Burning Down the House Read online

  ALSO BY JANE MENDELSOHN

  I Was Amelia Earhart

  Innocence

  American Music

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2016 by Jane Mendelsohn

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a divison of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd., Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mendelsohn, Jane, [date]

  Burning down the house / by Jane Mendelsohn. — First edition.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-101-87545-2 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-101-87546-9 (eBook)

  I. Title.

  PS3563.E482B87 2016

  813'.54—DC23 2015018821

  eBook ISBN 9781101875469

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photograph © Andria Patino/Alamy Stock Photo

  Cover design by Peter Mendelsund

  v4.1_r1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Jane Mendelsohn

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One: The Necessary Condition

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Two: The Total Dark Sublime

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part Three: The River Neva

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Epilogue

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  To Ann Close, editor and friend, and to Lily, Grace, and Nick

  When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. Two o’clock and the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing with light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner, I saw that it was Gatsby’s house, lit from tower to cellar.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby

  I will write my name in fire red.

  —JEAN RHYS, Wide Sargasso Sea

  And after the fire, a still small voice.

  —1 KINGS 19:12

  PROLOGUE

  IT BEGINS with a child. She lives far away from any city, high up in the mountains. She sits by a fire. Light turns in crazy pinwheels on her soft young cheeks. Wind blows and the moonlit clouds go wild, an armada of wayward ships. Her mother and her father are close by, talking quietly in a tone that could be ominous or soothing, depending on the words, which she cannot understand. Her father says something and her mother begins to cry. The girl pulls her legs up and rests her chin between her knees.

  —

  Her father comes over and sits next to her. I remember the day you were born, he says. I swore then that I would always take care of you. He wraps his arms around the girl and holds her tightly. Life is not very long, he tells her. I want you to have everything.

  —

  The recruiter had come by when the child was getting water. She was off by the river, with her laughing friends. He seemed to know the area, the family, the girl. He spoke their language and promised safety and good work. He wore a shining watch and carried a leather wallet and showed the couple a picture of a restaurant where the girl could get some work. He pulled the photo out from between a wad of bills. The man and the woman were not sure what a restaurant was, but they were too amazed by the recruiter and the bills and the gleaming diner in the photograph to ask him any questions other than when.

  —

  When is tomorrow.

  —

  At ten years old she is taken away. Never again will she see the swollen sun rise over the hillside behind the hut. The snowy ashes in the fire pit, the skinny dog. She is taken in a direction she has never been, a passenger across the landscape, a wisp of information traveling through the air. She moves up and over the mountain range, past reindeer, gnarled trees, through a fog tinged with a piney scent that she has known all her life and that she takes for granted as the smell of being alive. She follows the recruiter down and down and down. The trip takes days. At the bottom of the mountain the scent is gone. A car is waiting for them. They glide through the countryside as if on water. Later a city materializes beyond the window, silhouettes of buildings against a smoggy sky, a demented network of streets and screeching commerce through which she tumbles like a coin or a broken bit of code, looking for something to attach herself to, to make some meaning.

  —

  On Tverskaya Street the women are called Butterflies. The recruiter tells the girl not to talk to them, that she will be going somewhere much better, a special place. He keeps her in the back room of a liquor store, and he brings her salty sandwiches and candy.

  —

  Two days later she is on a boat. At the crowded port cranes rise up like gargantuan metal insects against the glowing sky. The water in the river sloshes green and oily. On Tverskaya Street she realized quickly that the recruiter did not have her interests at heart, even when he took her to buy some clothes, even when he fed her the candy and sandwiches. But it was hard to reconcile that understanding with the knowledge that her parents had sent her off with him for her own benefit. When he says goodbye to her briefly, offhandedly, on the ship in the liquid predawn light, she is not sorry to be rid of him, but when she sees her new handler with his dead eyes and his many piercings from his brows to his nose to his cheeks to his lips, she understands that the recruiter had treated her kindly. This new chaperone does not even speak her language. What he communicates is by gesture and force.

  —

  She learns on the crossing that she is not supposed to resist the men who come to her at night. She rises up like some demon from the dead when they try to touch her but although she is tenacious she is not big. She has a strong face, beautiful but not pretty. Her eyes are intelligent and curious and still innocent although less so with each day of the crossing. She tries to fight with her fists, her knees, her nails, her teeth. She becomes a better fighter but is still no match for the parade of men. There is a grunting regularity to their visits. When she is not lost in the mystical elsewhere in her mind that she conjures to escape the daily brutality of this new life, she will occasionally catch a glimpse of their fat hungry faces and feel that, although nature as she has known it is beautiful and pure, the world is ugly and mankind unapologetically vicious.

  —

  One night a visitor comes to
her with a gun. He wants to enjoy her while pointing the gun to her head the entire time. Thrashing to escape the barrel against her skin she is shot twice: once in the arm and once not far from her heart. The man races out of the cabin with his shirt smeared with blood and his pants in his hand. She lies on a sheet drenched in red, and her thin frame shudders. She feels nothing but an eerie peace.

  —

  The chaperone screams at her and finds a doctor who will care for her without asking any questions. The doctor comes often and she looks forward to his visits. He makes sure she is given proper food. Over the course of three weeks, as the ship stops at ports along its way, she recovers steadily and the doctor is pleased with her progress. The chaperone arranges to meet the doctor on the deck of the ship in the early morning to pay him as promised for his services. But the chaperone does not intend to pay. The chaperone greets the doctor with a knife and the doctor sees the steep side of the boat slanting against the rising sun as he bobs in the water before he sinks.

  —

  Now the child is no longer a child. She has been turned inside out and has felt her childhood cascade from her like the liquid and seeds of a fruit pouring into the garbage, the pure beginning of life discarded, a useless muck. She is allowed to walk on the deck to assist in her recovery. The passengers eye her skeletal shape and see no meat. She breathes in the ocean air. She looks at the rolling gray. She thinks about jumping overboard but for the moment her physical weakness is her salvation: she is too exhausted to kill herself.

  —

  When they pull into the port of their final destination she is presented to a new handler, another entrepreneur in this chain of small businessmen. As soon as they are away from the crowd and unseen he hits her to make absolutely certain she knows that he controls her. You are my property, his fists say. She has nowhere, has never had anywhere, to go.

  —

  They drive through the monotonous streets of a new city. She is no longer fascinated by the teeming life or the variety of people. As night falls they cross a bridge strung with lights and each light seems to her like a captured star wishing to return to the sky. Within a week she is living in the back of a spa in a strip mall. Her boss is a woman with an enormous forehead and tiny eyes, a cap of black hair and a slicing voice. Men come to the salon, which in the window advertises STRESS REDUCTION. Sometimes the girls, for the girl is not alone, get driven in a van a few miles away to a large hotel. She moves through her days with a determination not to die that comes from where she has no idea. Maybe the bad music that is always playing. Maybe the computer in the boss’s room. Maybe those sounds and machines give her the sense that there is another life, another frequency or signal that if only she could grasp it would pull her through a hole in time or space back to where the stars are not strangled by invisible strings and instead free to move continually, fluidly, up above. She sees girls covered with cuts and others beaten blue and another one hang herself with a pair of jeans.

  —

  She is used by men from all walks of life and given drugs by the woman with the cap of black hair. A customer who says he loves her gives her extra cash every week. She hides the money and fights more fiercely with the drugs than she fights anymore with the men. She wins. She beats the drugs. She takes an action to change her life. In the year 20— when she is seventeen years old she runs away and rides a bus through the dead fluorescent glow of the Lincoln Tunnel into the mirrored darkness of New York City.

  PART ONE

  The Necessary Condition

  He had told her, the first evening she ever spent at Gardencourt, that if she should live to suffer enough she might some day see the ghost with which the old house was duly provided. She apparently had fulfilled the necessary condition.

  —HENRY JAMES, The Portrait of a Lady

  1

  THEY ALWAYS CELEBRATED important family events out of town, usually in another country. Here they were in a black car as it sped along the highway, now turning onto a side road, disappearing and emerging from under trees like a blinking light on a Global Positioning System screen moving across a continent. The tinted windows flickering with shadows and reflections, sparks dancing against the glass. From the outside, the family riding in the car was difficult to understand, the way the movements of a fire, even when viewed within the safe confines of a fireplace, seem random and uncontrolled. However, inside, from amid the licking flames of its interlocking relationships, the Zane family made its own fantastical sense. All families are complicated, but because their connections constitute the primary reality that its members know, some families create a world that to them is more comprehensible than the world itself.

  —

  From the point of view of the fire in the fireplace, the living room appears extraordinary, disorienting, and obscure. And the unexpected lashings of the blaze feel comfortable, ordinary, and known.

  —

  This time Jonathan had flown his driver over, so Vlad was taking Jonathan, Miranda, and Alix from the airstrip to the house in the same car. It was awkward for Alix because she had been conscious of the tension between her brother and his fiancée ever since they had begun their journey and they had been journeying for a long time: from New York to London, and then from London on a smaller plane, and now in this sedan, here, on a road in the British countryside lined with ancient trees whose branches and leaves so loose and careless reminded Alix of one of Jonathan’s silk ties, flung casually over his shoulder as it was at this very moment. She sat next to Miranda, while Jonathan had opted to sit up front with Vlad. Alix and Jonathan had two much-younger half brothers, nine-year-old twins, and Miranda had recently discovered that Jonathan was sleeping with their nanny. Miranda had threatened to call off the wedding, was still threatening, convincingly, to leave tomorrow and head to Sardinia where some friends had a place, but Jonathan had talked her into coming this far and now here she was sitting in the backseat being driven to the manor house which Jonathan’s family had rented for the occasion. Her eyes were red, but she was in possession of her usual perfect haircut and amused expression. Alix had no idea what Miranda was thinking, but she knew that Miranda was capable of impulsivity—and in this case maybe bolting was the rational thing to do—in spite of her preternaturally still surface. Miranda was like a big cat. Composed, she looked out the window at an angle which almost touched her disembodied yet vivid reflection and which made it appear to Alix as though her brother’s betrayed fiancée were in the middle of having a quiet conversation with herself.

  —

  Alix thinks that it is too late. Too late for her to have any kind of life other than this life dictated by her family circumstances, defined by these people trapped inside their pain. She does not believe as she rides in the car on the way to her brother’s wedding that anything can grow other than these old green trees which line the road. She is waiting for Ian, for the friend who knows her, who represents a time when she believed that things might grow. She sits in the car and waits for Ian.

  —

  Vlad, said Jonathan, could you pull over for a minute?

  Thanks.

  The rush of green coming at Alix made her eyes blur. So much beauty outside, so much misery in the car.

  Thanks, said Jonathan. And now that we’ve stopped would you mind getting out for minute? Just to give us some privacy. You’ve got an umbrella, right?

  Vlad nodded and reached down for his umbrella and opened the car door and stepped out and stood by the side of the road. Jonathan swiveled around in the front seat and said: Alix, you too, okay? Miranda and I have to talk before we get there.

  No, not okay, said Alix. I don’t have an umbrella. It’s not like I don’t know what’s going on anyway so you can speak freely in front of me. Or get out of the car yourselves.

  Alix, it’s not raining very hard.

  You’re right. It’s more like a mist. So you guys won’t get too wet. Or you can huddle under Vlad’s umbrella.

  Alix…

&nb
sp; Miranda got out of the car without saying anything and walked several yards along the road beyond where Vlad stood smoking a cigarette.

  Thanks, Alix.

  You’re welcome. The fresh air will probably do you both a world of good.

  —

  Alix watched Jonathan follow Miranda down the road. The mist swallowed their outlines and as they met in the distance the image of the two of them through the watery window fused with the raindrops in a hazy, romantic picture. Alix could have imagined that they were very happily in love. They were, in their own way. Some people, thought Alix, are happiest when they are unhappy. Miranda was one of those people. I am too, thought Alix. And in a flash of insight that sped past her like one of the cars on the road, she understood: but some people are not like that, some people are happy when they are happy. A flash and it was gone. She wouldn’t have believed it even if you had been able to prove to her that she had had the thought herself. The memory of the idea was somewhere in her mind, but already Jonathan and Miranda were walking back toward the car together and Alix was aware of what their postures meant before her conscious brain had even registered that she had seen them. She didn’t know what Jonathan had said or promised or what Miranda had threatened or demanded. But Alix knew: Miranda would stay at least another day.

  —

  It’s on the way to the wedding that Alix remembers Poppy will be coming too. Alix doesn’t always look forward to seeing Poppy, her much-younger half sister who is also her cousin, but now Alix does, she looks forward to all that youthful energy and stupid beauty. Looking forward to seeing Ian and Poppy, Alix is able to bear the rest of the ride. Later she will remember the feeling she had in the car while thinking about Poppy and Ian, the mixture of despair and anticipation, and she will think that she’d had no idea what was coming. How could she have known? Why should she have known that Poppy and Ian would begin a flirtation at Jonathan’s wedding that would evolve into a romance and escalate into a tragedy?