by Jane Smiley
“Jane told me she was going to see her sister.”
“She did?”
I tried to remember more clearly. Then I said, “Well, I suppose it was Marcus who told me that.”
“Joe.”
“Yeah?”
“Joe, I’m going to say this while I’m still kind of sane.”
“What’s that?”
“I think they’ve left. I think they’ve walked out and left and Marcus knew if I talked to you, you would tell me. Did they leave? Marcus and Jane? Did they go off together? You can tell me.”
“I can’t tell you. I don’t know.”
“You told me that Marcus told you that he was going with me, and Jane was going to Mary Rose’s. Why would he tell you that? You’re sure he told you that?”
“I’m sure.”
She hung up.
By eight o’clock I was in the office, looking through all the drawers in both Marcus’s desk and Jane’s and through the file cabinets too. I kept looking at my watch. At 8:05, I began calling downstairs to the gold trading company and asking for George. George called me back at 8:36, casual and relaxed from a ski weekend. I said, “Say, George, did Marcus deposit a check with you, in a gold trading account, in both of our names, his and mine, last Thursday?”
“What would that be, the twenty-ninth? Let’s see. How much would it have been for?”
“Sixty grand.”
“Oh, goodness, no. Marcus owed me about three thousand at that point, so I would have noticed that for sure. Is he around? The market is jumping today already.”
“Marcus is not around.”
“When do you expect him?”
“You know, I’m not sure of the details of what’s going on, but I feel certain it’s some simple thing and we’ll all look back on this and laugh.”
“Laugh at what?”
“Oh, laugh at how worried we were.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll call you back.”
I called Betty. Gordon answered. I said, “Hey. Any word from Felicity?”
“No,” he said. “It’s been four days now. I hired a guy.”
“What sort of guy?”
“The sort of guy who looks into things. Nathan knows him.”
“How’s everyone over there?”
“Not sleeping. I don’t know, Joey. I don’t know. It’s a bad deal that Marcus Burns is—”
“Do we feel like Marcus Burns is—”
“Is gone? Yes. I think Marcus Burns is gone. Betty doesn’t agree with me. Linda Burns was over here.”
“I’m sure there’s some explanation, Gordon.”
“What would a good explanation be, Joe? I mean, an explanation that we would like?”
“Did she take any money with her?”
“Hank says about ten grand.”
“That’s a good sign.”
“It’s a good sign if you’re worried she’s dead.”
“Well, yes.”
“So, it’s a good sign.”
He hung up.
What was missing from Marcus’s desk were the financial records of our partnership. That, I thought, was a bad sign. Just as I thought that thought, the phone rang and it was Bart from the savings and loan. He said, “Is this Joe?”
“Yeah.”
“Joe, I took your name off the loan.”
“Which loan?”
“The last loan, the loan on the farms in the Midwest. Where was that, Kansas? Nebraska.”
“My name wasn’t on that loan.”
“That’s why I took your name off it.”
“Excuse me?”
“I have to make this quick. There’s a lot going on.”
“Yes, there is. But I never even saw the paperwork on that loan.”
“Well, after thinking about it I decided probably that was the case, so however your signature got on that loan, and your condo—well, I removed them.”
“Marcus and Jane forged my signature on that loan?”
“That’s what it looked like to me after I thought about it for a while, yes. I thought that rather than going down that road, since there are going to be plenty of other roads to go down, we would just—you know. Less said the better.”
“We’ve been waiting for that money for months.”
“It did take awhile. Lot of money, in some ways. But I’m sorry to say that it was paid out ten days ago, and we understand from Mr. Nuelle, to whom I spoke this morning, that none of it has been paid to him, and none of it has been paid to the engineers, and so, I have to say, that’s a loan that is going to be scrutinized very closely in the near future.”
“Ten days ago?”
“Let’s see, yes, more than that now. Paid out on December seventeenth. I’ll call you back.” And he hung up.
That’s the exact moment I realized that Marcus and Jane and Felicity had taken at least eight hundred thousand dollars, plus my sixty, which would make it eight hundred and sixty thousand dollars, which was a lot of money in 1984, and left the country.
In the newspapers, the reports and the investigations centered on Jim Crosbie, and for a long time the collapse of Portsmouth Savings and Loan, which became official on the fifteenth of January, was considered to be an example of malfeasance on the part of Crosbie and only Crosbie. It was Bart, it turned out, who alerted the FSLIC and supplied the government with notes he had been keeping since Crosbie’s arrival. Apparently, Portsmouth Savings had been hiding losses since the late seventies, and hiding their diminishing net worth from the regulators by inflating loan appraisals and cooking the books. Crosbie’s job had been to make risky investments and apply the proceeds to Portsmouth’s net worth, and he had risked millions of dollars in deposits on T-bill futures and junk bonds. When the regulators had a look in November, just by chance, there had been plenty of money in the coffers, but three big losses after New Year’s had wrecked that—and when Crosbie had to cover margin calls with almost all the deposits, Bart had phoned the regulators. The government sent in eleven accountants, and it took them months to figure out all the details. In fact, that chaos was part of Crosbie’s defense—what with the slow transition to computers, the unfamiliarity of the staff with the new system, and the huge new variety of transactions the S and L had been engaged in, he more or less didn’t know what was going on. The Portsmouth Herald supported Crosbie at first, if you consider calling him an incompetent boob support. He lost a good deal of credibility, or maybe it was sympathy, though, when he happened to shrug on the local news and say, “All the deposits are insured, aren’t they?” There was a considerable outcry about how he didn’t seem to care, and, in fact, he didn’t. When the Portsmouth Herald did a story about all the falsified loan documents found in the files, with appraisals from guys named Joe Blow and Roger Roe, things got more serious, and eventually Crosbie was sent to federal prison for fraud. After a while, the FSLIC sucked up all our firm’s collateral—Gordon’s properties and farms, Salt Key Farm, Bobby’s little house that he had bought with Fernie, and Marcus’s house—and everything was sold for what it might bring. For a long time, until the Resolution Trust period, the $800,000 that Marcus and Jane took with them to the Bahamas was listed as an asset. Then the debt was sold off, Marcus and Jane were indicted in absentia, and I didn’t have the heart to follow the money, wherever it had gone. Bobby Baldwin said it was in Switzerland somewhere. Perhaps that was true. Marcus also took our books, so we never figured out how much of our original stake he had with him, but what with all the bills left unpaid, my guess was about $200,000.
Susan Webster was very cool when she ended our friendship. It was maybe ten or twelve days after my conversation with Bart. We were sitting on her bed, and I was looking at the picture of the glossy oranges across the room and saying, “I think I would be satisfied in some way if I just knew when he made up his mind. I mean, was it all the way from the beginning? Was it some kind of panic deal at the end? Did he, or all of them for that matter, just look at that money and sa
y—”
Susan said, “Joe.” She removed her hand from mine, and I realized that I had been rubbing her thumb a little hard, and I kissed the spot that I had been rubbing. She took it back anyway. She went on. “I have to say that I really don’t want to go on with this.”
“With what?”
“With this thing that happened to you. Or that you did. Or, anyway, it’s going to take a long time to sort this out, you said so yourself, and I don’t want to go through it with you. I like you, but I thought about what sort of thing this is going to be, and I have to be honest. It’s not for me.” She smiled quietly and with complete conviction. Then she glanced into my face and shrugged slightly. She said, “But it’s late. I wasn’t going to say this until tomorrow, but, you know, I just don’t want to talk about it. You can stay if you want to. I don’t mind.”
I got off the bed and left. At that moment, I was mostly annoyed with her for not letting me finish my question about Marcus and for not giving me her opinion. She could have allowed me at least that. Afterward, though, I was more surprised that I didn’t miss her, and surprised that I had been thinking I was going to marry someone I didn’t actually miss when she was gone. But this was what she was like—she was like those oranges. Like holding a cool, perfect, fragrant orange in the palm of your hand, and putting it to your cheek, and being glad you have it, because it is perfect and strange, but then, after all, it’s not important. That was the first good thing that happened to me, but I have to admit I didn’t realize it was good until long after I saw Felicity’s picture in the paper.
We all knew when Felicity got back in the country, because her picture was in the paper. When I opened it that day, which was just as the forsythia was coming out, the first thing I noticed was that she had cut her hair after all, and that her head was beautifully shaped, just as she’d said, and her eyes and mouth looked bigger, though she wasn’t smiling and she was looking down, and a man in a uniform had his hand on her arm.
I heard from Betty within a couple of days of Felicity’s return. She said, “She hasn’t been with Marcus. She hasn’t been with him since the end of January.”
“Where is Marcus?”
“When Felicity left them, they were in the Bahamas. She doesn’t know where they are now.”
“Really?” I loved Betty, but I knew I sounded hostile, suspicious.
“Really. She’s been in France. I mean, she was in France until she ran out of money. We had to send her a ticket.”
“She ran through ten thousand dollars?”
Now there was a long silence for which I wanted to apologize but couldn’t. Finally, Betty said, “They can’t link her to Crosbie in any way, so they’ve kind of lost interest in her, I gather. She’s staying here while she and Hank work things out.”
“What about Marcus? Aren’t they interested in Marcus?”
“Not very, I gather. I mean, the bird in the hand at the savings and loan is so big, the bird in the bush in the Bahamas is small by comparison.”
We were silent again. She said, “She would like to talk to you.”
“Why wouldn’t I talk to her?”
“She thought they were going on a vacation. She thought they were going to run off for two weeks and decide if they had a future. She thought it was her idea, even, and her money. Marcus told her he couldn’t afford a vacation, but she wanted to do it. She didn’t realize there was anything else going on until they got to the hotel and Jane was there.”
“Do you believe that, Betty?”
“I think when a woman has been married for twenty years and is crazy to leave her husband, she thinks anything is plausible. Now she realizes she was an idiot.”
I admitted that Marcus was good at getting you to think that his ideas were your ideas.
“You see?” said Betty.
But then I couldn’t stand to talk about it any longer.
I have to say that Betty was persistent, though to what end I didn’t understand. One day I ran into her at the shopping village, and it took her less than a minute to get back on the subject. She put her finger on my arm and drew me into a corner. She said, “She never realized that Marcus had our money or your money or the money from the savings and loan until she got home. Norton told her. When she was with Marcus and Jane, the only person who bought anything or paid any bills was Felicity.”
“Was that why she left?”
“That was the catalyst, I guess. I mean, when she realized they were living off her, she knew she had to get out of there. But she said they started bickering almost as soon as they got there. Marcus would leave her in their room, and go to say something to Jane, and then he would be gone for hours, and Felicity could hear them through the wall. Joey, you should see her. She wants to see you.”
“I will. I really will.”
But I never went over, not as long as I knew she was staying there. One time, I even saw her at the end of the aisle in the grocery store and turned around and walked out the door and got into my car and drove home.
I asked Betty, “Why did he take my money?”
She said, “I think it was Jane’s idea, myself. I liked Marcus. I think he was committed to the project, and then Jane saw it wasn’t going to work and she cooked it up. You never really noticed Jane, did you? I mean, she was plain. Men like you are friendly towards plain women, but you never really observe them, do you?”
“But why did he take my money?”
“Why not?” said Betty. She smiled. She smiled genuinely. I never understood that about Betty, how she never lost her equanimity. She and Gordon moved into one of the townhouses we had built, and Betty continued to run her antiques shop. The lease had been in her name all along, ever since Gordon bought those pink silk chairs. Bobby went to work for her, and he and Fern got married, but they never had any children. Gordon found himself a truckload of antique-furniture-making planes, and then a traincar load of brick paving stones from somewhere in Connecticut, which he sold to Columbus, Ohio, for repairing the brick streets of some quaint neighborhood they were trying to preserve. We didn’t see much of each other, and so I don’t know what was really behind how he and Betty went from land baron and patriarch to an elderly couple in a townhouse. His lawyer was Martin Jenkins, and then he got Sol Bernstein, who after a while joined the poker game. Betty’s voice always sounded light and good-natured. When I didn’t want to talk about Felicity, she told me stories about her grandchildren. She asked me if I was seeing anyone. I said I wasn’t. I said I wanted to see her, but I didn’t. It was odd the way that friendship dissipated, or at least I thought it was odd until I woke up in the middle of the night and realized how I had betrayed them, bit by bit—first for Felicity and then for Marcus.
I had lunch with George Sloan every so often. He was very philosophical about Marcus. I would sit quietly while he would expound his theories. He was on a low-fat diet, eating his salad and waving his fork around. “What you’ve got to ask yourself about Marcus,” he would say, “is when exactly did he know what he was going to do? I mean, if we could talk to him now, what would he say? Maybe he would say that it was us who tempted him. We—I mean you-all, really, since I only let him have about five grand in all. You just handed it over. Maybe he was planning to go right down the straight-and-narrow but how could he, because here was the land and here was the estate and here were the guys, and, eventually, here was the girl, and so why not? Sure his wife thinks he’s the devil incarnate and so do you, probably, but who’s the tempter and who’s the tempted here?” He would chuckle at this point. He was an investment genius, making money hand over fist. “So, that place. They redid the roof and fixed it up, and now they’re out of business. Look into it for me, okay?”
George Sloan was the only person I could talk to about it. My lawyer kept saying, “Look, don’t speculate. Every motive you attribute to the guy, every story you make up, it compromises you. And I don’t just mean legally. Put your life back together. You’ve got your real estate license, and you�
�ve got some listings. If you keep turning this over in your head, pretty soon you’re going to be fifty and you’ll still be sitting on square one. Between you and me, be grateful you aren’t the wife and get on with it.” Linda was in a pickle; eventually she got a ruling that divorced her from Marcus and went back to New York.
The prosecutors and the auditors and the federal officials and the state officials breathed on me, and their breath was hot, but in the end the flame from the throat of the federal dragon burned others. They would send me notices and call me up and have me come in and talk to them, or they would subpoena me, but there was never a trial except for Crosbie. I read about that in the paper. People from North Carolina and even New York had more important things to say about him than we did.
Of course, my parents were getting older. In the fall of ’84, I sold their house and my condo and found a duplex, three bedrooms downstairs and two up. They had almost a hundred thousand dollars in equity. We were moved in by the first snowfall. I kept the walks shoveled and salted. My dad parked his car in the garage and never drove it again after that, but we weren’t far from the center of Deacon, and they went for walks in the spring, two or three blocks and home again. My father discovered gourmet coffee. Every morning, he would walk down to the Larkspur Café and have some roast or other—Blue Mountain, from Jamaica, or Kona, or dark Sumatra—and he would read a newspaper from a different town or a different continent. My mother would lament to me, “I know he thinks we should have traveled more. I know he’s sorry now that we didn’t even get to New Orleans.” But my father said, “This is enough for me, just the papers and what things are called and the different flavors. I never was much for leaving home.” In my spare time, which sometimes was quite plentiful, I fixed the place up. It was soothing.
The hotel division of Avery Development bought the farm for a million. They paid off the lien Gottfried had put on the place, brought in a big construction firm from Florida, and added on to the house to the west and the south. Ten suites and a hundred rooms; another dining room, which made two gourmet restaurants; eight tennis courts plus the golf course; gift shops that were auxiliary to the fanciest ones in the shopping village; and an ice rink and hot tubs and saunas for the winter, when guests came to eat steamed vegetables and slim down. No horses. When it opened in 1988, they called it THE SPA AND RESORT AT SALT KEY.
