The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai Page A

years. So I go, ‘Oh, well if it’s hard for you to climb, I can go by myself.’”
    “Oooh, brilliant!” Gurgle of southern laughter, toss of curls.
    “So twenty seconds later she’s marching up the stairs. And here.” He shuffled through the photos and found two of the attic door—one from outside, one from inside. “It’s a simple old lock. The key was just two prongs.”
    “But she had the key on her?”
    “No. I mean, I was exaggerating about the twenty seconds. Really she disappeared for five minutes and came back with the key. So sue me. I’m a poet. I’m prone to exaggeration.” He grinned at Miriam, who was too absorbed in the photos to notice.
    “Here’s what I think,” she said. “I doubt there’s anything valuable there. No one would put a rolled up painting in a file cabinet.”
    “But a poem!” Leland said. “A poem that was part of someone’s application!”
    “Slides,” Doug said. “Letters of recommendation. Project proposals. Listen: Just this summer? The New York Public Library bought the archives from the Yaddo colony for some huge amount, and they’re saying there’s unpublished Carson McCullers in there. We’re not in the same league, but still.”
    “So how do we convince her to let us look?”
    Doug sighed and watched the joggers going past. He wasn’t sure if Gracie’s persistent and decisive evasion of Laurelfield history had to do with her guilt at having displaced the colony, orher shame at being associated with so many unwashed artists, but she hadn’t budged. At Bruce’s birthday dinner last week, when Doug had asked if historians had ever shown interest in documenting Laurelfield, Gracie had said, “Douglas, isn’t there something more productive you ought to focus on? Perhaps you could publish a novel.” (“What is her problem ?” Miriam had whispered later. “Her energy is so off.”)
    “What if we talk her into donating it to a library?” Leland said. “Or the college?”
    Doug said, “I think she’d sooner donate her kidneys.”
    “It doesn’t seem that Gracie’s the right person to make the judgment call,” Miriam said. “She’s not a writer, she’s not an artist, she’s not a historian. And didn’t you say”—she turned to Leland—“it’s an easy lock to pick?”
    When a man sat down at the next bench with his laptop they began whispering, but what they came up with over the next hour was a hypothetical scenario so risky that Doug knew he’d never pull the trigger on it. They were having fun though, and so he let Leland and Miriam plot.
    They agreed that the best time to break into the attic would not be on one of the rare occasions when both Gracie and Bruce were gone. Sofia was usually around, as were Bruce’s personal secretary and the guy who came to walk Hidalgo. If someone met them on their way out, they’d have a hard time explaining the armloads of files. Miriam was the one who remembered the Democratic fund-raiser Gracie and Bruce were hosting in early December, which Doug and Zee and the younger Breens would be expected to attend. They could easily smuggle Leland in. Sofia would be working downstairs with the caterers. It would be loud. No one would hear if they had to bust down the attic door.
    “It’ll be like Notorious !” Miriam said. “Only we won’t get caught like Ingrid Bergman.” Seeing how her hands flew aroundher hair and her nose flared out, how her whole face was pink and bright, Doug wondered if she’d actually been depressed all summer. Those other times she’d seemed happy, like standing on the counter that first day with those plates, it must have been something fake. It was nothing like this.
    Doug finally shook his head. “Zee would never forgive me,” he said. “Not for going after the files, but—I mean, Gracie would kick us out.” He could imagine his mother-in-law smiling thinly, saying that now that he’d found a new career in espionage, he could surely afford his own