“I think you got that covered, my friend. But listen. When I say she’s a problem I’m not kidding. She’s filed a lawsuit against the town—saying she owns your land.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“My guy on the board of selectmen told me. She wrote the complaint herself. He says it reads like something out of the Old Testament. But she’s
pro se
, so some judge’ll have to give her a hearing and try to piece her shit together on the taxpayer’s dime. And I’ll have to show up to make sure he tosses it out. It’s a nuisance suit—she’s crazy.”
“Get rid of it, Mikey. You hear me? I don’t need that shit. Not now.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.”
Up ahead, a third woman, in a Burberry jacket and duck boots, this one steering a stroller, joined the nattering pair obstructing the roadway.
“I got a situation here,” Doug said, tossing his phone aside and stepping from the car.
“Where do you think you are?” the pearled young matron demanded, as he approached the Volvo. “Los Angeles? Are you planning to fly into some kind of rage?” She turned back to the driver. “All right, then, Ginny. We’ll see you Tuesday.”
“Okay! Bye!” the woman behind the wheel called out in her bright, chipper voice. And with that, she stepped on her accelerator, leaving Doug standing by himself in the middle of the street as the cars behind him began to honk.
T
HAT MORNING
he’d slept through his alarm, which he never did, caught up in dreams again, the remnants of which stuck with him as he cleared the town traffic and made it onto the Pike, still moving at a frustrating pace along the crowded inbound lanes. He’d dreamt of his cousin Michael and it had reminded him of when Michael had told him the story of Doug’s father. His mother had met him when she had gone to help serve his family’s Thanksgiving dinner. This would have been 1964 and she would have been seventeen. When the dinner was through and the dishes washed, the son had driven her home, all the way from the North Shore, an hour at least. This part Michael could say for sure because he’d heard it from his own father’s mouth. That, and the fact they’d been on dates. Two or three and it had ended by Christmas; or maybe it was five or six and had run on into January; he was in college in Western Mass or he’d just graduated or was working for his father before going. His father was rich, that much was clear, because Doug’s uncle John had got a break as a young electrician with a contract to service all the companies the man owned. It was Uncle John who’d recommended his little sister for that day, thinking she might get a regular job out of it. Michael had been told never to speak of it, especially not to Doug. But they were sixteen and they were drunk in
Uncle John’s basement while everyone else finished up the Labor Day barbecue in the yard and Michael had told him.
So that was his father. The nameless son of a nameless family who at one time had lived about an hour’s drive away.
What Doug had already known—what everyone knew—was that by February 1965, his mother was pregnant and without a boyfriend, let alone a husband. She stayed with her parents that year and for a year or two after, while Doug was a toddler. Her parents were religious people who never renounced their obligation to love their daughter or their obligation to be ashamed. They continued to share a pew with her at St. Mary’s, though now the family sat at the back of the church. She had many different jobs but by the time they moved into the apartment on the top floor of the blue triple-decker on Eames Street, she mostly cleaned houses and cooked. They had a small backyard that ran down to a creek, and through the trees on the far side of it you could hear the cars moving along the state route. Back then there had been nothing along that highway but a few warehouses and a depot for the Alden town trucks. But when Doug had turned six an auto-parts store had gone in. Soon after that came a mattress discounter, then a gas station, and six months later a Burger King. They cleared land for the first mall, an oval of white concrete with an open-air courtyard and fountain, surrounded by the largest parking lot anyone had ever seen, which backed right up to their creek. Once the cineplex went in with its own vast parking lot, lit by even brighter lights, Doug’s bedroom never got fully dark anymore, the glare of the strip strong enough to color his shade a pale yellow into the small hours of the morning.
On Saturday evenings Doug and his mother went to Mass and again on Wednesdays, and though he hated it from an early age, mostly for the pity shown him by the adults and the pity shown his mother,
before he even knew why, he followed obediently along until thirteen or so when he told his mother he didn’t believe in God or the Church and didn’t care what she thought about it. She’d lost most of her bargaining power to the drink by then and didn’t much resist. Daytime was a raw period for her, a time to be endured, after which the relief of the first glass of wine came, a routine that left little margin for argument or delay. He was taller than her well before he reached high school and there weren’t many places in the apartment for her to hide her bottles. Early on he’d learned he could cut her off more or less at will, and after that he never needed to; the threat alone sufficed to win whatever concession he needed from her.
Never a talkative woman, she said even less when she’d drunk three or four glasses.
After the first bottle, her silence deepened into something more profound, her daily withholding of words buoyed up into a principle of sorts, an almost enjoyable one it seemed, a queenly disregard for the commonplace of chatter or conversation, as if he were a man in whose presence she was determined to remain permanently coy. Conspicuous in her withdrawal. She had her television and her magazines, and as long as he was there to watch her getting along without him then indeed she could. And when she fell asleep on the couch at the end of the night Doug would carry her to her bed and turn out the light.
Once he’d gotten his license he had taken control of the car and begun to drive her to work. Heading down the state route you always knew exactly where Alden stopped and Finden began because the strip ended. After the muffler shop and the liquor store strategically placed on the town line to serve the residents of the dry community next door, you came to a traffic light. Beyond that it was as if time had stood still. Just the fluted gray railing running up the side of the highway and
behind it, on either side, woods. It continued like that all the way east, seven miles or more toward Boston, until you reached the next town, where another liquor store stood just over the line and the malls and burger chains and car dealerships started up again.
All his mother’s work was in Finden. Over the years, she cleaned for different families in the mornings but as long as he could remember, she’d always worked afternoons at the Gammonds’, where he would come to pick her up in the afternoons. They lived at the end of a white gravel drive in a large brick house with green shutters and flowers in the window boxes.
In spring and fall, Mrs. Gammond would often be working in the garden. She had white hair and fine mottled skin and Doug had always remembered her necklace of jade with its large stones of sea green and imperial purple, separated by rings of silver, resting across her chest like the jewels of some northern queen.
She would ask him how school was going and which subjects interested him and comment on the weather as they waited for his mother to emerge from the house.
“Such a handsome son you have,” he could remember her saying.
People had always liked him for his looks. As a child, he’d got lost in the supermarket and all the other mothers had crowded around, saying how adorable he was. As a teenager, he’d begun jacking off naked in front of the mirror on the back of his closet door, goading himself on, his looks beginning to handle like his first real weapon, his first experience of control.
“She says I’m the best cleaning lady she’s ever employed,” his mother said once on the ride back to Alden, a wry smile on her face, as she smoked her first cigarette in hours, asking Doug to conspire with her for just a little while, to take her slender joke, to be with her for a
few moments, on her side. “Maybe one day she’ll give me a medal. A shiny medal.”
The only man who ever visited their apartment was Father Griffin, in his horn-rimmed glasses and black raincoat. His narrow bird face was gaunt with sympathy. Knowing how to time his calls, he would arrive just before supper, when Doug’s mother had drunk only a glass or two and was still sociable. He’d share parish news—of the sick and the dead and the newly born—and stand up to leave as soon as Doug took supper out of the microwave.
What the navy recruiter had to offer was a way out of that apartment and the sight of his mother drowning. Doug had signed the papers the day after his eighteenth birthday. For a week he tried coming up with the words to tell his mother he was leaving but they never came and so he decided he’d call her instead, once he reached the base. He took a bus to the Naval Station Great Lakes, and after three days there ended up phoning his cousin Michael instead to let the family know where he’d gone.
Most of the other recruits struck him as innocents without a plan: patriotic boys itching to stick it to the Evil Empire, kids with eyes set wide apart who looked as if they’d arrived through some damp, half-witted dream into a bunk and a bench in the galley, washed off the prairie like shallow soil. Right away he knew he’d do the minimum and get out. He kept figuring he would write his mother a letter or a postcard, but then again she knew where he was and she hadn’t written or called.
He met sailors who no longer knew where their folks lived and didn’t seem much to care. At first, he thought he’d begin to forget like that, that his memory would wipe itself clean. But it didn’t. It wasn’t at the low times that he thought of his mother but when things were going well, when accomplishment and momentum felt real, at the end
of a well-executed maneuver or when he got his first promotion. Then, just as he grabbed on to a bit of excitement, to the sense that things might work out, he’d picture her spending the night on the couch, waking with a headache at dawn, shuffling to her bed for a few more hours of sleep, and like a kill switch, the image would cut dead the power surging within him. Noticing how the memory of her held him back, he decided he would no longer permit himself guilt. It was a priestly game, after all, a game of sin and forgiveness, one that could eat a life whole.
A
S HE ROUNDED
the exit for South Station, Doug could see the eastern face of the Union Atlantic tower shimmering in the morning sun. It was taller than 60 State Street and framed in crisp white lines, its glass much brighter than the dark reflective obelisk of the John Hancock. Jeffrey Holland had built it against all kinds of opposition, striking the deal when prices were low because no one wanted to put up with the Big Dig on their front doorstep, despite the fact that it would eventually be a park leading to the water. The tallest building in the city, it now dominated the financial district and had become the centerpiece of skyline night shots during Red Sox broadcasts and the network legal procedurals set in town, the Union Atlantic logo—the outline of a cresting wave—lit in bright blue along the south-facing superstructure, the whole gleaming edifice a bold announcement of intent, its scale impressing clients and competitors alike. Holland understood well the logic of images creating impressions which became facts. Insider chatter about overreaching had been no match for the persuasion of size and ambition. The foreigners in particular loved it, the Koreans and the Chinese, whose business they were getting hand over fist now. At Doug’s encouragement they’d entered into talks with
the Four Seasons about a hotel next door. Union Atlantic alone could fill two-thirds of it with clients.
“Good morning, Mr. Fanning,” the new receptionist on the senior management floor said as Doug stepped off the elevator. He was a twenty-something metrosexual in Banana Republic gear whose smiling deference was so total it almost begged a crude response. “I’ve sent a few packages down to Sabrina for you.”
Doug had gone through three secretaries before he found Sabrina Svetz. She was an aspiring writer looking for a day job. A brunette with the angular features of her Slavic ancestors, her looks were peaking now in her late twenties, the severity of the bone structure no longer hidden by youthful chubbiness, but still on the glamorous side of gaunt. He liked that she fundamentally resented her job and had other ambitions. It clarified their relations. She was a shameless flirt and ill-suited to working in a bank, always nosing around for odd bits of detail about people’s personal lives. He’d waited three weeks before taking her out for a drink and sleeping with her, a perfunctory exercise they’d engaged in two or three times since and which gave Doug what he needed from her: an understanding between the two of them as individual actors, bound by the bargain they had struck, not some bullshit out of a company handbook about what got reported and to whom. He’d made it perfectly clear before they took their clothes off what the sex would and wouldn’t mean. Being a somewhat hardened woman, for reasons he didn’t care to know, she understood right away and consented. She’d often eat her lunch in Doug’s office with the door closed, telling him about her dating life and discussing who was hot and who wasn’t among the staff.
She was writing a novel set during the Spanish Civil War and had a thing for Iberian men, particularly those whose grandparents were old Fascists willing to talk.
“Our Leader awaits you,” she said, not bothering to look up from her screen as he approached her desk. The downside of such close relations was that she felt comfortable indulging a degree of sullenness that would otherwise have been considered unprofessional. The gain, however, was worth it. She did exactly as instructed even if it meant telling the chief of administration to screw off. She had no loyalty to the organization but plenty to Doug.
This was important. When Holland had hired Doug, Union Atlantic had been a regional, commercial bank. It took in deposits, offered checking accounts to the public, and made loans to businesses and real estate developers. It had the conservative balance sheet of the highly regulated institution that it was. But Holland’s plan for the company was much larger. Through acquisition, he wanted it to grow into a financial-services conglomerate with an investment banking arm, an insurance division, and a private wealth management business.