by John Enright
“Upstate somewhere. There’s an address in those papers I gave you. Say, Dominick, do you think Amanda is gay?”
Dominick glanced at Barnett, this compact, hirsute little man across the table. He probably had to shave twice a day. The question, of course, was not about his sister but about her attorney. “I wouldn’t have the slightest idea,” Dominick said. “Does that matter somehow?”
“No, of course not. It’s just that after I deal with people for a little while I start inventing backstories for them.”
“Why is that?”
“I think if I know where they’re coming from I can make a better guess as to where they want to go. Being an attorney is all about knowing the answers to questions before they get asked. Just working at my backstory.”
“That’s rather deific of you, isn’t it? Creating other people’s pasts for them, their personalisms?”
“Oh, it’s all based on what they tell me, plus what little else I can find out elsewhere, of course.”
There followed a long stretch of silence, as suited such a hushed bar room. Dominick sipped his single malt. Backstory, backcountry? Men in a bar? Who knew what sparked such memory flashes? But Dominick was reminded of a saloon in the Australian outback filled with blokes and abos getting tanked after work on a payday, the deafening roar of working men joshing and laughing and arguing, smashed glassware and brawls breaking out. The contrast made him smile.
“I don’t have a backstory for you, Dominick, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Barnett said. “Marjorie never said zip about you.”
Chapter 5
Amanda woke up to the sound of doors closing and people moving about in the house. It was morning, and the girls were up and going off to work. It was good to be home and in her own bed and with nowhere else she had to be. The house full of people was comforting. She burrowed back into her pillows. The day before, she had gotten word from Barnett that Nemo had signed off on everything and that she could now draw down her slightly less than a million dollars from the estate account. So today she should drive into the bank in Catskill and set up the wire transfer of funds, but that could wait. She went back to sleep.
When she got up the house was quiet. All of the cars but hers were gone from the driveway. There was still a mug’s worth of overcooked coffee in the bottom of the Mister Coffee pot. The day was already getting warm, and the morning sun filled the back porch. She sat on the steps leading down to the kitchen garden amid the insect hum of a summer’s day. She was dressed just in old shorts and a tank top.
Susan surprised her coming around the corner of the porch, dragging a hose. They surprised each other. “Oh, hi,” Susan said. She was dressed in her overalls and faded blue T-shirt. “Soak time for the tomatoes.”
“Soak away,” Amanda said. “Susan, I’m just curious—it really makes no difference—but how did you come to be here?”
Susan laid the end of the hose down in a raised bed of newly staked tomato plants. She had been holding the hose crimped shut; now she released it, and water flowed out. “Oh, Kathy is my sister. She came and got me and brought me here. She said it would be alright.”
“Where were you staying before?”
“Oh, I was living in the park. Tompkins Square? In the city?”
“You’re from New York?”
“No, Ohio, a little town near Columbus that you never heard of.”
“How old are you, Susan?”
“Seventeen, but I’ll be eighteen soon, if that’s a problem.”
“No, no problem, Susan. Are you a runaway?”
Susan turned away and moved the hose farther down the bed. Finally she spoke, in a small but distinct voice, not looking at Amanda. “I don’t know what that means. I’ve been on my own a year now, since last summer. I’m not running away from anything. I’m running to something.”
Amanda decided not to ask any more questions. She went back to her room to change into go-to-town clothes. She was checking her e-mail when Morgan burst into her room.
Morgan never knocked, she just entered, talking. “It just occurred to me: don’t close out that Virginia bank account completely. Keep a couple of thou in there in case there’s anything else that needs to be liquidated to the estate. I just talked to your brother.”
“Nemo?”
“The Captain himself. Tell me, does he ever speak in more than monosyllables and three-word sentences?”
“You actually reached him on the phone?”
“No, he reached me. Our buddy Barnett passed on my message for him to call me.” Morgan had a handful of papers. “Listen, sis, we have to pay off my credit cards and get them back in the game. We’ll put twenty, no, thirty thousand into my account. I’ll get a new card if I have to. I have to get down to Manhattan.”
“How’s that? I need you here. The contractors will be coming.”
“Captain Nemo is going to summer up in the Vineyard. He’ll be stopping over in New York on the way. He’s agreed to meet me there.”
“So, you did think of a way to get a hook in him? Good work.”
“Well, he caught me by surprise, and all I could come up with was the truth, or a version of it. I’ll have to play it by ear when I meet him. He didn’t sound very enthusiastic. I think he was just being polite by agreeing to meet me for drinks.”
“At least Barnett won’t be there.”
“Actually, in a way I’d rather deal with shorty than with unknown Nemo. Barnett is a lawyer. I’d have a better clue where he was coming from.” Morgan was already dressed to go, in tight jeans, pumps, and a short-sleeve cotton blouse. “I’ll go with you to the bank and try to straighten this shit out,” she said, holding up her clutch of credit card bills. “I’ll take tomorrow morning’s train down to the city. Come on. We can eat in town at the inn.”
Amanda looked at her laptop screen. She was in the middle of an e-mail and wasn’t ready to leave. Her inner voice spoke up, but she didn’t. Okay, once again Morgan calls the shots. Why do you let this black girl order you around? Who died and put her in charge? Some day you will just have to assert yourself. Say no, later, we’ll see, anything but yes.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be right down,” and she hit Save Draft and logged off. As she closed the top of her laptop she looked at her hands. Ringless and wrinkled, they looked terribly old, the hands of a stranger.
***
Dominick had caught up with his mail back in Tavernier Key. In there had been an open invitation from an old school acquaintance in Martha’s Vineyard to come visit during the summer. Dr. Toby was recently widowed and lonesome for companionship in the big old summer house. He could be a bit of a bore, but Edgartown was livable in season. The Keys had become too tropical. It was a lot of driving, but Dominick didn’t mind. He liked being on the move. Driving was a form of meditation. Having a destination helped. He could probably stretch out his stay at Toby’s as long as he pleased. It was Toby’s wife who hadn’t liked him.
Alexandria, where he stopped to settle things up with that lawyer Barnett, had been conveniently on the way, and now he had agreed to meet with this Custis woman in New York. He could never go past New York without spending at least a few days there. After all these years it was still the center of his universe, his Mecca Manhattan. He had his favorite little Upper East Side hotel off the park close to the museums, his favorite restaurants. The Custis woman had said that by happy coincidence she would be in the city when he passed through; perhaps they could get together, as she wanted to meet him and had a proposal to share with him. Dominick normally would have said no, but there was something to her voice—a hint of Southern ease—that caught him, and he wondered what kind of woman would stir Barnett’s juices. He assumed that, as Amanda’s attorney, she would propose something to do with the estate. He had agreed to meet her for drinks. The drive to New York up I-95 was monotonous, but it only took five hours. He didn’t stop at any forts or battlefields.
The Reading Room was a bar with just one affecta
tion—its walls were lined with books. It was a locals’ bar just off of Lexington Avenue for a clientele with a tweedy predisposition. There was just one TV set behind the bar, and it wasn’t tuned to a sports channel. There were no dartboards on the way to the lavatories. Its patrons were mainly serious solo drinkers who, for whatever personal reasons, were not drinking at home that day. Its booths were cushioned and private. Its back bar proudly displayed some thirty-plus brands of Scotch whiskey. It was one of Dominick’s old haunts, and he was always surprised to find it still there, a throwback to a time when the city’s intellectual life ran on ethanol fuel.
Dominick was early for his meeting with Ms. Custis. He was also pleased with himself. An afternoon spent in used bookstores had delivered two finds—a fairly pristine copy of the forty-year-old Fortress America: An Illustrated History of U.S. Forts and a beat-up old copy of Johnny We Hardly Knew You, a collection of Confederate Civil War memoirs. He took a booth by the front window, where the light was better for reading, and ordered a pint of Guinness. He polished his reading glasses with a cocktail napkin and looked out the window at the fast-forward passage of Manhattan pedestrians. And what a mix they were of ethnicities and dress and class, all ages and sexes. E Pluribus Unum. Did Franklin really lift that phrase from a Roman recipe for salad dressing? He was fairly certain that the waitress who brought him his pint had been here forever. This was Manhattan, after all, a place so accustomed to constant flux that it refused to change.
He neither saw nor heard her come up; he was reading.
“Dominick?” she said, and he looked up from the schematic of Fort Sumter’s ordinance lines of fire. She was dressed in a New York attorney’s tailored gray suit with beige blouse. “Morgan Custis,” she said, and she reached out to shake his hand. “Shall I?” she asked with a slight body gesture toward the seat across from him.
“Yes, please. Please, Ms. Custis, a pleasure to meet you.” He half rose. Because Dominick was sensitive about his weight, the first thing that struck him about Morgan Custis was her seeming lack of body fat. She had a handsome, almost pretty face, but she reminded him of one of those Kenyan marathoners who after running twenty-six miles are still not sweating. It was not a body type that appealed to him.
“You got here early; you beat me,” she said, following her briefcase into the booth bench across from him. She said it playfully. “I wanted to get here first to see if I could pick you out when you came in. I can see some Amanda in you.”
“Did you pick me out right away?” Dominick motioned for the waitress to come over.
“You were the only one in this supposed reading room actually reading.”
“Reading and drinking go together. What will you have?”
“A vodka tonic and the Daily News,” she said, and then to the waitress without looking at her, “Stoli tonic with a twist.”
Dominick found Morgan Custis, Esq., to be very easy to talk with. She finished off her vodka tonic and started another before she pulled papers out of her briefcase. Then she let them just sit there while they joked about people who thought themselves important, mainly politicians and other preachers. Dominick enjoyed her put-downs. He ordered another Guinness. It was twenty minutes before she started the pitch for her proposal. It seemed Amanda had decided she would invest her portion of the inheritance into a project she had already begun, and she wanted to offer Dominick the chance to get in on it at the ground floor. It was a real estate development scheme called Diligence Retreat & Spa.
“Diligence is the name of the town where it’s located up the Hudson,” Morgan explained, “but the name fits because it’s to be marketed as a very upscale, self-contained, country-inn-style facility for corporate retreats, think-tank conferences, and the like. Corporations are the only people left with money like that to spend. That’s the target market, not the occasional bird-watching tourist or couple up from the city to see the fall colors. There will be a heliport on the grounds, full spa facilities, restaurant, bar, meeting rooms. Someplace the suits can escape to and relax and write it all off.”
“Is there a golf course nearby?” Dominick asked.
“No, but that’s not the pitch. It’s a year-round not a seasonal moneymaker. I mean, you’re not a golfer—are you?—and you’re a think-tank kind of guy.” Morgan motioned to the books beside him on the table. “You are our kind of clientele. You wouldn’t mind spending five days in a first-class inn discussing”—she picked up the bigger book and looked at the cover—“historic forts with your peers, would you?”
Actually, the idea repulsed him, but he was enjoying Morgan’s company, so without any comment he let her go on. “We’ve done our market research. It’s an unfilled niche, close to New York and Boston and Albany. There are places in the same business making fortunes in places like Vail and Kauai and Taos, all long jet flights away from anybody’s home base.”
Dominick appreciated the fact that Morgan didn’t seem overly insistent about her spiel. She wasn’t being a saleswoman. Dominick asked a few more simple questions. She answered them almost flippantly. “Dominick, Amanda asked me to lay out the proposal to you, and that’s what I’m here to do.”
He didn’t know what if anything he was going to do with Marjorie’s money, but he was fairly certain it would not be going into some harebrained executive resort bubble.
“No, counselor. Thank you.” Dominick said. “I would be an amateur in that game, and in my experience amateurs always lose to pros. I, of course, wish Amanda—and you—the best success in your venture, but it is not my kind of venture.”
“I understand that—if it’s such a great idea, how come no one has already done it.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s just that the whole thing is contrary to my nature.”
“Well, I brought this prospectus for you to look over at your leisure,” she said, pushing a file of papers to him. “If you have any questions or happen to reconsider, you can give me a call. Or stop by for a visit. If you’re headed for the Cape, it’s only an hour or two out of your way and you get to avoid that terrible stretch of I-95 to New Haven with all the trucks. You can take the Mass Pike back to the Cape, which is a pleasant drive this time of year.”
Dominick opened the file. On the front page of the prospectus under the title “Diligence Retreat & Spa” was the photo of a stately three-story antebellum mansion.
“And by the way,” Morgan said, getting the waitress’s eye and motioning for the check, “Amanda wouldn’t mind seeing you. She was hurt, I think, when you left so suddenly, took it personally somehow.” Morgan handed the waitress a gold credit card.
“What is this place?” Dominick asked, holding up the photo of the old house.
“Oh, that’s the old Van Houten place, the centerpiece of the inn. The rest of the complex will be built out from it. It’s all in the plans.”
“How old is the house?” Dominick asked.
“It was built in the 1830s, I think. We picked it up basically for back taxes. What we can save of the place will set the tone for the rest. You know—landed gentry, old wealth.”
“Is it currently occupied?”
“Right now it’s where Amanda lives.” The waitress brought the check, and Morgan signed for it. “You’re interested in forts. You know there are the ruins of forts all along the Hudson. Have you ever been to West Point? That’s on the way to Diligence, fascinating spot, I hear. But then, you probably already know all about such places.”
“Does the house have a history?”
“I’m sure it does, but its future is what’s important. You know, Dominick, one benefit of becoming Amanda’s partner in this is that you could always have a place to stay, a permanent address, what other people call a home.”
***
It was raining at West Point, and the river in its green velvet canyon was hidden here and there by low clouds. At the Academy gate Dominick went through the routine of getting a visitor’s pass, but he declined the guided bus tour. West Point was, afte
r all, just one more fortress that had never known combat, and the rain showed no intention of relenting. He went directly to the museum, whose collection of hand-held weapons, from stone clubs to automatic firearms, was famous. He wanted to see a Springfield musket like the one he would have carried on Sherman’s March. He wanted to see a uniform like the one he would have worn. The footwear still bothered him. In the gallery of illustrious alumni were presentations for both Generals Grant and Lee. Again he had this history place all to himself; everyone else off in the present. He spent hours reading the little exhibit cards, until someone came up and told him it was time to leave, the museum was closing. Dominick spent the night at an inn in Cornwall-on-Hudson, still not sure if he was heading on to Diligence or not. Roads were flooding.
***
Amanda couldn’t remember if it was supposed to rain like this in June or not. Everyone made such a big thing out of the weather these days, as if none of it had ever happened before. But for three days now it hadn’t stopped raining. It was like a tropical rain—constant, insistent, vertical, and warm. The contractors had called and postponed their visit. Morgan had not returned from New York. Denise was still away at her convocation, and the strain of being on their own was beginning to show on the girls. Last night there had been a yelling and door-slamming blowout among several of them that Amanda had to intervene in. She wondered if that phenomenon she had read about—that the hormonal cycles of a group of women living together somehow became synchronized—was happening. The bathroom smelled of menses.
And now this. Nemo was coming. Morgan had called; Nemo had called her from somewhere downriver asking for directions to the house. He had asked Morgan to call Amanda and tell her he was coming to look at the property. Morgan was excited by the news. She had cast the bait out there and he had bitten.
“I think it’s called chumming when there’s no hook in the bait,” Amanda said. “What am I supposed to do when he gets here? Gaff him?”
“Look, sis, I got him there. You keep him there until I get back, maybe late tomorrow. Stall him. Don’t say anything about our plans until I get there. Put him up in my room. Is Denise back? No? Shit. Well, maybe the girls will behave with a man in the house. Just remember, low impact. I got the impression your brother shies away from complications.”
