by Sarah Blake
“Proves what?”
“It’s about to happen. It’s all about to happen. The bass line is exploding.”
“What the hell is it?”
“Change, man. We are here. We’re all here. But we’re about to change. This is the moment. Everything’s about to blow—”
“We?”
“Yes,” Moss said to him.
Reg shook his head. “You are completely infuriating.”
“Why?” Moss’s blue eyes held his.
“Because you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Reg said. “We don’t hear each other, no matter what you think you hear. We can’t.”
The angry bewilderment that flared on Moss’s face just then flared and as quickly was smothered. “Prove it.”
Reg’s heart slowed. “I don’t have to prove what you can’t see.”
Moss shook his head. “I see something else.”
“When you look at me,” Reg said, “what do you see?”
“Reg Pauling,” Moss answered swiftly.
“First? That’s the first thing you see?”
Moss flushed.
Reg nodded. “No, you don’t,” he said kindly. “You see a Negro. It’s not a new time, no matter what it looks like to you.”
But why say it like that, thought Moss. So baldly. It left no room.
“I see tribes when I look at this room,” Reg said. “Men coming to sit together. Girls they allow in. Tables of tribes. No way around it. Human beings have survived because of the tribe. That’s the fact. There’s nothing we can do about that, except recognize it and listen for their drums—”
“Yeah?” Moss leaned across the table. “What are we, then, Reg? What tribe are we?”
“It’s not that simple,” Reg protested.
“It is.”
“You’re dreaming, man.”
Moss nodded. “What if I’m not?”
For an instant, Reg went still. And then his dark, intent face cracked open, and the white of his smile broke through, and it got Moss, got him in his gut.
“See there.” Moss grinned, reaching across the table with both hands. “See that?” He grabbed Reg by the shoulders and shook him happily.
“All right, man.” Reg smiled, letting himself be shaken. “All right. Simmer down.”
They looked at each other.
“Listen,” Moss urged. “Come to the Island. I dare you.”
The idea was on Moss’s lips before he thought.
Reg looked at him. “Come where?”
Why hadn’t he thought of this before? Moss shook his head, amazed.
“Come up to the Island.”
“What island?”
“Crockett’s,” said Moss. “Where we go in Maine every summer. Where I’m going this weekend. We run boats, hike mountains, sing, eat lobster. It’s terrifically, fabulously dull.”
“An island?”
“On my honor,” said Moss, smiling. And suddenly he wanted nothing more than for Reg to set foot on the place and walk with him and turn those considering eyes on them all up there.
“That is exactly the kind of invitation men like you toss out,” Reg said, exhaling.
“Men like me? There aren’t any men like me,” Moss tossed back.
“And there sure as hell wouldn’t be any men like me,” Reg leveled at him.
“What do you think would happen?” Moss pressed him seriously.
“Nothing,” Reg answered swiftly. “Not a goddamn thing. I’d be surrounded by silence and polite smiles. Like Pocahontas in London.”
Moss considered this.
“You know I’m right,” said Reg. “You were in the Yard with me.”
“But I wasn’t with you,” Moss said urgently. “I hadn’t thought it all through.”
“And you still haven’t.”
“You think the North is a dream.” Moss leaned forward. “Show me. Show me so I can see. Isn’t that what you’ve been saying you want to do? Come to my sister’s party. Come up and prove it.”
He hesitated.
“Bring Len,” said Moss. “Bring Len, too. I can teach him how to sail.”
Reg snorted. “The Jew and the Darkie?”
With a pained expression he didn’t bother to hide now, Moss stood and stretched and reached for his jacket off the back of the chair. “Come on,” he said. “I dare you.”
Reg tossed his cigarette down and crushed it with his shoe. “And what would we do? Hire a boat and just come over, arrive on the dock and ring the bell?”
“Something like that,” Moss said quietly, and held out his hand.
Reg shook it. The expression on Moss’s face was so solemn, so sweet, he couldn’t look away.
“Come up and see.”
“See what?”
Me, Moss didn’t say. Come and see me.
“Us.” He was light. “The Miltons. I dare you.”
Reg didn’t move. He watched Moss thread through the crowd, heading out of the club.
It was enough, it had been enough merely to know it, to see the lie every day and to build his wall by noticing it, by remarking it. He hadn’t cared until he’d walked into Moss Milton’s party and seen him turn and smile. And as much as Reg wanted to believe in the ideas that Moss believed, he wanted to prove him wrong. Once and for all, to have men like Moss see that this dream of America was impossible until everyone saw what the black man saw. He wanted to have Moss see. Moss stirred in him a helpless curiosity, and moving toward him was his future, or his fate. It didn’t matter, Reg realized now with a kind of fear. He was helpless in the face of it.
* * *
LEN WAS SITTING in the living room, in the dark, smoking, when Reg pushed open the door. He flicked on the lights.
“What’s going on?”
Len turned his head and looked at him, and then pointed to some papers on the table. Reg went over and stood looking down.
“What am I looking at?”
Len rose and came to stand beside him, pointing to the dates. “What do you make of this?”
“Jesus,” muttered Reg, studying the pages. “So Milton’s a Nazi.”
“Well, maybe.” Len was quick. “Maybe not.”
Reg turned and looked at him.
“We don’t know anything,” said Len stubbornly.
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to ask him.”
“Ask him what?”
“If we stayed in through the war.”
“We? Who’s ‘we’?”
“The firm. Milton Higginson—”
Reg stared at him and felt older than Father Time. Old and sad, and for the first time in this room, banging the gong on his own. “Since when is that you?”
Len didn’t answer.
Tear it down, slats and all, Reg thought.
“Are you going to tell Moss?”
“Moss?” Len looked at him, surprised. “Tell Moss?”
“It might break him free.”
“What do you mean?”
“It might give Moss what he needs to leave.”
Len looked at Reg thoughtfully. But he wasn’t thinking about Moss.
Twenty-five
AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK on the morning of the meeting, Evie pulled open the thick double doors of 30 Broad Street, where Dick Sherman’s offices occupied the first floor below what had once been the offices of Milton Higginson. As long as she could remember, when presented with a knotty problem, Ask Dick Sherman was the reply everyone always gave. Old Dick, as her grandfather’s lawyer was called, had been replaced by Young Dick, a classmate of her uncle Moss’s, who was now in his eighties and had worked for the family the whole of his adult life. Seeing no one in the conference room, she pushed through the heavy door to the ladies’ room, tastefully disguised as the entrance to a boardroom, where her cousin Min, short for Minerva, bent over the long row of sinks, washing her hands.
“Oh.” Evie stopped. “When did you get here?”
“About five minutes ago.” Min l
ifted her hands out of the water and turned around, leaning into Evie’s shoulder and giving it a bump by way of hello, her hands dripping.
A willowy blonde who had danced at the cotillion, cradled a lacrosse ball, and walked out the gates of Harvard Yard with the class of 1983, Min had headed as far west as she could go. Having been raised to be seen and not heard, she seemed to view quiet—of any kind—as a challenge she took up in her adulthood. Not only would she not be silenced, she would not be quiet. She will not shut up, Paul had grumbled nearly every summer. She believed firmly and squarely that talking things out was the only way to get to the bottom of anything, and that went for herself and for anyone else who wandered haplessly into her orbit. She was a practicing Jungian, had four dogs and a small house perched in Griffith Park, and sent out newsletters every month titled “From the Interior.”
“I didn’t think I’d see you,” Evie said.
“Why’s that?”
“It’s a long way to come for a meeting.”
Min looked up at Evie in the mirror, flicking water off her hands into the basin. She wore a sleeveless linen shift and blue suede Birkenstocks and still had the lithe, active body of an athlete. “Pretty important meeting, wouldn’t you say?”
“Do you know something I don’t?”
Min straightened. “No, Evie.”
Evie nodded and handed her one of the cloth towels piled discreetly on the side of each sink. Min took it, dried her hands, and then thrust her face into the damp cloth with a sigh. Then the two cousins walked back into the office and were pointed past the receptionist’s desk and into the conference room.
“Hullo, Shep.” Evie smiled at her cousin, one of Min’s brothers, already at the table.
Shepherd Pratt leaped up to hug the women with the fluent grace of an outdoorsman. In his late forties, he still had the bloom of a younger man and wore his suit as though he were in costume. He’d drifted in and out of nonprofit jobs, working tirelessly on behalf of orphans, flood victims, and endangered mountain gorillas until he’d tired of them all and moved on to his most recent venture, running sailing trips out of Rockland Harbor. Lovely, divorced, and untouchable, he wore his charm like armor.
“Where’s Harriet?” Min asked.
“Hold your horses, I’m right here.” Evie’s cousin Harriet slid in. Miss Mousie, their grandfather had called her. The spitting image of Evelyn, Harriet had married young and married a Moffat, moved to Beacon Hill, given birth to four enormous boys who ran the engines high and hard on all the boats on the Island, and had already sent the last one off to college. At forty-five, she remained mouselike, her black eyes shining in a tiny, impatient face.
“Hello, everyone.” Henry, the last of the cousins, appeared in the doorway, dressed as always, Evie noted, in faultless navy blue. Used to being the man in charge, the suit set off his silvering hair, and he looked crisp and ready to go. Whereas the rest of them had gone into nonprofits, academia, or the arts, Henry Houghton Pratt—the eldest of Evie’s cousins—had taken the money they had all inherited and done the one thing that ran in their blood: invested it.
“Let’s get started,” he pronounced. “We’ve got a lot to decide.”
And though he was competent, intelligent, and as passionate about the Island as she was, it was exactly this breezy assumption of authority that drove Evie to dig in her heels, every time. Like brother and sister, they had battled each other to be best—on tennis courts, around dinner tables, and in the winter classrooms of their college—all their lives.
“What are we deciding, Henry, do you know?” she asked.
He didn’t answer, making his way instead to the end of the table farthest from the door, setting his briefcase down.
“I have some thoughts”—Shep spoke before Henry answered—“about things. Improvements that need making—some small changes—”
Min groaned. Last summer, the cousins had spent a disastrous afternoon “making a list” of what ought to be done. Harriet wanted to choose new wallpaper, have a little fun, she pleaded, if we’re going to own it, let’s show it’s ours, for god’s sake.
“But I like the blue boats,” Evie had protested. “That’s what I used to count when we had to wait to be excused from the table.”
“They’re ugly,” Harriet declared flatly. “And stained.”
“Okay, why don’t we look for something like them?”
“Why don’t we just paint the walls. Forget about wallpaper?” Min suggested. “Try a new look—something more spare.”
“I don’t care what the fuck we do to the walls, let’s just make a decision,” Henry groaned.
They were silent.
“What’s the decision?”
“To paint,” Shep said, entering the fray. “I agree with Min.”
“Will you guys let me at least search out wallpaper that’s the same kind of color as the old blue and maybe even has the same spirit?” Evie asked.
“I had no idea you were a decorator underneath all those degrees, Evie.”
“Will you?”
“What if you can’t find anything? Then we’re back to square one.”
“Then we paint, but keep it the same blue.”
“Fine,” Henry said, moving into the pantry. “What about in here?”
But Evie had not found wallpaper to match; she had not even looked. She’d gotten pulled back into her life in the city and the fall semester, and that had been that.
“Small changes,” Henry said, dismissing his brother now, carrying on smoothly, “are not what we need to discuss today. We all know that the money in the Island trust can’t last forever, and we’re going to need to come up with some ideas for cash. We need a plan.” He paused, clearly about to deliver one.
“Why don’t we call Pottery Barn?” Harriet broke in swiftly. “They could do photo shoots up there.”
They looked at her. “Seriously, Harriet?” But Shep was smiling. No one ever took Harriet seriously.
“Why not?” she said. “They pay fortunes for great spaces.”
“Why not Ralph Lauren for that matter.” Min rolled her eyes.
Harriet turned to her. “Don’t be so snotty.”
“What’s your plan, Henry?” Evie had not taken her eyes off her cousin.
“Well, it’s not really my plan. Mum thought of it before she died, so I am really just carrying on in her stead.”
“Go on.”
“Mum thought, and I agree, that we ought to sell a portion of Crockett’s, a sizable lot that someone could build on, with a good view. Someplace set off a little from the Big House and the dock, someplace that has its own point.”
“Such as where?” Evie asked uneasily.
“The picnic grounds,” Henry answered her. “You have to agree, it’s the perfect lot. And the rocks at the end would make a natural pier for someone to build a dock.”
“We can’t,” Evie said immediately.
All four of her cousins turned to look at her.
“What?” Henry asked. “Why not?”
“Mum wants her ashes to go there.”
“What’s wrong with the graveyard?”
Evie flushed, looking down at her hands. “She didn’t want to be in the graveyard; she wanted to be on the rocks there.”
He shook his head. “It might scotch a sale.”
“That’s your response?” Evie turned in her chair to look directly at him.
He held her gaze.
“That’s the spot she chose,” Evie said.
“You can’t.”
“I promised, Henry.”
“It wasn’t yours to promise,” he said stiffly. “The Island belongs to all five of us now.”
Evie was speechless.
“And Mum wouldn’t want it,” he went on.
No one spoke.
“Your mother is dead,” Evie said.
The sorrow upon her cousin’s face caught Evie by surprise, as if his grief were fresh, his mother newly gone. He was protecting Evelyn, E
vie saw. That’s it. But from what? From her? He crossed his arms.
“Henry,” Evie said more softly, “Aunt E is dead.”
“I can’t let you.” He shook his head slowly. “I’ve got to look out for her.”
Evie turned away.
“Anyway, it’s not right.” He exhaled. “It wouldn’t be fair to Mum, or to Uncle Moss.”
“Fair?”
“If Aunt Joan gets her wish on this.”
“Fair?”
He nodded, but he wouldn’t look at Evie.
“Henry,” said his sister firmly.
Evie looked at Min. “What is he talking about?”
“You know it’s not right,” he said to the papers in front of him. He didn’t look at Min, but he kept speaking. “You know it. Mum told us what happened. It’s not right.”
Harriet sat with her arms crossed tight across her chest, and Shep had started doodling on the pad in front of him. Min watched Evie, who was staring at Henry without speaking. The quiet in the room worked like a fist in the gut. It was clear they all knew what Henry meant.
“What are you all talking about?” Evie said slowly. “What did Aunt E say happened?”
Henry didn’t answer.
“Min?” Evie asked.
“Mum wanted to get rid of the whole thing, you know,” Harriet tossed out quietly.
Henry looked up and frowned. “No, she didn’t.”
“She did.” Harriet looked at him now, relishing his discomfort. “She told me so.”
“Only that portion of it, Harriet.” Henry sat up in his chair. “That’s all. As usual, you’ve got it all slightly wrong. That’s what I was detailing before.”
“Wait a minute,” Evie said. “What do you mean, Henry?”
“You think you know everything, don’t you?” Harriet sat back and folded her arms, leveling her gaze at her brother and paying no attention to Evie. “But you weren’t there that last morning with Mum. You weren’t there.”
She took in Shep and Min. “None of you were.”
“Mum said get rid of the Island?” Shep was incredulous.
Harriet nodded. “She didn’t want it. She didn’t want us to have it.”
“She didn’t want Joan to have it.” Min spoke up for the first time.
