by Jane Smiley
“God in heaven, Marcus!” exclaimed Jane, as soon as the door closed behind us. “Can’t you stop lying? I nearly fell out of my chair at all that shit vaporizing into thin air. State-of-the-art indeed! You are shameless!”
Marcus shrugged and wrapped his muffler more tightly around his chin. “Someone, somewhere, has some modern technology, and I guarantee we’ll find it. It’s easy to find. It’s only a lie if it doesn’t exist. It isn’t a lie if you just don’t know right now what it is.”
Jane shook her head.
I said, “I’d like to know about the plenty-of-money part.”
Marcus burst out laughing and slapped me on the back as if I had made a tremendous joke. I laughed too; I couldn’t help it. But he didn’t actually answer my question, because the door opened and Vida called us back in. They wanted to ask about the time frame we were looking at. Marcus dipped his head graciously and said, “Well, that all depends on you. Things are in place on our side. All the ducks are lined up in a row, and we are ready to move.”
“Well,” said the main spokesman of the group, “we are drawn to several features of the plan, including the golfing facility, assuming you are aiming at real quality, tournament-style quality. So we’ll want to know who your course designer is going to be. And we like this part about retention of the house and the gardens, especially the gardens. I understand there are several varieties of old and rare plants on the property, which we think should be cataloged and preserved. You know, old Thorpe was something of a collector. Vida, has the heat gone off in this room? It feels very cold now.”
“Might have, Mr. Nickles, it’s after eleven.”
“Well, we’ll hurry then. Now, we don’t often have to deal—or may never have had to deal—with anything like this, but we like it, at least for now. Pete, here, has some reservations, but we know Gordon, and we know Gottfried, and so, young man”—he looked right at Marcus—“we are going to advise you that we think it’s okay to go on with this, though nothing’s official yet until Jerry Taylor gets out there and really looks the place over, and he’s not going to do that in the snow, so you’d better put yourself on ice for a bit. And now, if no one has anything to add, I am going to have to leave, because the chill in here is giving me some problems.” And he got up, put on his coat, and went out. And so did the rest of them.
My phone rang at 6:30 A.M. Wednesday, which meant it was Gottfried, since that was when he got up and began his business day. As soon as I picked up the phone, he said, “I want to build those houses. I know just what to put there, something that will fit in nice with the big house. And I want to go into that house today, if you can get out there. Dale wants to see it, too. Dale’s as excited as I’ve ever seen him. You know he refurbed the wooden moldings and paneling at the statehouse in Nebraska before he came here. And he was thinking of going to England and Germany, but now this has come up. He’d stay here for this.”
“Dale is an unusual person,” I said.
“Well, you think I don’t know that? I give Dale just about everything he asks for. My wife says that if Dale wanted my kidney, I’d give it to him, and she’s just about right.”
“The thing about those houses, Gottfried—”
“Now you’re going to palm me off with some mealymouthed deal. I knew you would, Joe. I knew when I found out about this, and you didn’t tell me first thing, that there was something going on and you weren’t going to tell me; you were making other deals without me.”
“Gottfried, when did you ever tell me you wanted to build hundreds of houses at once? Didn’t you always tell me you are a craftsman rather than a building contractor? Aren’t those your very words?”
“I’ve had my eye on the Thorpe place for thirty years.”
“Since you were seventeen years old? Yesterday you said twenty.”
“Yes. It’s been a very long-term thing. I’ll meet you out there in half an hour.”
“It’s dark.”
“They got lights. I’m bringing Dale with me.”
“Gottfried, I’m still in bed. I haven’t eaten breakfast yet.”
“You got some woman with you?”
“Is that your business?”
“Well, if you don’t, what are you waiting for? You can stop at McDonald’s on the way out. They’re open.”
“I don’t want to meet you out there. I have partners. We have to talk about things. I don’t make decisions alone.”
“I’ve already talked to Vida.”
“This morning?”
“Yeah, and she said the main reason they looked favorably on your plan—and don’t think for one moment they are fooled by that asshole and his sister; what was she wearing? I couldn’t believe it; she looked like she was going to a party—was because I was there. Gordon Baldwin just gets by, you know. Everyone knows he has some shady deal going on, but he hasn’t been caught yet, so he gets by. Me, they trust. So because I was sitting there and everyone knows me and I’ve been doing good work around here for thirty years, they gave you the benefit of the doubt.”
“That’s not what it looked like to me, Gottfried.”
“Well, Vida has forgotten more last week than you’ll ever know, so believe it.”
“Why are you yelling at me at six-thirty in the morning?”
“Because I’m trying to goddamn wake you up and get you to smell the coffee.”
“Okay, but I want to tell you one thing once and for all.”
“What’s that?”
“You keep running Marcus down—”
“So what? He’s a jerk.”
“Only so this. You hate everybody who buys one of your houses, so you’re not proving to me anything about Marcus in particular. It’s you who’s the crank.”
“Yeah, well, just meet me out at the Thorpe place.”
Finally, the reason I got up and put on my clothes and went out and started my car in the freezing dark and let it warm up so I could drive out there on the coldest morning of the year with only a cup of coffee in me was I knew if Gottfried really really wanted the Thorpe property, he could afford, just barely, if I were to sell his houses I had listed, to buy it, and if he bought it the commissioners would agree to anything he wanted to do, no problem, and it would keep him busy for twenty years and get Gordon out of a deal that he was still a little reluctant about, and furthermore it would return me to the sphere where I felt most comfortable: selling houses one at a time, not owning property and developing it.
Dale was duly impressed. Dale was a forgettable, round-shouldered, bearded, silent guy with a knitted hat pulled down over his eyebrows and overalls and well-oiled Redwing boots and cotton gloves on, but Gottfried followed him around the Thorpe house, and Gottfried stared at everything Dale stared at, and then I stared at it too. Dale whistled and hemmed and nodded and said, “Mmm-hmm,” like he was tasting something, and touched things and got up close to them and peered at them, and when we had finished looking at the library he turned and shook my hand and said, “Thank you for showing me this, Mr. Stratford. This is quite an education.”
“It’s not very elaborate.”
“It’s simple,” said Dale, “but it’s not easy. Here’s what they did. They made all these panels and moldings by hand, with hand planes. That way, if anyone made a mistake, it would only be a thirty-second of an inch mistake, and he could rub it out, no problem. This is beautiful, painstaking work. It’s always harder to make something simple look right than to make something elaborate look right. I’d much rather spend a week putting together leaf moldings with ridges and beads and all that than spend a week making a straight chair rail with a square edge and, let’s say, a groove down the center.”
They looked at the floors and the banisters and the cabinetry and the picture moldings and the window casings and the windows themselves and the interior doors and the exterior doors and the baseboard trim and the window trim and the hinges and the drawer pulls and the bathtubs and the sinks and the sink fixtures and the lighting fixtures and everything el
se. It was almost noon by the time they had had enough. I was yawning so much I had to go outside in the cold and walk around.
When they were done, they walked me to my car. Dale said, “This house was built around the First World War?”
“Yes. I’m not sure of the exact year.”
“I like it.”
Gottfried broke into an honest-to-God grin.
I said, “It’s a beautiful house.”
“Here’s what I like about it. Now, normally, I’m not much into eclectic. I saw this house once out West that was parts of seven different kits put together. Seven different styles. There was Gothic and Greek Revival and I don’t know what else. I considered it a personal affront, that’s how much I hated eclectic. Go ahead and shoot me, but I did. Now this—this is eclectic too; I see that—but what the guy did, the architect, was he simplified every element of every style that he drew from, so there’s a kind of squareness in some of the rooms that just gives you the feeling of something Greek, and that flows into something a little more vertical, that gives you just the feeling of the stick style. He knew how big it had to be, and he knew how self-important the family was, so he gave it a little museum-type grandeur, mostly in the size and the proportions, but he also knew it was, you might say, their farmhouse, so he rusticated it by smoothing it all out and giving it real grace. Just grace. Myself, I don’t think it ought to be furnished or used—let the elements be seen—but most people like to make use of a building, so I say, let them, if they own it.” He sighed deeply and generously and went on. “Gottfried and I, we’ve got just the picture on what to do with the houses that are going to go along the golf course. What you do is break out the different styles of this house, and you intensify each one just a little—not much but enough to catch the eye a bit—and then you offer the prospective buyers one or two of each of the different styles. I identify four offhand; I can tell you what they are another time. There is some variety in the development, but it all flows together. You won’t get some Tudor monstrosity staring down from the top of the hillside at everything, but at the same time, you won’t have a hundred little versions of the clubhouse dotted all around. That’s what you should do.”
“Genius,” said Gottfried.
He was right. He was exactly right, and I was going to feel some residual guilt when I stole that very idea and gave it to our future builder, whoever he might be. What I said was, “I like your ideas, but you were there at the meeting, Gottfried; it’s going to be months until we can break ground, and the clubhouse and the golf course come first, and after that the sewer plant, and you know how long that’s going to take, so what can I say?”
Gottfried stared at me without speaking, knowing for once that I had him, that practicality and wisdom were on my side, and no amount of ranting and raving would change, or quicken, our course. He nodded. They got into Gottfried’s truck and drove off, and all I could do for a few minutes was stand there, staring after them in relief.
CHAPTER
17
AN EIGHTEEN-HOLE golf course requires a hundred and eighty acres, but two hundred is better. This was the first thing I learned when Marcus and I began driving around and visiting golf courses in March, when the ground reappeared. I had played golf maybe half a dozen times over the years, mostly at a public course outside of Deacon called the Dawson Club, but not really a club at all. Marcus passed by the Dawson Club without a second glance and went straight to the Cookborough Country Club. The whole way out there, he told me about golf. “I hate golf,” he said. “I told you I hate sports, but even more than sports I hate golf, but I’ve played golf a hundred–two hundred times over the years, and every single time has been enlightening.”
“It takes so long,” I said. “I don’t see how anyone with an actual business to run can get the time in.”
“Or a family to raise. But do you ask your buyers why they have such oddball tastes? No. You just hope to find some house that will appeal to them. Same with golf. Now what we’re going to do is look at all the courses in the area, and we’re going to make our course more challenging than eighty percent of them. When all those golfers are living in all those houses and staring out their windows every day at the third hole or the eleventh hole or whatever, we don’t want them grinding their molars in frustration. Maybe there’ll be one hole, say the ninth, the last hole on the front nine, right by the clubhouse where no one can see it, that is the most challenging hole in the county. But all the other holes will beckon them outside. Nice plantings, contoured fairways, good views.”
At the Cookborough Country Club, he drove in the gate with a wave to the guard, pulled up in front of the pro shop, and parked in a reserved spot next to a golf cart. It was a nice enough day, but no one was playing, and there was still snow in the shady spots. The greens had begun to turn green, but the fairways were still brown. The door of the pro shop, which had a CLOSED FOR THE SEASON sign in the window, opened, and a man in a sweater and a jacket came out. Marcus went right up and shook his hand. “Hi. You are?”
“Ray. I’m Ray.”
“Hello, Ray. I’m Marcus Burns, and this is my friend Joe Stratford. I’ll tell you what we’re doing. We’re building a golf course! First one around here since 1949. What we want to do is see what’s needed. You know, what would fit in. What would be an addition to the area’s present facilities. Are you the pro?”
“Nah.”
“Do you play?”
“I been playing. I’m not very good.”
“Well, Ray, what do you like about this course?”
“I don’t know.”
“Just one little thing, the littlest thing you can think of. The first thing that comes into your mind.”
Ray looked at Marcus. After a moment, he said, “I like the crick across the fairway in front of the green on the sixth hole. You get the ball in that crick and you’re sunk, but if you put it on the other side, you’ve got a pretty good approach to the green and a good chance of making a birdie.”
“Would you mind showing us that hole?”
Ray looked at us again, then said, “I guess not. But it’s a ways from here. Get in the cart.”
We piled into the golf cart, and Ray wheeled us expertly down the winding blacktop path, past several tees and several greens, in and out of a few stands of trees, past sand traps and forlorn benches and ball washers. When we got to the sixth hole, we got out of the cart and stood on the tee, staring down the fairway toward the green. Sure enough, the sharp cut of a creek, wider than it looked from where we stood, angled across the fairway, which sloped gently upward on the far side. We stared at it for a minute.
Marcus said, “What’s par for this hole?”
“Par four.”
“How many times have you birdied it, Ray?”
“Maybe half a dozen.”
“I’m impressed,” said Marcus. “Why don’t you show us the rest of the front nine on the way back to the pro shop.”
“Well, all right,” said Ray. And we wound our way, into the chilly wind this time, back to where the car was parked. When we got out of the cart, Marcus took out a notebook. He took down Ray’s name and gave him his card. He said, “Now, Ray, you call me if you have any more thoughts about how this course plays, okay? What I’m interested in is the average player, you know, average but experienced. Okay?”
“Yeah,” said Ray.
We stopped for something to eat, which I had noticed Marcus never failed to do—he always got even more sociable over food—and we went on to the Marque Valley Country Club, where Marcus got into a chat with the guy doing maintenance on the sprinkler system for the putting green at Deacon Hill. His opinion was that the best course in the area was the Preston Mountain Resort course.
“I’ve never heard of that one,” I said.
“No one has. That’s the most exclusive club in the state,” he said.
Marcus’s face lit up. “Where is it?”
The guy drew us a map. It was down a road I had driven a
ny number of times, between Nut Hollow and Roaring Falls. I said, “Well, I thought I knew this area.”
“You know what?” said the guy. “When I’ve got to go over there, they meet me at the gate and escort me to the work site, and when I’m done they escort me out. One of the caddies told me that when his shift is over, if he leaves something at work, he’s not allowed to go back and pick it up.”
Marcus was beaming.
“You know who I saw there a couple of years ago? Paul Newman. Paul Newman the movie star.”
I said, “Around here?”
The guy shrugged. “The security guard over there told me he comes here all the time, and that other guy too. What’s his name? Oh. Sylvester Stallone. Rocky. There’s movie stars and CEOs all over that place.”
Needless to say, Marcus picked me up at noon the next day, and we headed straight for the Preston Mountain Resort. We drove in his car—or, rather, I drove his car—and he sat in the backseat. Hatchcock Road was the sort of road they put into autumn travel brochures, pleasantly curving between rustic fence lines with leafy red mature maples bending together above. In the middle of March, the trees were bare, wet, and black, and the roadway was lined with puddles and dirty patches of snow, but there was nothing unbeautiful about it. Exactly 4.8 miles past the intersection with Nut Hollow Road, there was a paved driveway off to the right that swung around a thick stand of evergreens, and—what do you know?—when we drove back there we found a split-rail fence line, a nice stone gatehouse, and a closed gate. I eased to a halt and Marcus whirred down the automatic window behind me. I sat quietly. As soon as the guard approached, Marcus said, “Has Mr. Newman arrived yet?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m to meet Mr. Newman here, and I’m afraid I’m late.”
“I haven’t seen anyone this morning, sir. Who is Mr. Newman?”
Marcus smiled knowingly, then said in a low voice, “You know, Paul Newman the actor.” He looked at his watch. “I was supposed to be here at twelve-thirty, but I got delayed in Portsmouth on my way from the airport.” The guard cleared his throat to speak, but Marcus interrupted him. “Have you heard from him? I’m on my way to Florida, and he promised to meet me here so I could see the place.”
