Authors: Jane Smiley
They were interested in current events, more interested than I was, but, as they filtered every issue through tests of faith, sometimes they took unexpected positions. In the election the year before, my father had ended up abstaining from voting altogether for the first time in his life, because the candidate he preferred, Ronald Reagan, was unclear about his religious background. How could he be Irish and not have a lot of Catholic back there somewhere? And if he wasn’t or hadn’t been Catholic, how come he wasn’t more forthcoming about it? Didn’t he care? But it was impossible that he didn’t care; indifference to religion, as far as my father was concerned, was the greatest impossibility of all. However attractive he found the candidate, in the end he couldn’t pull that lever for fear that the mind-shaping effects of early Catholicism were latent in the man. I remember him saying with perfect seriousness as the election approached, “Well, I hate to say this, but I would just have to meet him and judge for myself before I could vote for him, so I can’t do it.” Somehow, something that bothered others, and that I expected to bother my parents, that he was a product of Hollywood (and my parents abjured movies and did not allow me to see one until I was fourteen) didn’t come up. Hollywood was something you could slough off; early Catholic influence was not. And my parents were suspicious of the Moral Majority and the other evangelical movements, too. “Baptists!”—my father would shake his head—or “If they really understood what John Wesley said, they wouldn’t be flocking to that church!”
My mother set out three prettily embroidered napkins, and we sat down in our places at the dining room table. Things were a bit awkward, then, because in spite of the fact that we got along well enough—or, perhaps, in order to get along well enough—we didn’t have much to say to one another. I heard the teakettle whistle and, with some relief, got up to make the tea. When I returned with the pot and the cups on a tray, my father was helping himself to another slice of the pudding, and my mother was well into hers. I set a cup of tea by each of our places and put the pitcher of milk in front of my father. I sat down again. My father asked me what I had been doing. I bragged a little about selling a lot of houses.
“I’ll tell you what happens around here.” He shook his head. “I’ve seen it more than once. Someone, or some group of people, suddenly gets a lot of money, the way people did in the twenties, say, and all of a sudden they discover this area, and it’s beautiful and unspoiled, and they build a legendary house, and everyone around here thinks, Well, it’s finally happened; we’ve finally been discovered, and it’s all gravy from now on. But what it’s really like is an extra-high tide. It floats things up onto the beach one time, but that’s the only time. The tideline hasn’t changed.”
My mother was nodding. She said, “There’s always a reason why some place is unspoiled.”
“Too far out of town,” agreed my father.
Since this directly contradicted our Salt Key Farm plan, I was tempted to argue, but I had yet to tell them much about the place, and anyway I had stopped arguing with them so long ago I didn’t know how to begin, so I just sat there uncomfortably, watching my father pour milk in his tea and drink it down. The fact was, I had always preferred Gordon and Betty to my own parents, just as, according to Felicity, Gordon had always preferred me to his own sons. Maybe the real tragedy was that Norton and Bobby didn’t prefer anyone to their own father.
But finally I said, “What do you mean, there’s always a reason why some place is unspoiled?”
“Well, people do tend to spoil things, don’t they,” said my mother cheerfully. “They take the best places first, so what’s left is naturally second best for some reason.”
My father was nodding. They always agreed, so they had this habit of one nodding when the other one was talking. “Here’s what I think,” he said. “We can’t live in paradise, because man is fallen. He felled himself with his own hand. Redemption doesn’t take place in this world, Scripture says, so whatever looks like paradise can’t be, and so it isn’t. If we look for it to be, then we are deceived, and Satan is at work.”
“More than you know,” said my mother. Now they nodded together. I was having my usual feeling—whenever I found myself thinking that they lived in the same world I did, I was almost instantly disabused of that notion. I must have sighed a deep sigh, because my mother said, “That’s right. But the lessons are all around us, if we choose to pay attention to them. More tea, honey?”
As I went down the front steps to my car, I wondered for the umpteenth time what would happen if one of them died. I had been wondering about this in one way or another since childhood—which one could I live without, did they actually have any existence apart from each other, who could I live
with,
what in the world had they been like before they met (he was thirty at the time; she was thirty-one, not young), would the survivor feel any sense of relief, or would he (she) just die? They, of course, would have answered that it was the simplest possible thing for one to go on ahead and receive the well-deserved jeweled crown, and it would be as a moment in eternity until the other one appeared. But could you have such a thing in a marriage as too much agreement? Would either of them manifest less righteousness if he or she
didn’t
have the support of the other one once in a while? And, the oldest question of all: Would things be different, would
I
be different, if I were one of many, even of two or three? If there had been two or three to be holy and two or three to be prodigal, maybe I would have escaped notice altogether.
There was a late Christmas party at the Davids’ place that I was headed for. I had hardly seen Felicity, only briefly one Sunday evening at Gordon’s. The days went by. That was reassuring in a way, because it seemed like we were putting more distance between ourselves and that dynamite explosion, making more of an opportunity for a real solution to present itself. Driving from my parents’ house to Deacon reminded me of another feature of my childhood—the safety of doing nothing, of nothing happening. My parents were always on the alert for sin, always ready to root it out, especially out of me. Categories of misbehavior were clear-cut and rather numerous. I could get into trouble without really meaning to, and my father realized this but punished me anyway, to give me something to remember the next time. He thought that if a memory of the punishment cropped up right at the same time as the temptation to transgress, I would stop myself. It was all a manner of systematic training. For whatever reason, this did not work with me, so there was always a period after I realized I had transgressed but before my parents found out. It was like being under a spell, so quiet and still, my parents so like themselves and me so like myself, yet lit up with the expectation of what was to come. Any stray word or action could break the spell, tip them off to the transgression, tumble us into the endless effort to drive sin out of me as it had been driven out of them. Over the years, I suppose, I had gotten to be a careful person. The Baldwins had made me more exuberant, but they hadn’t really made me less careful.
But Felicity was at the Davids’. It was nearly midnight. She drew me into a corner and put her arm through mine and bent her head against mine and kissed me on the cheek and I was so happy to see her and feel her presence that I rang like a bell with the shock of good fortune. She whispered, “You know, I sent them skiing today. I said to Hank that the boys had been wanting to spend time with him, which was an absolute lie, and then I said to Jason and Clark that he missed them even though he doesn’t say much about it, and so they were on the slopes for seven hours, and everyone came home, very happy and tired, to the turkey I cooked, and they were sleeping by nine! I was a tremendously good mom today.” She kissed me right on the lips. The Davids’ house was dark and filled with people I had never seen before. David John came over and put his arm around Felicity. He said, “No secrets, darling.”
“I told you I drugged my whole family so I could come to this party.”
“You could have just told them you were going to Midnight Mass. That’s what Elena did.” He gestured across the room. “How’s Joey?”
I looked meaningfully at Felicity. “A little frustrated.”
“Oh, my goodness. Do tell.”
“He wants me to give him dirty pictures.”
“Of you?”
“Not dirty,” I said. “Just nude.”
“Oh, the dirt comes later. Absolutely. Yes.”
“But they’re impossible to take!” exclaimed Felicity. “Have you ever tried to take a picture of your whole body? I bought an inexpensive Polaroid, but I couldn’t get anything in. I mean, one shoulder that looks like a loaf of bread and a breast that looks like a mozzarella cheese. So I got my husband’s camera, one that has a shutter delay, but then it felt strange setting it up and then running over and arranging myself on the bed and even stranger setting it up and running over and arranging myself on the dining room table. And when I had a roll, I didn’t dare take it to be developed because I had forgotten and put my face in.” She was laughing.
“I want your face in. That’s what makes it not dirty pictures.” I was laughing too, mostly with delight at the thought of all her efforts.
“It’s a much harder assignment than I thought it would be.”
“I’ll take them,” I said.
“Oh, honey,” said David John.
“Come to my condo.”
She shook her head. “That’s a half hour from here and I have to be home in an hour.”
“Mingle,” said David John, and then we had to mingle. Felicity stayed for maybe forty-five minutes. I watched her the whole time. She kissed me good-bye when she left, a full-on Felicity kiss that reassured me in several ways, and then I stayed till at least three, because I couldn’t believe how many new people had slipped into our area without first stopping at Stratford Realty. I was very friendly and welcoming—a lot of them hadn’t bought yet. I fell into bed later thinking I had done a good night’s work in every way.
It snowed on Christmas Day, and I had a piece of luck. I was supposed to go to Gordon’s late in the afternoon, but I stopped by my office on the way, to do paperwork for an hour. Even though the snow was cascading out of the sky, there came a knock on the door, and then Morris Levine walked in. Morris was looking for a five-bedroom house, and he wanted to buy before New Year’s. I pulled out the multiple listings, and we found one—just one—five-bedroom house. It was south of Deacon, maybe seven miles from the office, and we drove there carefully; Morris had chains on his tires. I let us in with the key in the lockbox, and two hours later I had a signed purchase agreement—a perfect example, I told Bobby, when he didn’t even show up for work on Monday (hungover), why Realtors have to be prepared to work holidays. “Well, yeah,” he said, utterly without conviction. But by the time I had finished with Morris Levine, the roads were so snowy that I dared not go anywhere but straight home, and so I didn’t see Felicity, which I had been counting on.
After that, two storms came right up the coast and turned inland, and a third storm came south off Lake Erie instead of going north, and the result was that I was preoccupied with shoveling and just getting by for almost two weeks. I saw more of my parents. I shoveled their driveway and walks five times in fifteen days and helped my mother with grocery shopping and a dentist appointment; she was terribly afraid of breaking her hip. Even if my father hadn’t been at his store, I would have taken her around because, as she herself said, “He’s got enough to handle in this weather with his own old age.” On Sundays, I took them to church before noon and brought them home in the late afternoon. It reminded me of when they drove me to church when I was a boy. We took the same streets and made the same turns. The only difference was that I was not as sure as I had been that everyone going in the opposite direction was literally going to Hell. I didn’t see Felicity at all. I came to think that spring would solve our insoluble dilemma or at least we would find ourselves going off together again once things picked up at the state park and Hank had more to do.
CHAPTER
15
I
T WAS LATE JANUARY
when I emerged from this familial cocoon. The weather had been clear for a couple of days. The sun was out and the roads were dry. Ice hung in the trees like glass beads. I was driving around, checking on my listings to make sure they didn’t need any caretaking—that the driveways were clear and no tree branches had fallen in front of doorways. I didn’t want any buyer’s first impression to be that there was a mess to clean up. I had two listings in Portsmouth, and after the first one I happened to be driving past Cheltenham Park. I saw Marcus’s car in the parking lot, so I turned around at the next intersection and went back to see what was going on. I hadn’t heard much from him—or from anyone, for that matter. My eagerness for Felicity had subsided a little too. I was just a guy doing stuff, not a billionaire in the making or a connoisseur of the erotic. It was boring, but familiar and not unpleasant. That was another pleasure of not being married—I could subside into dullness without bothering anyone.
I hadn’t been to Marcus’s office since he’d moved in, which struck me for the first time as odd. If I was his partner and his friend, shouldn’t my presence be required more often? Perhaps I shouldn’t be feeling like I didn’t know even the most basic facts, like where was the place. Whose office was this, anyway, Salt Key Corporation or Marcus himself? I was suspicious and edgy by the time I actually found the door and opened it, and my first unmannerly question to the person inside was “Who are you?”
She looked up. She was a thin brown-haired woman in a blue dress, and before she had time to say anything, Marcus flowed out of his office with a grin and came around her desk. “Joe! This is so perfect, man. I just said to Jane, here, you’ve got to call up Joe at his office and see where he is, because there’s so much going on that I need to talk to him about. God! I can’t believe this weather! Where have you been, in hibernation?”
“More or less. Bosom of the family.”
“Speaking of family, this is my sister Jane. She’s helping me out.”
Jane came around her desk with a big smile, holding her hands out, and when I went to shake hers, she slid smoothly up to me and gave me a hug. She said, “Joe this and Joe that. I was beginning to think they were putting me on, and there wasn’t any real Joe to help me put my little brother on the right path.”
“Jane Burns?” I said.
“Ah. I wish. Jane Johnson for now.”
“Have you moved here?”
“Lock, stock, and dog. Three weeks ago today.”
“Where did you come from?”
“Kansas City.”
I laughed.
She said, “You must have been to Kansas City.”
“No, I was thinking of something my mother said. Someone she knew came back from the Midwest, and she couldn’t remember where, only that it was one of those places with slaughterhouses.”
They laughed.
“So, Jane,” said Marcus. “I’m going back to my office, and you show Mr. Stratford in to me.” He sped into his office and closed the door.
A moment later, Jane called out, “Ready or not, here we come!”
Then she turned to me. Even though she was plain-looking, she had a humorous smile and a twinkle in her eye. She propelled me in front of her, opened the door, and said, “Mr. Stratford to see you, Mr. Burns. Won’t you go right in, Mr. Stratford?”
She closed the door behind us.
Marcus leaned across the desk. “Jane is a genius, Joe. I couldn’t believe it when she told me she was coming East. I begged her to come and work with me, even though she had already taken a position in New York. I won’t even tell you what they were going to pay her to analyze third-world loans. Enough to buy an apartment by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was all set to sign the papers and I talked her out of it. She is really excited about what we are doing. Makes banking look like playing pattycake, that’s exactly what she said. I mean, everything I know I learned from Jane.”
“I didn’t realize you had a sister.”
“Well, she’s five years older, you know; she was a senior in high school when I was in seventh grade, so she’s always seemed beyond everything else. And then she moved out to the Midwest right out of college, got married and everything, so I’ve mostly viewed her as a legend.” He leaned forward. “No kids. That’s the bad part. She waited too long. And then he left her for a younger woman who he’s already got pregnant, and they aren’t even married! Good thing my mother isn’t alive to hear that. Ugh. I can’t believe that guy. I’d like to say I could see it all along, but I couldn’t. I thought he was great. We’ve played golf plenty of times, no problem. I thought they were stuck together with Krazy Glue.”
“She must be devastated.”
“Well, she and Linda have had a few talks, but she’s a monster for work. Just sets it aside and gets on with it. She is really on top of things, too. She knows all the new investment instruments, and how they work, and who’s doing this and who’s doing that.”
“What are
we
doing?”
“Well, that property is still on the market, the farm by the side of the road that we talked about a couple of months ago. Time to make our offer. Crosbie thinks the whole thing is a brilliant idea, very visionary; even better than that, I discovered he’s been in secret negotiation with an S and L in the western part of the state. I have to hand it to you, Joe. I didn’t understand what Crosbie had to offer, but now I do, and it’s exactly what you said. Lots of very conservative depositors.”
“I’ve had an account there since junior high.”
“Exactly. I guess this possible merger candidate has a better loan profile but iffier depositors and is dying to get into this part of the state. Anyway, the place is about to get a tremendous infusion of cash. He told me one of the nuggets he had to offer was this new idea. Even though the Salt Key Farm thing wasn’t big to them, our plan for a sewage plant and the minimall and the more modest housing was like a golden apple hanging from the branch. No one else in the state is doing anything like this. You would have to go down to the DC area to find anyone who really understands the possibilities; that’s what they told him. So the merger is waiting on some paperwork, and then there’ll be cash everywhere.”
“What did Gordon have to say?”
“He was pretty dazzled. Crosbie called him, so he called the guy in New York who was going to come and cart away all the good stuff and told him to wait. I think, outside the savings-and-loan and even outside the inner circle over there, we might be the only ones to know what’s in the works, and we’re all pledged to secrecy. The problem is working capital. It’s almost February already. The first of April we’ve got to start on the roads and the pipes—”
“Where did you get the permits?”
“Well, that’s what I was going to call you about. The planning commission out there meets in eleven days—what is that, Tuesday, February eighth?—and I think you have to have your application ready before that meeting. I leave that entirely to you, since I don’t know that side of it at all.”
“What am I applying for?”
“Everything we talked about. Four hundred houses at Salt Key Farm, a golf course, a clubhouse and equestrian facility and bridle paths, the sewage treatment plant, and the minimall and two hundred dwelling units on the new property. I haven’t mentioned the elementary school; I think it’s best to wait on that for at least six months, but obviously we’re going to need permits, and pretty fast, so there you go!” He was grinning enthusiastically.
I thought he was joking. The last planning commission meeting I had been to, in Deacon Township, they had talked for an hour and a half about whether the Washington Market should be allowed to enlarge its sign from four feet by twelve feet to eight feet by sixteen feet and eventually voted it down. They denied the post office another twelve feet of parking space. That took forty-five minutes and the testimony of thirteen citizens of the town. I said, laughing, “And when would you expect to get the zoning approved?”
“Well, an April-one start date would mean approval, at least basic approval, in March. The March meeting is also on the eighth. I think twenty-five days would be time enough after that to get things in order. Gordon built those townhouses in about four months—”
“Which isn’t the same thing at all.”
“Larry built that house in—what, twenty-eight days?”
“Twenty-nine, but that was in the sixties. I’ve seen that house. It was a simple ranch-style house on a slab.” It seemed he wasn’t joking after all. I sat down, the way you always do when you are delivering unexpected bad news. “Look, Marcus. For a project like this, we are going to be going back and forth with them for months, maybe a year. It’s not like we can go in there eleven days from now and come out with permits.”
“You work on it. Don’t be careful unless you have to. See what you can get away with. Dazzle them with the size of the project and the beauty of it. I’ll find some plans somewhere. I’ve got the ones of my house here. I’ve been showing them.”
“Are you crazy? Those are Gottfried Nuelle’s plans, and he isn’t going to be building these houses. It would take him four hundred years to build four hundred houses.”
“Just to give the feel of that house. I never say he is the builder or these are the plans, but just for a sense of what it’s going to be like. Jane thinks we should have a model of the whole thing, 3-D, like they do corporate headquarters and stuff. I don’t suppose you know anyone who does that sort of thing? If you could have that ready by next week?”
He looked so excited and eager and well-dressed and businesslike that I hated to say what I had to say, which was, “I doubt it. Actually, I wish you would come to the board meeting and meet the enemy. It’s not the way you think. These are people with jobs. They don’t get paid much and they do it in their spare time.”
“Maybe I should, but for now I’ve got too much else to do. Potential investors are parading in and out of this office. Jane is bringing some people in on the third to work up this investment idea we have. Out West they do it all the time. It’s called real-estate trust shares.”
“Did you tell Gordon you expected permits in the next two months?”
“Well, his attitude was the same as yours, so I didn’t get into it with him.” He came around the desk and sat down on it. He leaned toward me. “You’re right. We should have gotten started on this in the fall, I admit that, but we didn’t, so we are getting started on it now. Time flies when you’re having fun. That’s okay. Crosbie wasn’t being swallowed up in the fall, that other property wasn’t on the market in the fall, Jane was still married and working in Kansas City in the fall. Everything is fitting together just fine. Don’t worry about it.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m telling you, Joe, we are never going to pay taxes again.”
So I didn’t worry about it. For one thing, he had the big suite, and for another, although there was no way to explain the challenges of the permitting process, one meeting would bring him right back down to earth, and there was no use worrying until he’d been to that one meeting.
I checked on my other Portsmouth property and went back to my office and called the Board of Supervisors for Plymouth Township, and—lo and behold—Vida put me on the agenda for the February eighth meeting, after Marie’s Pink Poodle Dog Boarding Kennel, which wanted to add six more runs; the county itself, which wanted to upgrade the toilet facilities at the state park in the northern corner of the township—“That shouldn’t take long,” said Vida, “they’ll rubber-stamp that one”—and the Darley Corners Garage, which wanted to take out one gasoline storage unit and put in a newer one. “And that isn’t voluntary. Mike Lovell would dearly like it if the township wouldn’t give him a permit. It’s a big job. But they’re gonna stick it to him after all this time. That place is an eyesore. So, you’re up after Mike, Mr. Stratford. I hope the weather holds and the meeting isn’t canceled.” She added that I would need to have a sketch plan for the township engineer and the commissioners themselves a week before the meeting. That would be four days from now.
I sat back in my chair and gazed out the window, thinking how maybe I was the only person in the whole world who could appreciate these two things coming together—the nationwide quality of Marcus Burns’s ideas and the sheer localness of Plymouth Township. As if my mind was being read, the phone rang, and it was Hank Ornquist. He asked me to have lunch with him and, not taking the
no
I couldn’t quite utter for an answer, said he would be passing my way around lunchtime and would stop by. I should look for him a little after twelve. All I could manage in reply was “Okay.”
After he hung up, I called Felicity, not even thinking that he might still be at home, but sure enough, he answered. The sound of his voice when I had been expecting hers ran up the back of my head like the point of a knife. I said, “Oh, Hank. What time did you say? I was momentarily distracted.”
“Just after twelve.”
“How about more toward twelve-thirty?”
“I’ll be there.”
So I had thoughtlessly done myself out of “mistakenly” missing his visit.
Hank showed up. Why was it so easy for him to show up and so hard for her? I was drawing up my little plan of two phases of the Salt Key Farm project, the golf course and the clubhouse. I had a call in to Gordon’s favorite engineer, who was supposed to get back to me after lunch. On my own I had decided it was best to break our plan to the zoning board gently, one step at a time. First the golf course and the clubhouse.
There was a knock on the door. I put my sketch plan in the drawer of my desk, and shouted, “Come on in!” Even the fact that he bothered to knock when there was a sign on the door that said
WALK IN
annoyed me, but I smiled and stood up and held out my hand and said, “Thanks for coming by.”
“Oh, sure.” He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his nose. He said, “Sorry, we’ve all got colds.”
“Really? That’s too bad. I haven’t had a cold in a year.” I saw that I was going to be involuntarily posting evidence in my own defense throughout the lunch.