The Pagan House Read online

  Tenderly, soothing himself, Edgar brushed his grandmother’s hair as moon-and starlight made warning patterns on the coverlet.

  17

  Jeffrey sauntered through the hall in his East Coast summer wear.

  ‘Geezer,’ he said.

  Jeffrey’s summer wear was comprised of blue linen shorts, his Birkenstock sandals, a vintage I Like Ike T-shirt, and the new snake tattoo on his back, which he took every opportunity to display with a bend or stretch.

  ‘I’ve had enough!’

  They heard Fay say this to Mon from the bedroom upstairs and there was only a murmur of Mon’s voice in reply, and Edgar was sure he knew what Fay had had enough of—it must be Warren, his cruelty with hair, the control he exerted over all the operations of the Pagan House. Fay required Edgar to rescue her as she had never needed him before. Mon’s plaintive murmurings went on, interrupted only by another harsh bird-cry of ‘I’ve had enough!’ followed by the unmistakable sound of two women weeping.

  ‘They’re arguing again,’ Edgar said.

  ‘It’s what women do. Hey. While I’m here. Maybe we could make an expedition.’

  ‘What kind of expedition?’

  ‘I don’t know, what would you like? We could go to a sporting event, a baseball match maybe.’

  ‘They’re called games.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘They’re called baseball games.’

  ‘Well a baseball game then, or one of those NASCAR races, or, something, I don’t know, take a visit to Indian country or check out the sailing on one of those lakes.’

  ‘Do you know how to sail?’

  ‘I know how to do lots of things, geezer.’

  Edgar studied the offer for what it was rather than what it pretended to be. Clearly it was an effort to move Edgar off-site, to manoeuvre him out of the battle. Was Jeffrey in league with Warren? Was Mon in league with Warren? Had the three of them reached some secret accord? Or maybe it was Jeffrey, just Jeffrey, whom Fay had had enough of, and how could she be blamed for that? No one, especially the frail and sick, could be expected to tolerate Jeffrey and all the Jeffrey-related crimes that Mon had committed in this house as elsewhere.

  ‘I’m kind of busy right now,’ Edgar said.

  Jeffrey was used to rebuffs from Edgar and liked to pretend that they amused him.

  ‘Well okay. It’s your funeral. Hey babe. What’s up?’

  Mon clattered down the stairs, swept past the pair of them in the hall and went out, weeping, into the garden.

  Edgar and Jeffrey looked at each other, waiting, hoping, to stand aside while the other went to comfort one or both of the women.

  ‘I’ll go see Fay,’ Edgar said, authoritatively taking charge of the situation.

  His grandmother lay in bed, painting one of her fieldscapes. Little splashes of brown and green dotted the counterpane around her. One frail arm lifted to his shoulder as he leaned to kiss her river-bed cheek.

  ‘Hi, Fay,’ Edgar said, as cheerily as he might. Her pale eyes blinked at him. They reminded him of the eyes of the horse that she had started to draw, to populate her empty blue fields.

  ‘You’re looking well,’ he said.

  ‘You’re getting older,’ Fay said, and he couldn’t decide if this was the simplicity of wisdom or decay.

  ‘Yes, I think I am,’ Edgar said, not without a certain amount of pride.

  In the next, awful, moment, something went from her face, from her eyes. She was looking at him without recognition, without consciousness, even. Then it, she, slowly returned and she smiled.

  ‘Have you seen Warren?’ she said.

  ‘He said he was going to Guthrie’s. He had something to give her for her cough.’

  ‘Mary is never ill,’ she said.

  Edgar had intended to badmouth Jeffrey to her, to enlist Fay in a campaign against Mon’s loathsome fiancé, but this seems inappropriate now. Instead he asks her if she would like him to brush her hair, and she gravely nods and says yes she would. Tears roll down the channels of her cheeks and she makes little kittenish sobs, but the combing seems to soothe her. She raises her head against the pillow to aid him, and the weeping softens and dies.

  Proudly, his aching arm a testament to his capacities, Edgar told Warren in the kitchen that Fay would be coming downstairs shortly.

  ‘I’ve been brushing her hair,’ he said.

  ‘Oh. Have you?’ Warren said.

  Warren was putting supper together when Fay made her way into the kitchen. Her colour was heightened. She walked slowly, statelily in, went, without stopping for rest, to the window and looked out over the garden. When she turned her head, her hair lifts and settles again into its perfect brushed shape.

  ‘I think I’ll be downstairs for supper tonight,’ she said.

  Warren didn’t say anything. Perhaps he banged the plates slightly louder than necessary.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ she said.

  ‘Why do you think I’d mind?’ he said.

  At supper Fay was lavish in her praise of the food. ‘That smells very good. Is it shrimp?’

  ‘Cooked Cajun-style,’ Warren said.

  ‘It’s delicious!’ Fay said.

  ‘It’s what I’ll be cooking for the Blackberry Festival,’ Warren said.

  Fay smiles. She looks happier than Edgar has ever seen her.

  ‘Your appetite seems to be coming back,’ Mon said.

  ‘Yes I think it is,’ Fay said. ‘But this is so good. It’s like a curtain has been pulled away. I can even taste the celery seed. There is celery seed in here isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Warren said. ‘There is.’

  After Fay, in gustatory triumph, had returned to her room, this latest version of the household gathered in the living room to outdo one another in sombreness.

  ‘I’m worried about her, I really am. She’s in decline,’ Mon said.

  Edgar protested. ‘She said she could smell the food. And how good it tasted.’

  ‘She was pretending, anyone could see that,’ Jeffrey said.

  ‘It breaks my heart,’ Mon said.

  ‘What about the celery seed? How could she know there was celery seed in it?’

  ‘It was one of her favourites. Is,’ Warren said, correcting himself.

  Arms are busy at night in the Pagan House. Edgar combs, his mother’s hand beats.

  18

  If printing is the most important art as the medium for uttering truth, navigation properly stands next in importance, as the means of transporting it. With these two arms, a competent and organized Press and a suitable Marine, truth is furnished for the conquest of the world.

  Letter from Niagara, John Prindle Stone, July 1851

  Is George Pagan ever stabbed by envy when watching John Prindle and Mary together? And if so, of whom was he more envious? The modern saint answering his special call from God, or the woman he had chosen as handmaid, helpmeet, and answering heart—in lieu of Mrs Lovell, that is, who remains resolute in Newhaven, resisting? In truth George Pagan is jealous of them both, a jealousy that increases when they are separated, the Pagans at the satellite community in Brooklyn, John Prindle in retreat at Niagara, but George has little time for jealousy; he has been printer, editor, business manager, trap salesman, kitchen hand, and he is newspaper publisher now, allowed an office of his own, whose door he craftily pushes near-shut, and a congenial set of tasks to which he is careful not to display any special love.

  His office door swings open.

  ‘They are here!’

  Mary adores jamborees. Pleasure animates her face in a way that no photograph can ever catch, proving the Israelites right about graven images. It is a mockery of God’s work to represent appearance without essence.

  ‘Who is here? Who is here, Mary?’

  But she is already gone, quicksilver, and she knows and he knows perfectly well who it is who has arrived: the captain and crew of the vessel that will take them home from Brooklyn, where the winters are always
snowy and the summers stultifying.

  The travellers are seated together in the dining room. They have been afforded time for rest, reflection, prayer, sanctification, ablution, and now they sit, in the glamour of recent arrival and imminent departure: Franklin and Glass good-naturedly mock each other’s seamanship; Abram Carter is a captain again, with a rough trim of beard, a blue sailor’s cap (it was he who bought the sloop Rebecca Ford with his own funds and presented it to the community—and how does he have these funds, when private property no longer exists?); and gloomy Mordecai Short, Mary’s latest mission and charge, stares sullenly at his food, his melancholy face typically lean and bitter.

  Some who do not love Mary so much say that there is a deficiency in her spiritual self, but George Pagan, still the idolater, loves Mary (this his own error, his cleaving to untranscendental stuff) best of all. Perhaps she is not so shrewd at others’ motives—her gift is for the instinctual grasp, not the analytical. But Mary Pagan is without sin and she still bears his name, and shows no desire to slough it off; as a result, his own standing has always been higher than it might otherwise be.

  Onyataka is the sacred ground of the new covenant. It is the manufacturing headquarters and sincere heart. Brooklyn is for publishing and trade, Niagara is where the salesmen are trained and where John Prindle makes his retreat, often companioned in fellowship by a recent female convert to the Perfectionist cause. It is where he goes to catch his breath and rest and mend his throat, and consider. They have a fresh letter from him, outlining the content of the Home Talk he will deliver when they are all soon reunited in time for the Blackberry Festival at Onyataka, where the family has outgrown its parlours and barns. Erasmus Hamilton is already at work on his designs for a new, larger Mansion House. Bible Communism flourishes; the new order of things is only a corner or two away.

  ‘Happiness is the natural element of man,’ Mary reads, smiling, stroking the words on the oilskin page. George sits perfectly still, hands smothered between thighs and chair. The Rebecca Ford carries a load of limestone for the new Mansion House. It will also carry Mary and George. Mary’s purpose is known to George Pagan, perhaps not to the men of the boat. She is to lift gloomy Mordecai Short, a frequent dissenter, a victim of choleric moods and petulant doubts, higher into the world of the heart. Images of some of the acts that can be consequent upon descending fellowship scorch George Pagan’s unholy imagination. He winces, a gesture that Abram Carter does not fail to catch.

  ‘Brother George?’

  ‘It is nothing.’

  If this were John Prindle as his interlocutor George Pagan would feel less easy. He has never been able to escape the superstition or truth that John Prindle’s clear blue eyes see all the way into souls, most particularly his own.

  ‘Indigestion only,’ he says, and Abram Carter nods superciliously, and all at the Willow Street table know what is signified by the nod. Everyone knows that suffering of the flesh has a purely spiritual cause. ‘A cold in the stomach,’ says George Pagan.

  Well, not everyone: ‘Sometimes a cold is just a cold,’ mutters Mordecai Short, defiant and shy, face colouring, sullenly looking down.

  ‘Oh Mordecai,’ says Mary, and this attention of hers makes him even shyer, even more bashfully stubborn, and he draws an invisible line with the toe of his boot on the floor as if to mark out a fortification.

  George clears his throat. He reminds gloomy Mordecai Short of the fundamental truth: ‘Christ is the physician of the body as well as the soul.’

  Abram Carter, always ready to demonstrate his own spiritual acuity and wisdom (and how many times has he been criticized, justly, for pride and the Prophet-Spirit?) says, in his hateful confidence-man’s voice, ‘Redemption of the body is twin to redemption of the soul and both may be obtained through sweet communion with God. Brother Mordecai suffers because he is unable to grasp this simple truth.’

  By smiling at George, Carter reminds the room that the announcement of indigestion is hardly less revealing than the display of spiritual canker. And he is about to go on, in his own Moses-Spirit, but Mary silences him, defending both Mordecai and George, and George, in his gratitude, detects inside himself nonetheless a resentment at being classed alongside Mordecai Short.

  ‘The new man’s birth pangs are the death throes of the old,’ says Mary.

  Mordecai Short seems both ungrateful and unconvinced. He can’t, though, keep from looking at Mary, sly life-seeking glances that remind George most of all of the false attentions of Abram Carter in those days of trial at the old stone house. And yet, is not Abram Carter also an agent of redemption? Were it not for that episode would George have found his place at Onyataka, or in this house, ‘Hope Springs’, as their less respectful neighbours call the Brooklyn community, in this spiritual dispensation? That episode is long past, a finished shame that served as a stepping-stone to freedom. He will not though acknowledge Captain Carter’s subtle look of complicity.

  And later, in bed, George paints the lineaments of his once-wife on to the sincere willing body of the printworker Martha Ashton, while in the room next door he can hear the unmistakable bed-scrapings, gasps and pleasures of continent love.

  In the morning, after breakfast, inner reflection, group prayers, the Brooklyn family gathers on the dock and Mary is urged to sing. In turn she coaxes George to fetch his violin. Together they perform ‘Jeannette and Jeannot’, George’s unpractised fingers surprisingly agile, her voice more beautiful than ever.

  She has never sung so well. In the intervals of her voice are the unapprehendable truths that George Pagan so effort-fully strives towards. In her performance she still has a moment for everyone, the look of mock-surprise she sends him (Oh, if I were Queen of France …), eyes widened, shyly smiling, as if to say, Who would have thought it, George? and George sends back, he hopes, a blithely appreciative smile, when all he wants to do is to build a house to lock her inside. The printworkers from the basement, blue-capped apparitions, have silently joined the audience for the recital. When Mary finishes (… let them who made the quarrels be the only men to fight!) the applause is huge. George Pagan bows. He takes Mary’s hand and shapes her into a curtsy and he tucks his violin into the crook of his arm and pounds his own hands together in applause so hard that surely they must soon feel the refreshment of pain, and how could he ever have hoped to claim this woman for his own?

  They all walk down to the wharf. A breeze disturbs the skirts of Mary Pagan as Abram Carter offers her a hand to board the boat. George Pagan stands on the foredeck, crossing his arms and stroking his beard as John Prindle would do, emulating his master’s manner if not his substance. Franklin tosses the bowline to Glass as Mordecai Short, his manners unimproved, his vitality wretched and sluggish, desultorily watches. Abram Carter at the helm raises his skipper’s cap to wave to the watchers on the shore as the sloop, heavy in the water from the limestone cargo she carries, gathers up speed to the north.

  ‘Happiness,’ says George Pagan, holding his balance on the deck, squinting into the sun, his words carried on the wind, ‘is the natural element of man.’

  19

  At the Blackberry Festival, trestle tables laid with Association plate and tableware almost covered the south lawn of the Mansion House. Most of Creek and Vail was here, receiving the Company’s annual festival of hospitality and charity, eating blackberry pancakes and drinking late-summer lemonade. Electa was with her family at a table of merchants and restaurateurs. Edgar had been placed at the dignitaries’ table between Janice and Guthrie. There was an empty place at the high-school sports-hero table because Husky Marvin, blushing and awkward, was sitting with the cast and crew of the opera. Even the Indian Fighters were here, at a table of unskilled Company employees, almost all of whom, Guthrie pointed out, were descended from the Association’s factory hands of Creek. The Indian Fighters had been placed discreetly away from the tables of Onyataka Indians.

  ‘Those are the good Onyatakas,’ Guthrie says. ‘None of the bad Onyata
kas are here.’

  ‘What’s a bad Onyataka?’ Edgar asks, unanswered. Shiverily, he imagines men in loincloths and scars, reeling from whiskey, stringing more poisoned arrows into their unerring bows.

  The Company glee club sings Association hymns and the good Onyatakas answer with traditional chants and the Company-sponsored Fun Run circles past. Edgar sees Company Bob puffing along, red-T-shirted, red-faced, white sweatbands on his wrists, insect trills from his headphones. A looping contingent of Down’s syndrome children wobbles up through the trees from the golf course. Coach Spiro shepherds them on, barking a clumsily walking boy back into a trot.

  All the town’s Prindles and Stones and Pagans are at the dignitaries’ table, apart from Jerome and Fay. They are of varying ages and occupations and shapes, but all, even Edgar, no less than the doctor or lawyer or university professor or newspaper editor, have the same square chin that Edgar has always disliked in himself, preferring slimness and neurasthenia. Fay is across the road in bed, pleading weakness. Jerome is absent, pursuing his researches. He has tracked down a path to a cache of letters and journals that Spanky Pete saved from the dowagers’ flames. And Mon had been sitting at the opera table, which is already empty as Warren’s show is soon to start.

  There are posters outside the Mansion House, clucks of neighbours on the rise, the warm-up sounds of the opera band drifting out from the Big Hall. Except there is nothing airy or watery about this music, which moves around like mechanical sound blocks produced by a grim machine, one of Seth Newhouse’s traps made into music, or maybe it is water after all, water and metal and wood, the sounds of crashing waves and a splintering boat. The posters show the same black-and-white photograph—Marilou Weathers, in pantalets and plain dress and slicked-down hair, smiles madly at the camera while Husky Marvin, with stuck-on beard and whiskers, his acne buried beneath mounds of foundation cream, stares baffled at his ghost-consort siren.