr. O’Neill,’ Bummer, not ‘Aengus.’ I’ve told you,” Carol said.
“Actually, it’s ‘Dr.,’ ” Aengus said, and then added hastily as Bummer’s eyes widened in terror, “but I’m not the kind that gives shots. I’m a doctor of storytelling. I tell about myths and legends and dead people who did wonderful things.”
“Like what?” Bummer breathed, his eyes enormous.
“Like turning people into swans. Or cutting off their enemies’ heads and carrying them in their saddlebags.”
“Aengus!” I said sharply.
But Bummer’s eyes held only fascination. “Cool,” he said.
“All my sons are bloodthirsty hooligans,” Carol Partridge said. “The kids on this side of the river have their own gang. I think they call themselves the Jets or the Sharks or something equally bucolic. I expect to see the police any day now.”
“Just on this side of the river?” Aengus asked with interest.
“Oh yes. The other side is far too chic and refined to put up with that sort of stuff. Their kids are practically perfect. I kid you not. Little zombies is what I think. But they do have good manners. Better than their parents, by a long shot.”
“I gather you aren’t fond of the parents. What are they called?” I asked.
“Besides shits? ‘Scuse me; I have a bad mouth. They’re called Woodies. They live in a subdivision… only they’d kill you for calling it that… called Riverwood. Fairly new, hideously overpriced, houses like bad copies of Versailles, way too much money. Nobody drives anything less than a Mercedes, including the perfect children. They’ve managed to start their own perfect school, K through 12, kids have to live there to attend, and even their own camp, up on Burnt Mountain. God, if any of them are your best friends I’ll cut my own tongue out—”
“Not likely,” Aengus said. “All our friends are left-wing sanitation workers and ladies of the evening.”
She laughed again. “Except you, I think. I think you teach.”
“Right. Most recently at Sewanee. I’m looking now. Know any schools that need a frightener of small children?”
“I bet somebody around here does. I’ll look,” Carol said. “And Thayer? Do you teach, too?”
“Sort of,” I said. “Only kindergarten level, though.”
“Oh, God, one of the teachers at Bummer’s kindergarten just left. I mean the one he was in two years ago. I’ll bet they’d love to have you! I know just who to call—”
“I don’t want you to go to any trouble,” I said. “I haven’t even thought much about it.”
“No trouble. Are you kidding? They’d kill to get Mrs. Wentworth’s granddaughter on the faculty. Everybody knew and loved her. Oh, I didn’t even tell you how sorry I was—”
“Thank you. We are, too. But I feel like we’ll always have her, what with the house a
nd all—”
“Then so will we. Well, come on, Bummer. We’ve done enough damage for one day. I ought to make you pay for that window out of your allowance.”
“I don’t get an allowance, Mama,” he said. “But I want to stay. I want to hear some more about the goat—”
“Come on now, or Dr. O’Neill will turn you into a goat,” Carol said. “Thanks for putting up with us. When you get settled I’d love it if you’d come to dinner.”
She towed her son out of sight around the house, and Aengus and I sat grinning at each other.
“I like her,” I said.
“Me, too,” said Aengus. “She’s very… real. Oh, look, they forgot the basketball.”
“I’ll run and catch them,” I said.
“Don’t bother. I have the feeling we’ve by no means seen the last of Bummer.”
“I hope not,” I said, still smiling. “He’s just the kind of little boy I’d…”
I let it trail off.
Aengus reached over from his chair and squeezed my hand.
CHAPTER 12
On the Tuesday morning after our first night in the Bell’s Ferry Road house, Aengus took a phone call in the library and came into the kitchen where I was making breakfast, grinning hugely.
“Don’t call them; they’ll call you,” he said.
“What?”
“I just got a call from the president of Coltrane College. You know, the little one over at Oxford? The good one?”
“Well, of course I know Coltrane. Grand’s sister went there, Aunt Courtney. I never knew her really, though she was my great-aunt. But Grand talked about Coltrane a lot. It’s supposed to be kind of a little gem of a liberal arts place, isn’t it?”
“Correct. Well, thanks to Grand’s sister, or her sister’s family, or somebody, I just got asked to interview for the chairmanship of the English department. Seems that whoever it was called the college painted a pretty glowing portrait of me. I’d love to thank whoever’s responsible, but I have a feeling she’s dead. He said we’d discuss who the caller was at the interview.”
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