by Lamar Herrin
And the money?
No, there was money.
And houses, lake houses, seaside houses, boathouses, bass boats and speedboats and cabin cruisers and … black Cadillacs?
There was money and there was property, Walter. Little Howie had known what was coming, and so had Big Howie. Rosalyn was the soul of generosity, but she was no fool. The Whalen fortune was not enlarging, but it was enormous enough already. Little Howie had put aside his millions for Laurie and their children, and Rosalyn had made sure her granddaughters, Ellie’s daughters, would be set for life the day they turned eighteen. That wasn’t the problem.
Money wasn’t?
Well, it’s always a problem, especially if you’ve got so much you don’t know what to do with it.
I wouldn’t know.
If at the end it’s a load you can’t get out from under, not entirely, so just when you want to shuck it all off and rise up like Big Howie, you stumble and fall down. Maybe the curse comes then.
An embarrassment of riches?
Or an affliction.
You haven’t mentioned Ellie, have you?
No, not yet.
Only that her marriage had fallen apart and she’d taken to drink.
“Taken to drink” has such an old-fashioned ring to it, doesn’t it, Walter? Almost comforting, as if you were snuggling up to a bottle. As if you’d “taken a shine” to it.
I’ll say this once, Walter said, even though I think I’ve said it before. In spite of me prodding you maybe a little more than I should—after all, cross-examination is part of my trade too—don’t talk about this if you don’t want to.
I paused. I said to myself: That’s a friend willing to let you off the hook. That’s what friends do. Then I let out a breath I hadn’t been aware I was holding. If I don’t talk about it, I said, what else are we going to do? Go canoeing, go swimming, go fishing, or go sightseeing? Go find some more WPA artifacts? Start with that little bridge down at the end of the lake?
No, Walter said, rising above my tone, which was a mix of sarcasm and entreaty, I’d drive us over to Lake George. The Sagamore? Have you seen it? Magnificent! A great crescent-shaped affair, every window with a lake view, right out of The Great Gatsby. You haven’t seen it, have you?
Safe to say, not a WPA project. Or maybe that’s where the workers bunked while they built this sweet little place.
Unlikely. I wouldn’t be surprised if FDR and Eleanor stayed there, though.
Making a youthful effort, Walter hoisted himself up out of his chair. We could have lunch there, mahogany fixtures, sterling silver, Prince Albert china, white tablecloths under the chandeliers.
Back before we were born, you say?
Back before Eleanor was born—and almost before FDR.
And how’s their chili?
Jim, maybe we should play some gin rummy. It wouldn’t hurt you to win a hand or two.
Sit down, Walter, I said.
It took him a moment. He turned away from me and looked out over the water. I wondered how long this piece of property had been in his family. Had he himself been a boy here, and in bringing me here for this long secluded weekend did he risk giving something of that boyhood up? I didn’t know about Walter. I didn’t know if he’d dived off that dock, splashed in this lake, hooted and hollered and made so much noise his father had to come out and shake some sense into him. If he’d scared off the fish or if he’d paddled out there and silently lured them back into the fold. He hadn’t said. He’d taken a little pickerel off the hook for me, but I had done all the talking and he had patiently, more than patiently, eagerly and even complicitously, heard me out.
Get away for a long weekend, he’d said. Do a little fishing and drinking and card playing, in the quietest and most secluded place on the map. My ex-wife Elaine had smiled as if the notion—a couple of guys, a cabin in the Adirondacks, drinking and card playing at all of that—was inspired. You two should, she said, as if she knew something I didn’t, which she undoubtedly did, many things. We didn’t end our marriage, not really, we ended our cohabitation. We each needed periods to look inside, take stock and discover what was worth passing on, and then we made dates. We made love, too, not without passion but in a certain commemorative spirit, you could say with a commemorative passion, but which could come with a real hunger attached. You can commemorate the past more passionately than you’d lived it. It seemed contradictory, but in our case it was true, and I think we got the divorce just to get the state out of the way, with all its side issues and annoying impositions. Then at last things stood out clearly. Divorced, and an unobstructed avenue opened between us.
Elaine and I had met in Walter and Molly’s backyard, on their patio, where we’d been invited to supper, and after supper, with a conversational current sufficiently alive, our hosts had disappeared into the house with dirty dishes and not come back out, as if Elaine and I were prize livestock, somewhat past its prime, who’d needed a little prodding, a little pep talk, before we’d been left penned to breed. It was so obvious it was touching, and it’s tempting to say to please our friends we’d paired up on the spot. At least we’d both understood that that was what the evening was designed to accomplish. Just before we divorced, we’d had Walter and Molly over to dinner and broken the news of what we were going to do. Unpenned, but eternally grateful, we insisted, to our friends. I was still grateful. I loved Elaine. I depended on her. She scared me a little, the access she had to me, that we had to each other. And, surely, we must have reasoned without speaking the words that access like that could not be available on a twenty-four-hour basis. To save it, to assure it, we would have to portion it out in moderate doses and make it last. Something like that must have gone through our minds. The joy of seeing her and then the joy of knowing that that joy was renewable, that it was a joy that might even be outdone, improved upon, as long as we did not do it to death. Something like that.
Had I told Elaine my short-haired dog story? Walter had wanted to know. Well, why hadn’t I? But he had not persisted. And who’s to say the story was not apocryphal? Why wasn’t there a snapshot of the dead dog, the dead snake, and the miraculously spared little boy? Had no one had a Brownie camera during an outing in the country like that? Two pairs of lovers and no Brownie camera?
Sit down, Walter, I said.
When I drove up that drive to the Whalen house, I told him, with no Howies left, with little Ellie grown up and gone, and with my aunt wasting away, it would be hard to express the desolation of the scene, even though if you had been with me you might have been charmed. It was a summer day, with the heat in the pines, the sort of still, scented heat that makes you believe summer will never end. In the patches of sunlight, pine needles lay orange on the ground, which was a reddish clay with glinting specks of mica, and the birdsong at that midday hour was a subdued, multi-throated warbling overshot by the long strident caw of jays. The immediate area around the house had always been kept kudzu-free by a succession of gardeners, and that was still the case. Rosalyn did not meet me at the door. A black woman named May did, who had been with the family for years and was the daughter of the man named Johnny who had been the groom for Little Howie’s ponies and horses, back when there’d only been a prince and no princess. It was May who told me, You sure are welcome, you sure are, then showed me to the sunroom, air-conditioned now, where Phil Hodge and I had once sat with Little Howie, and where Big Howie had later spread out a map to show us where the fish were biting and where we could and could not go. At that same table and under overarching plants that had grown as the family had diminished, Rosalyn sat waiting for me. From her vantage point she would have seen me driving up and surely would have known the desolation I had felt. Favorite nephews and favorite aunts had a special bond. She did not get up. She said, Jimmy, Jimmy, and emptied out what was left of her laughter, as I leaned in to kiss her cheek, which was drawn but not yet slack. She was ill, but not incapacitated. She could have gotten up and met me at the door. But she pulle
d me in, all the way in. This had been a fishing family, and since she was all that was left of it, there would be a tradition to uphold—
Ellie was left, don’t forget her, Walter reminded me. And according to her father, she was catching fish right out of the cradle.
I haven’t forgotten Ellie, I said. I mean of the family before then. Before Ellie.
Before you were run out of town for terrifying her with your beard, you mean.
Or traumatizing her, I said.
One or both, Walter said, otherwise you wouldn’t have been down there then, would you? You wouldn’t have been “called on.”
That point is very well taken, I told Walter, who was once again engaged. But not so that he couldn’t have been lured away. Had some up-the-lake neighbors paddled down to socialize, Walter would have socialized. He had a capacity, a remarkable capacity, which meant in a court of law he could make a good show of defending anybody.
You could see it all in Rosalyn’s eyes, I said. They had always been a bright blue, a translucent, northern lake blue. I assume there were cataracts that needed to be removed and she saw no point in it. The blue was gray now. More accurately, her eyes were a tarnished steel color, and the longer you looked into them, the more you realized they were fixed on one entrenched idea.
Reading the expressions in eyes doesn’t always get you closer to the truth, Walter reminded me. But you already know that, Jim.
Maybe not in court, I said, but what happened in that sunroom is essential if this story is going to make sense, and that look in her eyes was part of it. Shall I go on?
Shall I bring the bottle out? Walter said, in part to lighten the tone, but he meant it.
Not yet, I said.
I hadn’t seen Ellie since she divorced her husband. Scott was his name. They’d had their fights, but no more than a lot of other couples I’d known with two young kids to care for and egos to trim, and they’d been blessedly free of money worries, except the worry of what to do with so much. Ellie had gotten tall. Height in the family would harken back to Mama Grace and her preacher husband James Pritchard, the grandfather I’d been named for, but Ellie was so late coming to the last of the Pritchard girls that that particular lineage might have seemed more legendary than real. Tall and, unlike her grandmother, thin. She’d passed through a stage when if her chin had not been quite so prominent she would have been considered lovely. The broad and unlined forehead, the high cheekbones, the high and elegantly bridged nose. And then the eyes, in the right light a rich mix of amber and honey and maybe even a tigerish yellow, golden eyes, or greenish eyes with a certain golden cast, large and almond-shaped and, as they used to say, tempting to dwell in for a while.
Walter chuckled. If I could read his thoughts, he was asking himself when was the last time any man could be said to dwell in a woman’s eyes and not be laughed out of town. And if he could read mine, he might have understood he was being asked to believe there were still a few places, little retrograde pockets down south, for instance, where that sort of thing went on.
The Pritchard girls were all known for their beauty—even Lily, as rough-cut as she might have appeared to be—and Ellie was one of them. Her chin, though, was weathered-looking enough that I could imagine her out in a fishing boat with her father or in a cornfield on a cold morning waiting for the dogs to flush out pheasant and quail. Big Howie, whose own chin was puffy, boyish and cleft, had left his mark on his daughter there. She’d been a daddy’s girl for a period of her life and taken it on the chin.
Walter’s chuckle betrayed a certain impatience, I thought.
The thing about Ellie, I told Walter, is that she was a shade away from being a lot things. A shade less hungry for whatever it was she imagined she didn’t have and I could even see her as a nun. Those eyes with that golden light looking heavenward or cast down.
Which would make her a big daddy’s girl, Walter took his liberty. The biggest daddy of all. More to the point, what drink had Ellie taken to? Bourbon? Had her daddy left his mark on her there?
As I recall it was scotch and not bourbon. And maybe in the summer, like the rest of us, gin and tonics. But …
But?
That hard drinking that wasted her away and left her crawling for her life only came later, if you’ll permit me to go on. Should I go on?
It’s your call, Jim.
Up over the armrests of our Adirondack chairs we sat looking at each other for a moment. Walter had astute eyes, never idle, the brows unruly little arcs of wiry gray hair like the hair on his head. He was on alert, always on alert, but rarely on attack, and then the injustice had to be grave, an insult to one of the few things that all humans should want to hold dear. I had nothing but good things to say about Walter Kidman. Go with him, Elaine had advised. I felt a surge of something rising up in me, some strong mix of feelings made one. I felt sorry for, of all things, this little lake, on which canoers had begun to paddle as though on an early evening stroll. I remembered that look in the eye of the pickerel I’d caught as Walter removed the hook. It said you’re out of place. It said we don’t fish the jumps up here. A moment’s wildness is no excuse. That’s not who we are.
I nodded to Walter and continued, It was that look in my aunt’s eye, and it was the look that was no longer there. The laughing look I’d known her by was gone, and what had replaced it was as hard as old steel. She said, Jimmy, I have something I want you to do, it’s a favor, and the lilt that had gone out of her voice as much as said she would never again be piling things so abundantly in my arms. She needed a man’s favor now, from a family’s firstborn. I won’t say Ellie has fallen in love, she went on. I don’t believe she has. But I will say that she has fallen under the spell of this man she works with … And I, of course, knew nothing about Ellie working, since my mother had not informed me about that, which was a curious lapse because news of anything that Ellie Whalen publicly did in her small town, such as taking a job, would have spread along the family hotline and quickly reached my mother, even though she lived a state away.
Rosalyn continued, I need you to find out what you can about him, what his intentions are, and Ellie’s, and then—
I stopped her. Ellie’s working? I said. She’s taken a job? Doing what, Rosalyn?
It’s not really a job, Jimmy. It’s more volunteer work through the church.
She hasn’t fallen under the spell of a preacher, has she, Rosalyn? and I couldn’t suppress a smile. History’s not repeating itself in that way, is it?
She knew immediately what I was referring to, and she chose not to return the smile. That told me everything, that my aunt Rosalyn would disregard the sweetness of an old story surfacing two generations removed to lovingly tie another knot in the family history.
It’s an organization, she said, it’s run through the church, it’s for poor children, so they’ll have something to do, some place to get away to, some … activity, you know … She was struggling, she wasn’t seeing it clearly.
So it’s a charity, I said. Ellie and this man are working together for a church-sponsored charity, maybe something reaching out to orphans, and this man—
I’d stepped in, and she reacted to my tone. Her favorite nephew, I must have sounded to her like some solicitous do-gooder willing to take the time to lead a feeble old lady through the mists in her mind.
The mists quickly cleared. She was a Whalen, after all.
He’s twice her age, Jimmy, she said. Divorced with four children, still living with their father but pretty much grown. He hasn’t been in town long. No profession anyone knows about. I suppose his profession is charity, and I suppose he believes charity begins at home.
Have you seen him? I asked my aunt.
I have, she said, with that old steel heavy in her eyes, something implacable there. He looks like a toad.
Rosalyn said that? Walter said.
She did.
You know the image I have of her? I’m lying there where your friend Phil Hodge lay, and you did too a
s a boy, and she’s standing at the end of the bed with that tray of shaving instruments in her arms. She has this confused look on her face, caught in crosscurrents. It’s sad and it’s sweet. And she called him a toad?
She did, I said.
Her mind’s made up, then, Walter said. She doesn’t need you to enlighten her. She needs you as an enforcer. Or is she hinting that the toad’s a prince in disguise and with one kiss from Ellie—
No, she wasn’t hinting that. She was all but stating that the man was a fortune hunter, and if she was hinting anything, it was that Ellie had fallen under the spell of a father substitute, but I don’t think so. I don’t think that even subconsciously Rosalyn thought that Ellie looked at this man and saw Big Howie. She would never have called Big Howie a toad.
Mister Toad has a name?
Leland.
Leland …?
Oldham.
Oldham? Old ham? Sure? You’re sure Rosalyn didn’t make that one up?
No, he was real, all right, and there were four young Oldhams needing to be fed and clothed and sent out into the world. What Rosalyn didn’t know, I told Walter, was where the children’s mother had gotten to, and neither, it seemed, did anyone in town. If Leland Oldham’s stock in trade was giving disadvantaged children a break, it only stood to reason he’d start with his own.
A toad, I repeated to Rosalyn. Then I asked her, Does he have any other distinguishing characteristic, in case I see him around town?
I don’t want you to see him, Jimmy, Rosalyn immediately made clear. I want you to go see Ellie. But not at home, I want you to take her out somewhere for lunch—
And I will, I assured my aunt, but just in case. Then it occurred to me and I stopped, not sure what if anything would be stirred up, to lighten or darken her mood, by evoking old times. For instance, I said to my aunt Rosalyn, is Leland Oldham clean-shaven?
The laugh she gave me then, Walter, said it all.
So you asked her that, in her weakened condition, and she laughed it off, water long gone under the bridge?
