The Best of Gene Wolfe

Kevin Malone

Marcella and I were married in April. I lost my position with Ketterly, Bruce & Drake in June, and by August we were desperate. We kept the apartment—I think we both felt that if we lowered our standards there would be no chance to raise them again—but the rent tore at our small savings. All during July I had tried to get a job at another brokerage firm, and by August I was calling fraternity brothers I had not seen since graduation and expressing an entire willingness to work in whatever businesses their fathers owned. One of them, I think, must have mailed us the advertisement.

There was a telephone number, which I omit for reasons that will become clear.

I showed the clipping to Marcella, who was lying with her cocktail shaker on the chaise longue. She said, “Why not,” and I dialed the number.

The telephone buzzed in my ear, paused, and buzzed again. I allowed myself to go limp in my chair. It seemed absurd to call at all; for the advertisement to have reached us that day, it must have appeared no later than yesterday morning. If the position was worth having—

“The Pines.”

I pulled myself together. “You placed a classified ad. For an attractive couple, well educated and the rest of it.”

“I did not, sir. However, I believe my master did. I am Priest, the butler.”

I looked at Marcella, but her eyes were closed. “Do you know, Priest, if the opening has been filled?”

“I think not, sir. May I ask your age?”

I told him. At his request, I also told him Marcella’s (she was two years younger than I) and gave him the names of the schools we had attended, described our appearance, and mentioned that my grandfather had been a governor of Virginia and that Marcella’s uncle had been ambassador to France. I did not tell him that my father had shot himself rather than face bankruptcy, or that Marcella’s family had disowned her—but I suspect he guessed well enough what our situation was.

“You will forgive me, sir, for asking so many questions. We are almost a half day’s drive, and I would not wish you to be disappointed.”

I told him that I appreciated that, and we set a date—Tuesday of the next week—on which Marcella and I were to come out for an interview with “the master.” Priest had hung up before I realized that I had failed to learn his employer’s name.

During the teens and twenties some very wealthy people had designed estates in imitation of the palaces of the Italian Renaissance. The Pines was one of them, and better preserved than most—the fountain in the courtyard still played, the marbles were clean and unyellowed, and if no red-robed cardinal descended the steps to a carriage blazoned with the Borgia arms, one felt that he had only just gone. No doubt the place had originally been called La Capanna or Il Eremo.

A serious-looking man in dark livery opened the door for us. For a moment he stared at us across the threshold. “Very well . . . ,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said that you are looking very well.” He nodded to each of us in turn, and stood aside. “Sir. Madame. I am Priest.”

“Will your master be able to see us?”

For a moment some exiled expression—it might have been amusement—seemed to tug at his solemn face. “The music room, perhaps, sir?”

I said I was sure that would be satisfactory, and followed him. The music room held a Steinway, a harp, and a dozen or so comfortable chairs; it overlooked a rose garden in which old remontant varieties were beginning that second season that is more opulent though less generous than the first. A kneeling gardener was weeding one of the beds.

“This is a wonderful house,” Marcella said. “I really didn’t think there was anything like it left. I told him you’d have a john collins—all right? You were looking at the roses.”

“Perhaps we ought to get the job first.”

“I can’t call him back now, and if we don’t get it, at least we’ll have had the drinks.”

I nodded to that. In five minutes they arrived, and we drank them and smoked cigarettes we found in a humidor—English cigarettes of strong Turkish tobacco. A maid came, and said that Mr. Priest would be much obliged if we would let him know when we would dine. I told her that we would eat whenever it was convenient, and she dropped a little curtsy and withdrew.

“At least,” Marcella commented, “he’s making us comfortable while we wait.”

Dinner was lamb in aspic, and a salad, with a maid—another maid—and a footman to serve while Priest stood by to see that it was done properly. We ate at either side of a small table on a terrace overlooking another garden, where antique statues faded to white glimmerings as the sun set.

Priest came forward to light the candles. “Will you require me after dinner, sir?”

“Will your employer require us; that’s the question.”

“Bateman can show you to your room, sir, when you are ready to retire. Julia will see to Madame.”

I looked at the footman, who was carrying in fruit on a tray.

“No, sir. That is Carter. Bateman is your man.”

“And Julia,” Marcella put in, “is my maid, I suppose?”

“Precisely.” Priest gave an almost inaudible cough. “Perhaps, sir—and madame—you might find this useful.” He drew a photograph from an inner pocket and handed it to me.

It was a black-and-white snapshot, somewhat dog-eared. Two dozen people, most of them in livery of one kind or another, stood in brilliant sunshine on the steps at the front of the house, men behind women. There were names in India ink across the bottom of the picture: James Sutton, Edna DeBuck, Lloyd Bateman . . .

“Our staff, sir.”

I said, “Thank you, Priest. No, you needn’t stay tonight.”

The next morning Bateman shaved me in bed. He did it very well, using a straight razor and scented soap applied with a brush. I had heard of such things—I think my grandfather’s valet may have shaved him like that before the First World War—but I had never guessed that anyone kept up the tradition. Bateman did, and I found I enjoyed it. When he had dressed me, he asked if I would breakfast in my room.

“I doubt it,” I said. “Do you know my wife’s plans?”

“I think it likely she will be on the South Terrace, sir. Julia said something to that effect as I was bringing in your water.”

“I’ll join her then.”

“Of course, sir.” He hesitated.

“I don’t think I’ll require a guide, but you might tell my wife I’ll be with her in ten minutes or so.”

Bateman repeated his, “Of course, sir,” and went out. The truth was that I wanted to assure myself that everything I had carried in the pockets of my old suit—car keys, wallet, and so on—had been transferred to the new one he had laid out for me; and I did not want to insult him, if I could prevent it, by doing it in front of him.

Everything was where it should be, and I had a clean handkerchief in place of my own only slightly soiled one. I pulled it out to look at (Irish linen) and a flutter of green came with it—two bills, both fifties.

Over eggs Benedict I complimented Marcella on her new dress and asked if she had noticed where it had been made.

“Rowe’s. It’s a little shop on Fifth Avenue.”

“You know it, then. Nothing unusual?”

She answered, “No, nothing unusual,” more quickly than she should have, and I knew that there had been money in her new clothes too, and that she did not intend to tell me about it.

“We’ll be going home after this. I wonder if they’ll want me to give this jacket back.”

“Going home?” She did not look up from her plate. “Why? And who are ‘they’?”

“Whoever owns this house.”

“Yesterday you called him he. You said Priest talked about the master, so that seemed logical enough. Today you’re afraid to deal with even presumptive masculinity.”

I said nothing.

“You think he spent the night in my room, they separated us and you thought that was why, and you just waited there—was it under a sheet?—for me to scream or something. And I didn’t.”

“I was hoping you had and I hadn’t heard you.”

“Nothing happened, dammit! I went to bed and went to sleep, but as for going home, you’re out of your mind. Can’t you see we’ve got the job? Whoever he is—wherever he is—he likes us. We’re going to stay here and live like human beings, at least for a while.”

And so we did. That day we stayed on from hour to hour. After that, from day to day, and at last from week to week. I felt like Klipspringer, the man who was Jay Gatsby’s guest for so long that he had no other home—except that Klipspringer, presumably, saw Gatsby from time to time, and no doubt made agreeable conversation, and perhaps even played the piano for him. Our Gatsby was absent. I do not mean that we avoided him, or that he avoided us; there were no rooms we were forbidden to enter, and no times when the servants seemed eager that we should play golf or swim or go riding. Before the good weather ended, we had two couples up for a weekend; and when Bette Windgassen asked if Marcella had inherited the place, and then if we were renting it, Marcella said, “Oh, do you like it?” in such a way that they left, I think, convinced that it was ours, or as good as ours.

And so it was. We went away when we chose, which was seldom, and returned when we chose, quickly. We ate on the various terraces and balconies, and in the big, formal dining room, and in our own bedrooms. We rode the horses and drove the Mercedes and the cranky, appealing old Jaguar as though they were our own. We did everything, in fact, except buy the groceries and pay the taxes and the servants, but someone else was doing that, and every morning I found one hundred dollars in the pockets of my clean clothes. If summer had lasted forever, perhaps I would still be there.

The poplars lost their leaves in one October week; at the end of it I fell asleep listening to the hum of the pump that emptied the swimming pool. When the rain came, Marcella turned sour and drank too much. One evening I made the mistake of putting my arm about her shoulders as we sat before the fire in the trophy room.

“Get your filthy hands off me,” she said. “I don’t belong to you.

“Priest, look here. He hasn’t said an intelligent word to me all day or done a decent thing, and now he wants to paw me all night.”

Priest pretended, of course, that he had not heard her.

“Look over here! Damn it, you’re a human being, aren’t you?”

He did not ignore that. “Yes, madame, I am a human being.”

“I’ll say you are. You’re more of a man than he is. This is your place, and you’re keeping us for pets—is it me you want? Or him? You sent us the ad, didn’t you? He thinks you go into my room at night, or he says he does. Maybe you really come to his—is that it?”

Priest did not answer. I said, “For God’s sake, Marcella.”

“Even if you’re old, Priest, I think you’re too much of a man for that.” She stood up, tottering on her long legs and holding on to the stonework of the fireplace. “If you want me, take me. If this house is yours, you can have me. We’ll send him to Vegas—or throw him on the dump.”

In a much softer tone than he usually used, Priest said, “I don’t want either of you, madame.”

I stood up then, and caught him by the shoulders. I had been drinking too, though only half or a quarter as much as Marcella, but I think it was more than that—it was the accumulated frustration of all the days since Jim Bruce told me I was finished. I outweighed Priest by at least forty pounds, and I was twenty years younger. I said, “I want to know.”

“Release me, sir, please.”

“I want to know who it is; I want to know now. Do you see that fire? Tell me, Priest, or I swear I’ll throw you in it.”

His face tightened at that. “Yes,” he whispered, and I let go of his shoulders. “It was not the lady, sir. It was you. I want that understood this time.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m not doing this because of what she said.”

“You aren’t the master, are you? For God’s sake tell the truth.”

“I have always told the truth, sir. No, I am not the master. Do you remember the picture I gave you?”

I nodded.

“You discarded it. I took the liberty, sir, of rescuing it from the waste can in your bathroom. I have it here.” He reached into his coat and pulled it out, just as he had on the first day, and handed it to me.

“It’s one of these? One of the servants?”

Priest nodded and pointed with an impeccably manicured forefinger to the figure at the extreme right of the second row. The name beneath it was Kevin Malone.

“Him?”

Silently, Priest nodded again.

I had examined the picture on the night he had given it to me, but I had never paid special attention to that particular half-inch-high image. The person it represented might have been a gardener, a man of middle age, short and perhaps stocky. A soft, sweat-stained hat cast a shadow on his face.

“I want to see him.” I looked toward Marcella, still leaning against the stonework of the mantel. “We want to see him.”

“Are you certain, sir?”

“Damn you, get him!”

Priest remained where he was, staring at me; I was so furious that I think I might have seized him as I had threatened and pushed him into the fire.

Then the French windows opened, and there came a gust of wind. For an instant I think I expected a ghost, or some turbulent elemental spirit. I felt that pricking at the neck that comes when one reads Poe alone at night.

The man I had seen in the picture stepped into the room. He was a small and very ordinary man in worn khaki, but he left the windows wide behind him, so that the night entered with him, and remained in the room for as long as we talked.

“You own this house,” I said. “You’re Kevin Malone.”

He shook his head. “I am Kevin Malone—this house owns me.”

Marcella was standing straighter now, drunk, yet still at that stage of drunkenness in which she was conscious of her condition and could compensate for it. “It owns me too,” she said, and walking almost normally she crossed the room to the baronial chair Malone had chosen, and managed to sit down at his feet.

“My father was the man-of-all-work here. My mother was the parlor maid. I grew up here, washing the cars and raking leaves out of the fountains. Do you follow me? Where did you grow up?”

I shrugged. “Various places. Richmond, New York, three years in Paris. Until I was sent off to school we lived in hotels, mostly.”

“You see, then. You can understand.” Malone smiled for a moment. “You’re still re-creating the life you had as a child, or trying to. Isn’t that right? None of us can be happy any other way, and few of us even want to try.”

“Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again,” I ventured.

“That’s right; you can’t go home. There’s one place where we can never go—haven’t you thought of that? We can dive to the bottom of the sea and someday NASA will fly us to the stars, and I have known men to plunge into the past—or the future—and drown. But there’s one place where we can’t go. We can’t go where we are already. We can’t go home, because our minds, and our hearts, and our immortal souls are already there.”

Not knowing what to say, I nodded, and that seemed to satisfy him. Priest looked as calm as ever, but he made no move to shut the windows, and I sensed that he was somehow afraid.

“I was put into an orphanage when I was twelve, but I never forgot The Pines. I used to tell the other kids about it, and it got bigger and better every year, but I knew what I said could never equal the reality.”

He shifted in his seat, and the slight movement of his legs sent Marcella sprawling, passed out. She retained a certain grace still; I have always understood that it is the reward of studying ballet as a child.

Malone continued to talk. “They’ll tell you it’s no longer possible for a poor boy with a second-rate education to make a fortune. Well, it takes luck, but I had it. It also takes the willingness to risk it all. I had that too, because I knew that for me anything under a fortune was nothing. I had to be able to buy this place—to come back and buy The Pines, and staff it and maintain it. That’s what I wanted, and nothing less would make any difference.”

“You’re to be congratulated,” I said. “But why . . .”

He laughed. It was a deep laugh, but there was no humor in it. “Why don’t I wear a tie and eat my supper at the end of the big table? I tried it. I tried it for nearly a year, and every night I dreamed of home. That wasn’t home, you see, wasn’t The Pines. Home is three rooms above the stables. I live there now. I live at home, as a man should.”

“It seems to me that it would have been a great deal simpler for you to have applied for the job you fill now.”

Malone shook his head impatiently. “That wouldn’t have done it at all. I had to have control. That’s something I learned in business—to have control. Another owner would have wanted to change things, and maybe he would even have sold out to a subdivider. No. Besides, when I was a boy this estate belonged to a fashionable young couple. Suppose a man of my age had bought it? Or a young woman, some whore.” His mouth tightened, then relaxed. “You and your wife were ideal. Now I’ll have to get somebody else, that’s all. You can stay the night, if you like. I’ll have you driven into the city tomorrow morning.”

I ventured, “You needed us as stage properties, then. I’d be willing to stay on those terms.”

Malone shook his head again. “That’s out of the question. I don’t need props; I need actors. In business I’ve put on little shows for the competition, if you know what I mean, and sometimes even for my own people. And I’ve learned that the only actors who can really do justice to their parts are the ones who don’t know what they are.”

“Really—,” I began.

He cut me off with a look, and for a few seconds we stared at one another. Something terrible lived behind those eyes.

Frightened despite all reason could tell me, I said, “I understand,” and stood up. There seemed to be nothing else to do. “I’m glad, at least, that you don’t hate us. With your childhood it would be quite natural if you did. Will you explain things to Marcella in the morning? She’ll throw herself at you, no matter what I say.”

He nodded absently.

“May I ask one question more? I wondered why you had to leave and go into the orphanage. Did your parents die or lose their places?”

Malone said, “Didn’t you tell him, Priest? It’s the local legend. I thought everyone knew.”

The butler cleared his throat. “The elder Mr. Malone—he was the stableman here, sir, though it was before my time. He murdered Betty Malone, who was one of the maids. Or at least he was thought to have, sir. They never found the body, and it’s possible he was accused falsely.”

“Buried her on the estate,” Malone said. “They found bloody rags and the hammer, and he hanged himself in the stable.”

“I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean to pry.”

The wind whipped the drapes like wine-red flags. They knocked over a vase and Priest winced, but Malone did not seem to notice. “She was twenty years younger and a tramp,” he said. “Those things happen.”

I said, “Yes, I know they do,” and went up to bed.

I do not know where Marcella slept. Perhaps there on the carpet, perhaps in the room that had been hers, perhaps even in Malone’s servants’ flat over the stables. I breakfasted alone on the terrace, then—without Bateman’s assistance—packed my bags.

I saw her only once more. She was wearing a black silk dress; there were circles under her eyes and her head must have been throbbing, but her hand was steady. As I walked out of the house, she was going over the Sèvres with a peacock-feather duster. We did not speak.

I have sometimes wondered if I were wholly wrong in anticipating a ghost when the French windows opened. How did Malone know the time had come for him to appear?

Of course I have looked up the newspaper reports of the murder. All the old papers are on microfilm at the library, and I have a great deal of time.

There is no mention of a child. In fact, I get the impression that the identical surnames of the murderer and his victim were coincidental. Malone is a common enough one, and there were a good many Irish servants then.

Sometimes I wonder if it is possible for a man—even a rich man—to be possessed, and not to know it.

This was a dream story. I dream a good deal of fiction, but it is mostly very bad fiction. The title was in my dream and the setup, the possessed servant hiring a master and mistress. That and one visual image that has never left me, that of a large upper-class room at midnight swept by a high wind. Its drapes flutter among my thoughts even now.

Some are haunted by ghosts. I am haunted by stories.