The Hundred-Year House Read Online Free PDF

flung himself at the window again and again, claws scraping the glass.
    “Oh God,” Miriam said, “I hate poodles.”
    “Just wait,” Doug said.
    Bruce answered the door himself, tossing Hidalgo peanuts to keep him at bay. “Welcome!” He gave each woman a long kiss on the wrist like a lecherous Austrian prince, pumped Doug’s hand, and slapped his arm around Case. “My boy!” he shouted, as if he’d never talked to his son before in his life.
    Bruce was red-faced, with big cheeks and a ring of white hair and a belly of hardened fat. Later, he would bully Doug into smoking a cigar with him out back. But he was a good man, and Doug hadn’t really had a father, so the handshakes, the cigar, the talk about bumping into the Clintons on Martha’s Vineyard—he found them weirdly thrilling.
    Doug saw Hidalgo advancing and kneed him in the chest before the claws could make contact with his shoulders, before the beast could leave welts down his arms again. Hidalgo was not one of those poodles with the haircuts. He was shaggy, fur the color of a rotten peach, breath like hot compost. Bruce threw another peanut.
    Gracie stood waiting in the library, in a long, gauzy green thing that Doug’s mother would have called a Hostess Dress. Zee kissed her cheek. “So you’re locking us out now?”
    “Bruce,” Gracie said, “did you lock the door? The ghost must’ve done it.”
    “The ghost only ever does three things,” Doug whispered to Miriam. “Closes doors, knocks on things, and flushes toilets.”
    Miriam whispered back: “Maybe it died from getting locked out of the bathroom.”
    Bruce mixed everyone gin and tonics without asking, and poured himself his standard glass of Mount Gay rum. “Let me tell you something, though,” he said, in a voice that wasn’t at all asking permission to let it tell you something. “We’re going to need new locks anyway. Y2K, December thirty-one, these fancy security systems are worthless. Crime will shoot up, credit cards won’t work, and are you aware, even your car , your car has a computer. I’m buying a ’57 Chevy. No computer, and I’ve always wanted one anyway. But I’ll tell you, no one should be out celebrating that night. Nuclear power plants , think about that. Best we can do is hunker down with the canned goods and barricade the doors.”
    “How festive,” Gracie said. Bruce had given the same speech at every opportunity for the past year, but this was the first time he’d mentioned the nuclear plants. “Let’s change the subject, shall we? Something less apocalyptic. Case, how’s your job search?”
    Case, sprawling on the couch, stretched his legs out. “I got some fish in the water,” he said.
    Zee said, “Some lines?”
    “One could say that, Zee. One could say that.”
    Bruce said, “I’m going to introduce him to Clarence Mahoney. Big guy in Chicago. Lots of projects, and none of this dot-com nonsense. Watch what happens to those dot-com folks, January one.”
    Case turned to Doug. “Tell us what your poems are about,” he said. “Nature, or what?”
    Doug tried to hide the ice cube under his tongue while he talked. “I’m actually writing a monograph. A book. On a poet named Edwin Parfitt. He stayed here a few times, at the arts colony.”
    “Just imagine,” Gracie said, gesturing around the room. “This place filled with painters and musicians!”
    “I’ve been meaning to ask,” Doug went on, willing himself not to look at Zee. “What about back in Toronto? There wouldn’t be anything from the colony up there, would there? Archives or photos? That got taken back?” He’d asked it before, but her answers were always so evasive that he held out hope she might blurt something different if she was in a good mood, if the weather was right, if she’d had enough to drink. (Once, after champagne, she’d volunteered the story of Zee’s birth in fairly graphic detail.) Plus she never seemed to remember that she’d already turned him