Authors: Nancy Thayer
At nineteen he had known exactly what he wanted: to live a life as good, dependable, and conservative as his father’s had been wasted and bad. He wanted to marry, to provide a safe and happy life for his children, to work well at some job. He began working for a building contractor in the summer, and immediately loved it. When he graduated from college, his professors advised him to go on to a school in architectural design, but Ron was not interested in cities or corporate buildings; he wanted to build homes. Safe, strong, lasting homes. When the day finally came when he was settled in Londonton, with two houses contracted for and his wife, Judy, pregnant with their first child, he felt triumphant, even rescued—it was so easy, living a good normal life! He was not doomed to repeat his father’s mistakes. Then, when his two children were born, healthy and perfect, and Ron was becoming successful in his business, he decided that there was only one prayer he need repeat for the rest of his life: “Dear God, just let my wife and children lead long and happy lives—
I’ll
take care of myself.” For he was sure of
his competence by then; he could muddle through on his own, because he had learned the rules of men and buildings and knew how to stick to them.
He doubted that many men got as much satisfaction from their work as he did. He had built houses with his own hands, and he could drive through Londonton and see these houses still standing, as solid and everlasting as the hills, and know his work was good. He had enjoyed the physicality of the work: the heft and perfume of lumber, the sleek force of nails, the evidence of measuring tapes and levels. He would drive out to the houses he was constructing on Sunday afternoons when no one else was around, and walk around on the subflooring, running his hands on the structural beams, thinking how he was building worlds within the world, and his the safer, the more sheltering. His houses were expensive compared to those of other builders, but Ron did not cheat his customers or lie or cut corners. His materials and workmanship were the very finest. He was proud of each house he built. He was proud of himself.
It seemed to him that with his own hands he had worked his way out of a nightmare and into a sort of paradise: he did work that he loved, and his wife and children were safe and happy. Surely this was the definition of a good man: to do honest work, to provide security and happiness for those under his responsibility. What a pleasure it was to him to buy a scarf for Judy and a toy for the babies, to buy sirloin steaks for dinner and good wine, to buy a swing set for the children and a car for Judy, to buy ponies for the children and a fur coat for Judy—providing pleasures for his family became addictive for him, the passion of his life. There is no greater luxury in the world, Ron discovered, than that of giving pleasure and happiness to the people one loves. This joy was redoubled by his knowledge of his wife’s childhood: she had suffered the embarrassments of her parents’ bankruptcy, she had gone without the clothes and other things she wanted, and as he gave his wife more and more, he felt he was in some way redressing the wrongs and sorrows of at least one person’s childhood. And Judy
cared
about her possessions so much. She took care of her home and her family and the material objects of their life with the devotion of a nun toward holy things. She was tireless, uncomplaining, graceful in her organization; she made the materials of their lives clean and shining. Nothing in their lives was dirty or frayed: what he provided, she preserved.
It was not Judy’s fault, nor the children’s, nor Ron’s—it was no one’s fault that their desires slowly began to burgeon and surpass his income. At first it was almost imperceptible, and it all seemed completely reasonable: a swing set for little children and
tennis camp and cars and colleges and clothes with the right labels for big children. A scarf for the bride of one year; a fur coat for the bride of fifteen. There is so much in the world to enjoy. When the Moyers rented a house in Nantucket for the summer, it seemed a good idea for the Bennetts to do the same. And the winters in New England are cold and long—it was nice to be able to fly to Bermuda or the Bahamas for a few days in February. If one is going to buy a piano, one might as well buy a Steinway baby grand. The children would be off on their own soon and that giant expense would be done with; why not provide as much pleasure as possible for them all now? Ron’s savings dwindled, then disappeared. He took a second mortgage on his house. He took out loans. He did not tell Judy any of this, because it would have worried her too much. And he was not doing anything that he couldn’t handle. The United States was built on credit. Looked at in the right light, we can say that we are only borrowing our lives from God—and if we can borrow from Him, then surely we can borrow from man and his institutions.
Ron did not believe, even as he sat drinking brandy in front of the dying fire, that his choice had been wrong. He was a man who lived by a strict set of values. And which is, after all,
bad:
to cause your family to suffer or to borrow money from an inhuman entity that doesn’t even know it’s gone?
When he had agreed to build the Londonton Recreation Center, the last thing on his mind had been the money. He had wanted this job—even though up until then he had built only houses—because of the honor involved; in this way he would be able to leave his mark firmly on the town. He would die knowing that generations of children would play happily and safely in the building he had built. It was a kind of immortality. But it had turned out to be a more difficult operation than he had thought. He had had to contract out much of the work to roofers and plumbers and electricians, but still the basic design and structure of the building were his, and his standards were the ones to be measured up to. This building would last forever. The work consumed his life; he had no time to do other houses or even the odd garage or family room or cosmetic work that he usually did at nights, on weekends, to augment his income. State licensing fees and insurance rose; health insurance rose, inflation hit hard. One Monday afternoon he found in the mail the tuition bill for his daughter’s first semester at college, the college she had longed to go to all her life, and that afternoon he didn’t have the money to pay it and couldn’t see where it would come from. He did not think he could get another loan from the banks when he had so many outstanding. Later that day, with this personal problem
on his mind, he returned some materials to Martin’s Lumber; he had by a sheer mistake in adding ordered twice what he needed. The refund he was given was so close to the amount of Cynthia’s tuition that it seemed fated, a message: here you are. He had gone to his bank, put the check into his account, and paid Cynthia’s tuition that day.
How it had spiraled, how he had come to lose control so completely, he did not know. In the past year it seemed that his life had splintered off into fragments, so that no matter how fast he spun or how quick he was, some things flew past his reach. When as a young man he had built houses, he had actually built those houses with his own hands, and it was this that had given him the greatest pleasure. As he grew older and more experienced, he learned to savor the intricacies of manipulating blueprints and designs, but still it was the actual work that he loved. He found his job as the contractor for the Londonton rec center more complicated than he had planned; he had to spend so much time on paperwork and ordering and signing and supervising that he had to have his crew do the actual work. It was as if someone else were raising a child while he gave directions from a distance. It was an unsatisfactory time for him, but he was committed, and he worked harder than he ever had in his life. When two personal loans came due, he did not have the time to consider the morality of it; he simply ordered more material than he needed, returned the material, and used the refund to pay off the loans. He planned to deal with it all later, when he had the time, when he was not under such pressure.
There were times, more and more of them as the work on the rec center progressed, when Ron was overcome with an emotion he had not felt before, at least not since childhood. He was lonely. He was lonely because now he carried a burden which he could share with no one—not his wife, not his friends, not even Wilbur Wilson—and that burden was the fear that he was after all not capable of carrying out the building of the rec center. Now, while he was caught in the middle of it, he realized that there was a possibility that he did not know enough, had not had enough experience, to do it well. Oh,
he
could have built it himself, with his own hands, given enough time; he could have done that. But he had to supervise the construction, oversee and hire and fire men, mediate between workers, satisfy the building inspectors, and spend hours on forms and regulations and paperwork and codes from intricate legal texts—it was the paperwork which really got him down. It bored him, and it irritated him. At the end of every day he went home exhausted, not with the sensual exhaustion of well-used muscles and a physically tired body, but with the draining, depressing, grim, and petty exhaustion of
mental strain. When he awoke each morning, he had to shoulder a fresh burden of doubt before he even went out the door, so he was tired from the start. But everyone around him seemed pleased with his work; they all leaned on him, the members of the recreation committee, his workers and subcontractors, his family, they all leaned on him with confidence.
In the midst of all this, the money he took, not steadily, but occasionally, as the need arose, seemed incidental, really. He could not focus on it. He could not see it as anything but a minor irritation in a maze of multiplying problems. It was around the middle of August when he realized that the money he had taken, bit by bit, refund by refund, had mounted up to almost seventy-five thousand dollars. This had not frightened him; it had annoyed him. Yet another problem to be dealt with. He had taken another refund, amounting to around twenty-five thousand dollars, and invested it in money market certificates. He had not been completely clear on this matter—finance was not his field and he did not have time to make a study of the various investment possibilities—but he planned, in a blurred but determined way, to keep investing the refunds in money market certificates until the interest earned equaled the amount he had borrowed from the rec center fund. But it was a vicious circle he had entered, for in order to earn as much money as he had taken, he had to take more. Time was against him. He would have to give the committee an accounting when the center was complete.
At the end of August, he and Judy celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, surely an occasion not to be slighted. Judy had openly yearned for a diamond and emerald ring, but Ron had to disappoint her. He had no money. He could not tell her this, not in so many words, for he suspected that Judy, for all her show of capability and strength, was in a way the frailest of them all. He knew that she exercised secretly in order to keep trim, and he suspected that she had other secret habits that kept her going. At this point in his life, he didn’t have the energy to imagine just exactly what these secret habits were … he was afraid to know too much. He was certain only that he must protect Judy from as much stress as possible. He had the memory of his father to warn him of the consequences of too much pressure on too weak a personality. But it made him lonely to know he could not share his problems with Judy. And he felt stingy for not giving her the ring.
That weekend, Cynthia and Johnny had surprised their parents with a celebration dinner party at Londonton’s finest restaurant. Dinner for fifty, and lots of champagne. It
was a glorious evening, one they could never duplicate, one Judy deserved. Of course Cynthia and Johnny couldn’t pay for it; Cynthia was in college and Johnny had just graduated, so they did the natural thing, they charged it to their parents. Ron took the refund for some plumbing materials to pay that bill. He did not want Mike Mansard, the owner of that restaurant, to think he couldn’t pay his bills. And with a strange logic, he felt almost justified in using the money for the restaurant bill, because he had refused the temptation of taking money to buy Judy the expensive ring. In a way, it seemed to him that the money he was using was his. He was working so hard. His life seemed completely tied to the rec center: they owned each other in a way.
These things happen to people: you are sitting in an airplane on the way to a vacation, and the plane crashes into a mountain; you are skating on a pond and hit thin ice and fall through; you’re walking through the skeleton of a house without your hard hat on and a beam falls and smashes your head open. These things happen to people every day. Bridges collapse, houses burn, cars collide, the heart attacks. Disasters. Surely those people sinking through ice, crashing in a plane, sliding off the road in a car, cried out with all their beings: No, God,
no
! It did them no good, and it would do Ron no good now, to cry or to wish he had done anything differently. For here he was, sitting by the fire with an empty brandy snifter in his hand, confronted with the truth.
He had taken over a hundred thousand dollars from the rec center fund. He had lied to Reynolds and Peter and Gary—poor loyal Gary, who had been so embarrassed by it all. The lie had seemed the right thing to say at the moment. It had saved them all a scene, and it had bought him time to think. Although there really was not all that much to think out. It was as clear to Ron as a blueprint, he could see it all at once. He did not have the money. He would not be able to give them back the money, not in the morning, not ever; he had no money left. Looking back, he could see he had been stupid, but it was too late now to think of that, and it was foolish to waste energy on self-reproof. It was done now, like a fallen plane.
There was one option open to him still, he supposed. He could admit that he’d taken the money, and could not repay it; he could declare bankruptcy, sell this house, and slowly, over the years, pay back what he owed. That way he would be at least morally in the right. But it would cause his children and wife such disgrace and anguish—he couldn’t even imagine what it might do to Judy. She had been through bankruptcy once in her life, she should not have to go through it again. She should not have to lose her
house, her life, she should not have to watch her daughter be refused the college she’d chosen because of money. If he told the committee he had no money, but would sell the house and slowly pay them back, he knew the inevitable outcome: people in town would be dismayed and angry, they would turn against the Bennetts, and Ron wouldn’t have a chance of getting another house to build. In short, they would all be ruined. The three people he loved most in the world would be ruined because of him, because of his stupidity. If he alone were to bear the consequences, he would gladly do so, but he could not bring himself to pull this catastrophe down on the heads of those he loved—not if he had any choice left open to prevent it.