Audio: Annie Proulx reads.
Arwen Rasmont waits hours at Keflavík International for his flight; they call it as he leaves the men’s room. He walks past the mirrored wall and is assaulted, as usual, by his dead father’s handsome image: high-arched nose, yellow hair. A difference in the contact glance—the father’s a hard squinting challenge, the son’s sidelong and measuring.
A week earlier the luxury-real-estate-rental mogul Rodrig Cushion had sent Arwen to Reykjavík to examine and make a judgment on a rare nineteenth-century whaling captain’s house perched above a fjord with a view of dripping icebergs. Now, as he stands in the boarding line, he checks the snapshots on his phone. The most recent shows the interior entryway of that house; an umbrella jar holds several walking sticks and two ancient Inuit harpoons with whale-bone barbs; on the wall above them hangs a gleaming nineteenth-century harpoon gun. It is, Arwen thinks, whaling history in a nutshell. Such details, he knows, are priceless to Cushion. He looks at the steel gleam of the harpoons, cruel instruments. The owner is a taciturn old woman who didn’t like the sound of Cushion’s deal and pushed the door open, inviting Arwen out but not before he took that quick shot of the harpoons.
When Acme-Air’s loudspeakers rattle out the information that boarding for his flight is under way, it is 3:20 a.m. and the Icelandic sun is coming up. He calls Carolla, who takes eight rings to answer.
“So, where are you? Do you know what time it is? Are you in Boston? Will you be home soon?”
“No, I’m still in Reykjavík. We’re just boarding. Sorry, babe, I forgot the time difference. I thought I was headed home, but I have to go to New York first. Via Chicago.”
“What, Iceland to Chicago to New York?”
“Cushion’s plan. He popped it on me out of the blue. He’s in Chicago this week. Look, I’ll call from there or New York. I don’t know what he wants.”
“Well—don’t call at midnight. And as long as he pays for the travel he can do that, right? You get to go to marvellous places—golden sands of Araby and all that.”
“Carolla, there’s a serious heat wave, some new virus, an earthquake, and gunfire in Araby right now, so I’m hoping he don’t get ideas about luxury tents and camels. I’ll be back Friday night and there’s a beaut cod on ice on its way to you from the fish market in Reykjavík.”
“For Saturday?”
“Right. I ate at a restaurant in the fish market, tried to get their recipe for the baked cod, no go, but my God, it was—look, I’ll call you from New York. When I know what he wants, O.K.? Take care of that cod. Love you, love you, I do love you.”
Only Arwen, in that large shouting family of boys, inherits the father’s face. All his brothers have enviable potato heads. As a child, he is the one chosen for the front row of school photographs or given a cookie and posed on the laps of relatives. Teachers treat him kindly and he imagines the world is a smooth place without difficulties until a summer family visit with his mother’s people in Kansas. Two cousins, lump-jawed bigger guys with pimples, hit and push him back and forth until his nose bleeds. He cries and runs to tell his mother, but he is intercepted by his father, who pulls him into the bathroom and hands him a sopping washcloth, tells him that it could have been worse than a bloody nose and a few bruises. “Hey,” he says, “the plug-uglies hate you at the same time they . . .” and he gives Arwen a fatherly smack on the shoulder. Arwen never knows what he means.
The father, Joe Rasmont, is a roofing contractor, whose pride is his Ulster Scots-Irish ancestry and his love of a scrimmage. The mother is a practitioner of invisibility and has secret habits. The father and Arwen’s brothers are loud; they like sports contests and marching bands, and on weekends do not get up until high noon. Arwen dodges arguments, likes silence and subtleties, sleeps lightly. The father laughs with Schadenfreude when he hears that a boy from Iowa has been to the ocean and had his right leg severed by a shark. He says, “The kid was dumb. Punch a shark in the snoot it hauls ass,” but Arwen has recurrent thoughts of the boy’s terror. By his teens Arwen knows that his good looks are evidence not of his personal uniqueness but of his father’s genetic domination. Even when Joe Rasmont dies after a fall from a roof where he was faking a clog dance for the plaudits of three preteen girls on their way home from school, Arwen’s knowledge that he is not uniquely himself folds him inward.
At the state university Arwen signs up for the jumbled mix of architecture, history, and arts courses popular with the student misfits. In his last year he meets Carolla Windon—strong-willed and so sure of herself that with her he feels guided, a feeling he mistakes for love. She seems a different kind of person, a fizzing bit of electricity that has broken free from the main lightning bolt.
Carolla finds that Arwen’s good looks enhance her own plain-Jane self, so she makes a decision not to correct his grammar. After graduation she hustles him into the jeweller’s shop to buy her engagement ring. She organizes their wedding and arranges the honeymoon—a trip to Japan where they overdo garden tours and he develops an allergy to shoyu—and finds them a little saltbox house half an hour from Boston. He revels in the love-light that shimmers from her and envelops him as she excitedly describes her plan for owning a rescued-and-restored-furniture shop or a booth at the county fair where she will sell home-made pickles that somehow are never made. She is not a beauty: sandy hair, elliptical brown eyes, and a thin mouth perfectly sized to take in whole apricots. She is also bony and stiffly put together, wide hipped, her arms and legs apparently hammered into place. But her rapid reactions sweep him along. He is secretly thrilled by her liveliness and her sudden huge enthusiasms that disappear and reappear like sunlight on a day of moving clouds. She puts his wardrobe in order, manages their joint taxes, and works out soy-free menus that keep him in good health. She is exceptionally loving and a serious cook.
“Carolla, you treat me like the prize pig you’re going to show at the farm fair—”
“I think you love every minute of being the prize piggy, don’t you?”
He does love it.
Early in their marriage he expects babies but it doesn’t happen. Carolla does not seem to miss being a mother and Arwen can find no way to introduce the subject without sounding like a domineering male.
In those same early days Arwen tries several jobs before finding Back Bay Garden Supply, in Boston. Since childhood he has waited for a defining moment, an event or a flash of comprehension that will shift him into self-recognition, the kind that happens in books when a character nails it—“from that moment Bertie Fuse knew what his life was going to be”—but Arwen’s shock of understanding never arrives. The closest he has ever come to an epiphany was discovering, as a six-year-old, that flakes of mica in the driveway gravel could be split into glassy layers with his thumbnail. Life just goes on, but he never looks at a driveway again without checking for micaceous gleam.
“ . . . and this is where I store my tennis ball.”
Cartoon by Lonnie Millsap
Albert Bebby, a large man in his sixties who still has great physical strength and flexibility, owns Back Bay Garden Supply. He also owns some acreage with a two-room shack on it forty miles north, past Gristle Falls, past the years-long paving work on a twisted mountain road, past the renovation of the old woollen mill below the falls. Bebby is a climate-change denier who sometimes wears his MAGA hat and argues that every grim bit of warming, hundred-year storm, or sea-level rise is an anomaly. There have always been storms and hot days. Yet Arwen likes him, and he likes Arwen, and assigns him every interesting job, from greenhouse work to scouting antique shops for giant urns, encourages him to take night classes in garden design—training he might have given his son, Daniel, had turtles not interfered. Daniel is afflicted with a sense of moral outrage over the misdeeds of humans which are bringing about the climate shift, an outrage that merges with his impulse to save small animals, especially turtles, from highway traffic. Daniel used to spend weeks at the shack up north. Arwen does not know him except through hearsay, because a year before Arwen met his father, Daniel quit the shack and moved to the West Coast to become a road ecologist.
Bebby mutters to Arwen that he is glad to be free from Daniel’s nightly dinner-table sermons about humans’ destruction of the natural world. Daniel, gone but not forgotten, sends frequent e-mail bulletins to his father offering proofs of climate change, exposing the machinations of villainous corporations and of governments that are planning to dredge and rape the seafloor, describing the coming floods that will drown the cities around the Great Lakes and create Lake Gargantua. Daniel puts all his business out there—he cares, and he wants his father to care. Bebby dismisses the messages: “Daniel don’t get it that there is always ups and downs. He thinks this ‘climate’ stuff is something special. We’ve had problems with weather and the seasons since the beginning. It’s in the Bible, all the plagues and floods. Just like now with Covid and Vermont underwater last year. And this business about carbon credits—there’s a crooks’ game for you.” But he continues to read Daniel’s warnings and prophecies aloud, and Arwen listens. After one of Daniel’s messages exhorting his father not to eat fish species that are struggling to survive—cod from the North Atlantic are on that list—Arwen feels a twinge of guilt, feels the earth beneath him stir uneasily like a sleeper seeking a more comfortable position, but the stirring is also possibly a global response to the devilish human fleas that plague its surface. He, Arwen, is just such a flea. He knows that.
Arwen and Carolla wink at couples who concoct a weekly date night to keep their marriage lively. Instead, they take a full day in the kitchen, usually Saturday, when they cook and eat together, trying difficult recipes such as duck roasted in a watermelon, chicharrones served in a greasy paper bag, a kavkaski shashlik. It is awkward in their poky little kitchen in East Ashbane, crowded with culinary accoutrements. They give each other presents of kitchen gadgets: smokers, hullers, scalders. Carolla lets him know that it is not every husband who can slice sea scallops into thin disks, steam them in a spoonful of white wine, and convert the juices into an unctuous sauce, and that she loves him for it. They drink back-page cocktails unknown to most bartenders and increasingly precious wines from European vineyards fainting with heat. They make a little world of toasting, roasting, boiling, grilling, and swilling which is inhabited only by the two of them. Once, a delivery man with a box of frozen crab legs looked around the kitchen and remarked, “You get a burglar in here, he sees all them knives, you got a killer instead of a thief.” And he laughed at his own wit.
After some happy years, their life together changes. Carolla’s mother dies, leaving her daughter money and a historic house called White Chimneys. And Rodrig Cushion appears out of nowhere.
White Chimneys is a large, extremely plain ten-room building, its defiant lack of exterior ornamentation a moneyed sneer at more ostentatious dwellings. White Chimneys dominates the landscape, exudes power. On the day of the funeral for Carolla’s mother, the thought flashes into Arwen’s mind that he is looking at an early example of brutalist architecture. The house is twenty-eight miles from the coast, set in acres of fourth-growth, boulder-strewn woodland that has seized the fields where sheep once ate grass down to the dirt. The woodland is neglected, a tangle of downed and broken trees, and in the clearings and along the old pathways grow invasive oriental bittersweet, buckthorn, Morrow’s honeysuckle, poison ivy, nettles, and Canada thistle in such exuberance that the place can never be rid of them. Foreign phragmites encircle and choke off a small pond.
After the cursory funeral—there are no other mourners—they walk through the house. Carolla leads the way with a bottle of lavender-essence germicide, spraying as she advances. She had visited the house only twice while her mother was alive.
“Yes, and now it’s mine so everything is new to me,” she says as she talks into her phone, making a list of the furniture and fittings, the heavy damask drapes and two Chinese knotted silk rugs. Arwen lags behind, trying to quench his growing distaste for the house. It seems to him that every wall and staircase exudes an unpleasant past—incurable illnesses, schemes and plots, intentions, hot-breath lies and betrayals. When Carolla drags chairs back and shoves tables so that the legs chatter across the uneven boards he hears centuries-old bullying laughter. They go upstairs and the groaning treads evoke women weeping in closets—people cornered by circumstances beyond modern recognition. He knows that it is a terrible house but he keeps his mouth shut. Carolla does not care about the truths of history or geology; her ideas of how the world and time and people come together are set in her mind like Roman concrete. So he says nothing, for there is no point in arguing with Roman concrete.
“I just love it. I will have to get an antiques expert in here to help me catalogue everything,” Carolla says. “I know Mother was really upset that a Searles family portrait was stolen by a house guest. Or a burglar. Or the guy who brings wood for the fireplaces. About twenty years ago. I don’t know if they ever got it back. I think it’s still on the IFAR list. An ancestor on a black horse.”
On that first walk-through of White Chimneys Arwen turns away from a cherry tallboy and, as if he had stubbed a toe, he is suddenly filled with utter despair and dread. The feeling lasts only a millisecond and does not return; he believes it to have been the remnant of an old memory, so old he can not pull its long-ago reality into his present consciousness. He supposes that the brief but terrible spasm of misery is something he had experienced in wordless infancy. Children, especially crying babies, have been invisible to him for decades but now he knows unmistakably that they are not complaining of wet diapers or hunger, that even without words they roar to show they are in the grip of black existential despair. That he and Carolla do not have children was once a secret sorrow to him; he is relieved now that he need not comfort a squalling disconsolate infant and falsely say, “There, there, it’s all right,” while knowing that nothing is or ever can be all right. Yes, it is better that they have not brought a child onto the despoiled earth.
White Chimneys is not a property that has been handed down through generations of Carolla’s family. Her family hands down nothing but the urge to move physically east and socially upward. The house was built in 1772 by Jonas Cutts, the wealthy owner of thousands of acres between two New England rivers who sold them off little by little, to maintain the Cutts family’s bizarre illusion of living on an English country estate. Sometime in the mid-nineteenth century the property came into the possession of a distant cousin, Henry Mintroy Searles, a Portsmouth shipping magnate and goods importer. In Portsmouth in the late twentieth century, at an exhibition of early-American dough troughs, Carolla’s mother found and rapidly married Nathan, the remnant Searles, who perished in the first wave of Covid. She metamorphosed overnight into a member of an “old Colonial family” with presumed American Revolution connections and became an impassioned spokeswoman for the house she described as a pivotal headquarters in the nation’s early history.
Upstairs they come to the library, a room whose walls are tiers of glass-fronted cabinets, the shelves freighted with books all the colors of old age: burned caramel, leached gray, dirty blue, streakily faded red, the green of nettles. A small fireplace in a sequestered alcove with two crewel-worked-upholstery wing chairs facing each other lets him know without evidence that here the earlier occupants made their grasping decisions.
As they walk through White Chimneys Carolla ticks off the possibilities.
“It’s better than I remember it. I can sell it. Or rent it out. It’s stuffed with antiques and portraits. It’s a historic house. Well, now that you’re here you know. The house is famous as a meeting place for the patriots. When Mother got it, after Nathan Searles passed, she had an open house the first weekend of September every year and tourists paid to walk around. There is a letter in the historical society’s collection showing that George Washington stayed in the north bedroom when he met John Adams. Or Sam Adams. Or Thomas Jefferson—one of them. Mother’s copy hangs in the entry hallway—I don’t know why it isn’t there now. We’ll look for it. Mother always intended to rent out the house for the ‘historical experience.’ But she never did it. Pretty sure I can rent it out.”
“And where will we live?” Arwen asks, the pinched saltbox in East Ashbane a two-hour drive from White Chimneys.
“Easy-peasy. We’ll fix up the carriage house with the money we get from selling the East Ashbane place. We will make a really great kitchen.”
He has to admit that it is sensible. The carriage house is a handsome and sturdy building. He likes its inaccessibility out in the broken black trees. They make an upstairs bedroom and living room in the carriage house and turn the entire stone-floored downstairs into a huge kitchen with two refrigerators, a professional chopping block, ceiling-to-floor pantry, three prep tables, two dishwashers, and a big squashy sofa for relaxing while waiting for something to come out of the oven. There is an alcove with an antique chestnut plank table and only two chairs, for they never invite guests to their feasts.
Carolla quits her job to work on the interior of White Chimneys.
“She left enough money and there is a lot of work to do on this place. We have to redo all the bathrooms. Also, the gardens and grounds are in terrible shape,” she says and looks at him.
“I can take care of that,” he says. He is glad then for his job with Albert Bebby and the classes in garden design. He even tells Bebby, “Al, it looks like a big job.” To Carolla he says that a restored and redesigned back garden at White Chimneys will be his contribution to the renovation if she gives him a budget.
“We’ll do it together,” she says. “Just let me know what your ideas are. And how much it will cost.”
He makes a plan with Bebby to work three days a week in Boston.
“I can sleep in the warehouse,” he says. But Bebby insists that Arwen use Daniel’s room—Daniel is immured in Oregon and has declared himself free of the East Coast. He is engaged to a veterinarian who specializes in reptiles and he writes a letter to Bebby describing his happiness near the Pacific, which he says is a superior ocean, far more interesting than the Atlantic. Bebby replies with some malice that the Atlantic is growing larger while the Pacific is shrinking.
With Bebby’s advice Arwen plans a wrought-iron archway. He discovers some antique bed edgings in a machinery warehouse, and although he wants to use native plants in the gardens Bebby begs him to choose the exotic and curious, as the original owners did. Yes, Arwen thinks, and that is why the place is choked with European weeds. Yet Albert Bebby knows the right stonemason to repair the tumbled rock wall; he gives Arwen the name of a poison-ivy-removal lady, and puts him on the trail of two old teak benches that once graced the gardens of the Maxfield Parrish house. They will be at their best placed along a gravelled path with good views of the water feature, a life-size spouting crocodile, a rescue from an estate sale. The crocodile looks uncomfortable as does all spouting statuary. The creature lies on its belly, snout raised like a howling wolf.