The Almanac Branch (29 page)

“Like welding.”

“That sounds right, welding together this weapon that I could use against him if I ever felt like it. Berg didn't know that he was incriminating his father, but his tongue was pretty loose back then. I did a little research on some of the things he had said, and it became clear very quickly that this designer church and the Trust that was corporately attached to it were shady at least. Berg didn't realize—and for all I know still doesn't—that family memberscannot sit on the boards of foundations and churches if they happen to be sole shareholder family members in the very companies whose donations are floating that foundation. It's called a conflict of interest for a reason. You skim some of your profits and bury them in your own foundation where they can work, untaxed, to your own benefit a second time.”

“Did Berg tell anybody else about this?” I asked. I was floored by Segredo's confession, not because I hadn't come to more or less all this information on my own, but because it seemed to me that if he knew so much about it, who else knew? The most surprising aspect of all of this was that the loop—a loop just like that of the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, sequestered, and going around full circle at just about the same rate as a church's fiscal year—had not been discovered before now.

“I told him not to. Whether he listened to me, I can't say.”

Here was a difficult question for me to ask: had Segredo ever given in to the temptation to tell anyone? I didn't have to ask it, though. He answered on his own.

“Once I knew that your father wasn't as perfect in his genius as I had thought, the obsession subsided. In the beginning it might have made me feel better to know that I could get him whenever it was convenient, just threaten to drop an anonymous letter to the appropriate party, and down he would come. But then, it became clear to me that this wasn't a viable way to go, either. It made me into a lowly blackmailer, or some such thing. One night—this was years ago now, Grace—I was out back here, working on something, and it dawned on me what I would do. It was so unbelievably easy.”

The air was fresh off the inlet, and the tide was heaving in over the stones down along the narrow beach.

“Nothing. I would do nothing. He was one of us, for all his running over the face of the earth, making his moneyhere and there with all his ornaments and toys and crafts and games, he was just like me. I've never given any of it much thought since.”

In setting up the project, Berg had taken precautions to protect his father. If the whole thing blew to pieces it would be demonstrable that Charles knew nothing about it; it might as well be a suicide rather than a murder—something along those lines. His sense of filial loyalty, such as it was, made him feel more confident about what he was doing. He knew that the more he could get himself to believe he was undertaking to produce a work of art, that the sacrifices and risks were his and his alone, the more he would be able to convince others to believe in him, too. He wanted to concentrate. He wanted to do something that was entirely his own. The more he could detach himself from his father, and the Sprawl, the better. He was getting too old to fit in that role that Faw had devised for him one summer so long ago. The hostilities, the jealousies, the anger he harbored for the better part of his life could be exorcised, he just knew it, if he were able to make this one pure move.

In this spirit, when he created the Almanac branch of the Trust he did what he could to bolster its legitimacy. He worked up a logo for the production company—

which he liked a lot because not only did it incorporate the three initial letters TAB into its design, but it had a cross at its center, which reaffirmed its religious affiliation. Moreover, the thing looked like the windows in the house out at Scrub Farm, side by side double-sashes with the lintel extending beyond the frames along the top. One of the windows, the left, was open. This was a graphic symbol, to his eye, that there was a way out for his father, should anything go wrong. (Funny how as time wore on, he cared less and less whether the project succeeded or failed, so long as it remained his, the fruit of his own thoughts, own labors.)

Logos, contracts, iconographies. It was just paper protection, but sometimes, he remembered, thinking of that game he used to play with his brother and sister, paper can be stronger than the hardest rock. Whether that was supposed to alleviate some of his feelings of guilt about finessing the till in order to satiate his desire to make
A Sinner's Almanac
he couldn't say for sure. It was far too advanced to turn back, anyway. If the financing of the film were ever scrutinized—following money through labyrinths was often the only way the law could ever catch up with skin traders—Berg could take the fall, could tell the truth about the operation, and possibly prevent anyone from bothering to look past the connection of the branch to the stream, to push a little further to see what kinds of tributaries were feeding the stream itself. He got a friend of Analise's to incorporate the project. Its charter set forth the purpose of the film as a documentation of the many fine accomplishments of the church and its shareholder trust. It stipulated that the large capital equipment purchase Berg had made—all his hardware for the film—and the payments to staff and actors would go toward displaying what wonderful things the Trust was doing with its charitable contributions. “To be shown at fund-raising events,” it explained. The Trust had existed now for some two decades without ever having manufactured any real evidence that it was engaged in carrying out salvage and restoration operations, or that its parishioners both in the Hatteras church and down in the ghost-limb outreach church in the islands were benefitingfrom Trust work. So this would create some fruit for an empty cornucopia. Berg even thought that he, as embodiment of the Almanac branch, could, while funding his serious project, also put a couple of days into filming some nondescript boat yard, maybe find a decrepit wreck somewhere and get the actors to look as if they were going over the skeleton ship with an eye toward putting the old hull and cross braces back together. In other words, actually make something that would protect the Trust while, admittedly yes, exposing the Trust to just a little danger by, well, running these funds out of it, borrowing them interest-free, say several hundred thousand would cover it, surely no more than half a mil. Once
A Sinner's Almanac
was released, the principal would all go straight back into Gulf Stream and no one in the Sprawl would ever know.

These nuances made him feel better, so that he could contemplate what mattered, the film itself.

When the car ferry arrived and I drove down the gangplank, I felt almost at once the sensation of being an outsider. This distance—a kind of disaffirmation of any sense of belonging here—I had experienced before, of course, but never quite so profoundly. I reminded myself that there was no reason that the landing, and the oak and maple trees, and the street that disappeared up toward the island center, should look foreign, reminded myself that I had just visited my mother and Gabriel not two months ago in their cottage, which was three minutes from here, that I had lived, on and off, on Shelter Island for most of my lifetime—but I wasn't able to shake the apprehension.

I drove to the new inn where I had made a reservation. I had registered using Grace as a surname. No one knew me at the place, as it was on the opposite end of the island—somewhere I never ventured, near the public beach. When I settled in my room, I took it out of my bag, and openedit again, the note I'd received that brought me here. It was typed out and unsigned. There was no return address on the envelope. There was nothing about the white paper on which it was written that would allow me to know the identity of its author; and this was, of course, intentional: no Geiger letterhead, no National Council of Churches, nothing. There wasn't even, in the way the few sentences were composed, a rhetoric that would give me any insight into the writer's slant on the situation, or what he or she hoped to gain from it.

“Your brother is about to make a mistake. You might want to observe the proceedings. Scrub Farm, middle next week, it begins. Sorry!”

I hadn't told anyone about this, though I'd been sorely tempted at least to telephone—of all people—my mother. She and Segredo had gained my trust when we met, and had even been in touch on the telephone, just talking, not even so much catching up, but talking about events, the world, the government, sweeping impersonal things that would help us to get our bearings again. But I didn't tell her about this; I imagined there was some chance she and Segredo wouldn't want to know. They might think, Grace is back in our lives and look what she brings, problems, maybe we were better off before. I didn't want them to think that way.

The last exclamatory word in the letter does carry a rhetorical weight, but what kind of weight, and in what way it leans, I cannot say. Sorry for me, for Berg, sorry for whom? And does it really mean, sorry, or is there a quiet snicker behind it, like, “Sorry, but richly deserved”? What is more, the word “mistake” is particularly
un
loaded—so light a term it is, within the context of this anonymous missive, that its rhetorical innocence seems false, and hints to me that the author of this thing wants me to know that the mistake is a grave one.

Like a fool, I have come; I didn't see what option there was. Later, I will go out there. Not in the car, though. Myown anonymity, it occurs to me, might have certain value, but in what regard I couldn't yet say.

Five families used to own the better part of Shelter Island, or at least that was how Berg remembered it, when he was growing up: the Nichollses, the Havens, the Tuthills, the Derings, and the Sylvesters, who had originally owned it all, having had it bestowed upon them by the crown. The island was Republican, as are most islands. In the summers the population would swell to twenty-four hundred souls between the natives, summer people, and the visitors. Islands are like that. A few people do their best to make money during the season, and then are left to survive as best they can through the winter. Berg invented a family that had seen better days. Once an island family, they were now treated as if they were a summer family. Once the toast of the island, once one of the great, glorious, landowning families, the Muellers—as he called them—were quite reduced now. Gone to seed were the terraced gardens, toppled was the fine statuary that once stood here and there, placed by some imported English landscape artist to heighten the effect of this lily pond, or that octagon. The trees on the Mueller estate were overgrown with vines, some of them missing large branches from the storms, some of them dying from diseases or age. The manor—not much of a manor really, just a clapboard farmhouse—was charming, if in a shambles. And the Muellers themselves were charming, if overly devoted to their livestock, the blind goat, the lame mule, the old horse, and the several dogs. The Muellers were caught in their own time-warp, because the stretch of water—narrow though it was—that separated them from the mainland also separated them from the social velocities at which those on the land excelled. Islands are washed by waves, and their clocks tick as irregularly as waves. The sun shows a longer day on an island, comingup as it does right out of the water, and then setting in the water too—no mountains or buildings to keep you in shadow.

So …

The camera focuses on a hand. The hand is holding a black fountain pen over a sheet of clean white paper. It is a girl's hand, we suspect, and the pen appears unwieldy, overlarge, awkward in its grasp. There is the suggestion, we suppose, of the black pen being homologous with a black phallus, held so quiveringly in the neophyte's grasp. We note it, the hint, and move on just at the same time the image does, not assigning too much importance to it—the hint—as the hand now puts the nib to paper.

Our earlier thought that the hand was a young girl's is confirmed, and this makes us feel at once satisfied. The words that begin to appear are written in large, rounded forms, and we are sure that the person writing is a child. Although the calligraphy is plain, schoolish, and legible, that the hand is shaking (what is she nervous about? we cannot help but ask ourselves) causes the words to be imperfectly shaped here and there. As the words are revealed, the innocent, fluty voice of the girl hovers over the text with us, and narrates her thoughts as they materialize on the page. No music. The quality of the sound is dry. There was a condenser on the mike in the room where the child-actress read for the sound track. Black and white, a tight shot filling the screen, deep tones of lush gray that almost have in them the quality of old nitrate film stock.

The voice tells us, “I am a sinner, and this is my calendar of days, my confession. This is my almanac,” and the theater fades to momentary black.

We can hear the ocean rocking against the shore and the image dissolves into gray waves fanning across sand.

“The ocean is a vast eye,” the voice continues, “which has witnessed many things, being an eye that never closes, night nor day.”