But that was because I had bumped into Nora in Venice, with her roots packed, far from home, away from Grynwood, where she might truly belong to someone else, perhaps even to me.
But somehow our mouths had been too busy with each other to ask permanence. Next day, healing our lips, puffed from mutual assaults, we had not the strength to say forever-as-of-now, more tomorrows this way, an apartment, a house anywhere, not Grynwood, not Grynwood ever again, stay! Perhaps the light of noon was cruel, perhaps it showed too many pores in people.
Or perhaps, more accurately, the nasty children were bored again. Or terrified of a prison of two! Whatever the reason, the feather, once briefly lofted on champagne breath, toppled. Neither knew which ceased breathing upon it first. Nora pretended an urgent telegram and fled off to Grynwood.
Contact was broken. The spoiled children never wrote. I did not know what sand castles she had smashed. She did not know what Indian Madras had bled color from passion’s sweat on my back. I married. I divorced. I traveled.
And now here we were again come from opposite directions late on a strange day by a familiar lake, calling to each other without calling, running to each other without moving, as if we had not been years apart.
“Nora.” I took her hand. It was cold. “What’s happened?”
“Happened!?” She laughed, grew silent, staring away. Suddenly she laughed again, that difficult laughter that might instantly flush with tears. “Oh, my dear Charlie, think wild, think all, jump hoops and come round to maniac dreams. Happened, Charlie, happened?!”
She grew frightfully still.
“Where are the servants, the guests—?”
“The party,” she said, “was last night.”
“Impossible! You’ve never had just a Friday-night bash. Sundays have always seen your lawn littered with demon wretches strewn and bandaged with bedclothes. Why—?”
“Why did I invite you out today, you want to ask, Charles?” Nora still looked only at the house. “To give you Grynwood. A gift, Charlie, if you can force it to let you stay, if it will put up with you—”
“I don’t want the house!” I burst in.
“Oh, it’s not if you wantit,but if it wantsyou.It threw us all out, Charlie.”
“Last night … ?”
“Last night the last great party at Grynwood didn’t come off. Mag flew from Paris. The Aga sent a fabulous girl from Nice. Roger, Percy, Evelyn, Vivian, Jon were here. That bullfighter who almost killed the playwright over the ballerina was here. The Irish dramatist who falls off stages drunk was here. Ninety-seven guests teemed in that door between five and seven last night. By midnight they were gone.”
I walked across the lawn.
Yes, still fresh in the grass: the tire marks of three dozen cars.
“It wouldn’t let us have the party, Charles,” Nora called, faintly.
I turned blankly. “It? The house?”
“Oh, the music was splendid but went hollow upstairs. We heard our laughter ghost back from the topmost halls. The party clogged. Thepetits fourswere clods in our throats. The wine ran over our chins. No one got to bed for even three minutes. Doesn’t it sound a lie? But, Limp Meringue Awards were given to all and they went away and I slept bereft on the lawn all night. Guess why? Go look, Charlie.”
We walked up to the open front door of Grynwood.
“What shall I look for?”
“Everything. All the rooms. The house itself. The mystery. Guess. And when you’ve guessed a thousand times I’ll tell you why I can never live here again, must leave, why Grynwood is yours if you wish. Go in, alone.”
And in I went, slowly, one step at a time.
I moved quietly on the lovely lion-yellow hardwood parquetry of the great hall. I gazed at the Aubusson wall tapestry. I examined the ancient white marble Greek medallions displayed on green velvet in a crystal case.
“Nothing,” I called back to Nora out there in the late cooling day.
“No. Everything,” she called. “Go on.”
The library was a deep warm sea of leather smell where five thousand books gleamed their colors of hand-rubbed cherry, lime, and lemon bindings. Their gold eyes, bright titles, glittered. Above the fireplace which could have kenneled two firedogs and ten great hounds hung the exquisite GainsboroughMaidens and Flowersthat had warmed the family for generations.
It was a portal overlooking summer weather. One wanted to lean through and sniff wild seas of flowers, touch harvest of peach maiden girls, hear the machinery of bees bright-stitching up the glamorous airs.
“Well?” called a far voice.
“Nora!” I cried. “Come here. There’s nothing to fear! It’s still daylight!”
“No,” said the far voice sadly. “The sun is going down. What do you see, Charlie?”
“Out in the hall again, the spiral stairs. The parlor. Not a dust speck on the air. I’m opening the cellar door. A million barrels and bottles. Now the kitchen. Nora, this is lunatic!”
“Yes, isn’t it?” wailed the far voice. “Go back to the library. Stand in the middle of the room. See the GainsboroughMaidens and Flowersyou always loved?”
“It’s there.”
“It’s not. See the silver Florentine humidor?”
“I see it.”
“You don’t. See the great maroon leather chair where you drank sherry with Father?”
“Yes.”
“No,” sighed the voice.
“Yes, no? Do, don’t? Nora, enough!”
“More than enough, Charlie. Can’t you guess? Don’t youfeelwhat happened to Grynwood?”
I ached, turning. I sniffed the strange air.
“Charlie,” said Nora, far out by the open front door, ” … four years ago,” she said faintly. “Four years ago … Grynwood burned completely to the ground.”
I ran.
I found Nora pale at the door.
“Itwhat!?” I shouted.
“Burned to the ground,” she said. “Utterly. Four years ago.”
I took three long steps outside and looked up at the walls and windows.
“Nora, it’s standing, it’s all here!”
“No, it isn’t, Charlie. That’s not Grynwood.”
I touched the gray stone, the red brick, the green ivy. I ran my hand over the carved Spanish front door. I exhaled in awe. “It can’t be.”
“It is,” said Nora. “All new. Everything from the cellar stones up. New, Charles. New, Charlie. New.”
“Thisdoor?”
“Sent up from Madrid, last year.”
“This pavement?”
“Quarried near Dublin two years ago. The windows from Waterford this spring.”
I stepped through the front door.
“The parqueting?”
“Finished in France and shipped over autumn last.”
“But, but, thattapestry!?”
“Woven near Paris, hung in April.”
“But it’s all thesame,Nora!”
“Yes, isn’t it? I traveled to Greece to duplicate the marble relics. The crystal case I had made, too, in Rheims.”
“The library!”
“Every book, all bound the same way, stamped in similar gold, put back on similar shelves. The library alone cost one hundred thousand pounds to reproduce.”
“The same, the same, Nora,” I cried, in wonder, “oh God, the same,” and we were in the library and I pointed at the silver Florentine humidor. “That, of course, was saved out of the fire?”
“No, no, I’m an artist. I remembered. I sketched, I took the drawings to Florence. They finished the fraudulent fake in July.”
“The GainsboroughMaidens and Flowers!?”
“Look close! That’s Fritzi’s work. Fritzi, that horrible drip-dry beatnik painter in Montmartre? Who threw paint on canvas and flew them as kites over Paris so the wind and rain patterned beauty for him, which he sold for exorbitant prices? Well, Fritzi, it turns out, is a secret Gainsborough fanatic. He’d kill me if he knew I told. He painted thisMaidensfrom memory, isn’t itfine?”
“Fine, fine, oh God, Nora, are you telling the truth?”
“I wish I weren’t. Do you think I’ve been mentally ill, Charles? Naturally you might think. Do you believe in good and evil, Charlie? I didn’t used. But now, quite suddenly, I have turned old and rain-dowdy. I have hit forty, forty has hit me, like a locomotive. Do you know what I think? … the house destroyeditself.”
“Itwhat?”
She went to peer into the halls where shadows gathered now, coming in from the late day.
“When I first came into my money, at eighteen, when people said Guilt I said Bosh. They cried Conscience. I cried Crappulous Nonsense! But in those days the rain barrel was empty. A lot of strange rain has fallen since and gathered in me, and to my cold surprise I find me to the brim with old sin and know thereisconscience and guilt.
“There are a thousand young men in me, Charles.
“They thrust and buried themselves there. When they withdrew, Charles, I thought they withdrew. But no, no, now I’m sure there is not a single one whose barb, whose lovely poisoned thorn is not caught in my flesh, one place or another. God, God, how I loved their barbs, their thorns. God how I loved to be pinned and bruised. I thought the medicines of time and travel might heal the grip marks.
But now I know I am all fingerprints. There lives no inch of my flesh, Chuck, is not FBI file systems of palm print and Egyptian whorl of finger stigmata. I have been stabbed by a thousand lovely boys and thought I did not bleed but God I do bleed now. I have bled all over this house.
And my friends who denied guilt and conscience, in a great subway heave of flesh have trammeled through here and jounced and mouthed each other and sweat upon floors and buckshot the walls with their agonies and descents, each from the other’s crosses.
The house has been stormed by assassins, Charlie, each seeking to kill the other’s loneliness with their short swords, no one finding surcease, only a momentary groaning out of relaxation.
“I don’t think there has ever been a happy person in this house, Charles, I see that now.
“Oh, it alllookedhappy. When you hear so much laughter and see
