by Sue Halpern
He still had some money, what a few years ago he might have blown on a quick trip from the L.A. office to the Beverly Hills Hotel to play poker. Rich people, potential clients, trusted you more if you were willing to lose large sums playing games with them, so wagering mid-five figures wasn’t gambling, it was business. But what had been Monopoly money before was real to him now. He had taken accounting, knew all about cash flow to assets, but when money was pouring down like a Niagara, the balance sheet was beside the point. You could drown in money, and that would be a stupid way to die. That’s what they told one another, sitting in the steam room, sitting in the sauna, sitting at the bar. The operative equation was simple: money in, money out. That was the measure of success. Was he happy? Was that even a real question?
And he had done it: He had left Duluth, gone to the university, done the internships, skipped the MBA, gotten the job with Morris, Maines on adrenaline and sheer determination, the same adrenaline and determination that put him in line for partner. He was successful. Didn’t his mother drum into him that happiness and success were the same thing? Lucky she was gone (six years already) before that rush of money ran dry and the only things accumulating around him were rejections from firms where he’d hoped to make a lateral move and past due notices from a lifestyle that seemed increasingly out of reach, as if it were a kite that had been enormous and pretty on the ground, but was only a speck in the sky now, its string unspooled, and soon would be out of sight. The guys he had worked with had disappeared, too. One to teach math at a private boys’ school—“Brutal,” he called it, but it was a job—a couple to the Dubai International Financial Centre where money, apparently, was still flowing, though in dirhams, and a bunch to AA and NA and sometimes both. They no longer kept in touch. What was the point?
In the beginning, and for months after that, Rusty approached unemployment the way he’d approached employment, throwing himself at it with the same will to win that had powered Lance Armstrong up the Alpes d’Huez all those years, despite the cancer, despite the crashes. That’s how he saw himself: like Lance, a winner against all odds. He’d get up early, go to the gym, and work out hard with his trainer when he still had a trainer, then approach his day as if it were a mountain he had to attack. Squats, dead lifts, footwork drills, again and again, until the sweat would overrun his headband and drip onto his cheeks and puddle on the floor. “Bring it!” he’d say to the punching bag as it sprang back at him. And: “Motherfucker!” It felt good. No, it felt great. Other people meditated or visualized success. He had seen success. He knew what it looked like. It looked like the guy at the top of the podium. He’d finish his workout, shower, put on a suit, and step into the river of commuters heading into Manhattan. He could tell, now, the ones with multiple copies of their CVs in their briefcases: the ones who didn’t have jobs. He could smell their defeat. The train car reeked of it. He started to drive instead, so that the odor was not clinging to his clothes when he sat in those windowless interview rooms, upbeat, confident, praying.
When he wasn’t getting any more callbacks, Rusty rewrote his résumé, pretending to have less experience than he had, as if HR departments all over the city hadn’t seen that trick before. If they were hiring at all, they were looking for young guys and he, Rusty was surprised to find out, was no longer considered one of the young guys.
It occurred to him that maybe Lance really was doping and that the system was rigged. That was a low day. He’d already given up the trainer, and given up cold calling firms angling for an interview, and given up, most days, driving the four miles into Manhattan, where everything cost more than it did in Jersey. He’d always known that, but now it mattered. He started living off his closet, getting sixty cents to the dollar for his Hugo Boss and Tom Ford suits, selling his custom Serotta road bike (not that he ever rode it), parting with his prized Mizuno golf clubs.
And then, one morning, digging around in his underwear drawer, thinking he might discover a stray fifty buried under the mountain of dress socks he had little use for, he found instead an old bankbook in his mother’s name that he vaguely remembered tossing in there after she died, because its single $5,000 deposit, made into a bank he’d never heard of, was too inconsequential to deal with when dollars were raining down from a cloudless sky. But now—now, actually looking at it and seeing that that single deposit was made in 1950—it was like finding a winning lottery ticket that he hadn’t remembered buying: $5,000 compounded over sixty years! He did the math, over and over, in the shower, eating breakfast, pacing his apartment. It was astonishing! $5,000 over sixty years at 5 percent was $93,395.93, and that was if it was compounded only once a year. Compounded quarterly, the amount was closer to $100,000, which was brilliant. At 8 percent, compounded annually, that $5,000 would have grown to half a million dollars—$506,285.32 to be precise. He wrote that number down, checked his calculator, ran it again, and that number appeared once more: $506,285.32. In theory he was supposed to split all assets with his sister, but she had disappeared long ago, following a yogi to India, where she renounced all worldly possessions by handing them over to him. This money, potential as it was, was his. All he had to do was retrieve it.
* * *
History has to live with what was here . . .
—Robert Lowell
Unclaimed money was typically turned over to the state, Rusty knew, but which state? There were Rivertons in Missouri, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Utah, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming. Rusty sat in front of his laptop for days, waiting impatiently for Google to lead him down and through and out one rabbit hole and into another. It felt good to be working again, to be sitting in the glow of the computer screen long after the sun had gone down, drinking cowboy coffee—the Keurig and the espresso machines were long gone—reading about places that might exist to bring him good fortune. After five days he narrowed the list down to four states, and after seven days, he’d whittled it down to two: Kansas and New Hampshire. Kansas because Rusty could find so little about the Riverton there, and New Hampshire because its Riverton had once been a big-deal industrial hub, a big enough deal, he figured, to boast a national bank. Yes, he decided, that had to be it. Riverton, New Hampshire. His Riverton.
How his mother had come into possession of a bankbook from there, Rusty had no idea. As far as he knew, his mother had never set foot in the Granite State. Still, his mother was inscrutable, as many parents are, but she possibly more than most. Rusty was in his teens when she mentioned she’d been adopted, news that meant little to him at the time. He asked the basic questions and got the basic answers: it had been a country-club adoption—a girl got “in trouble,” was sent away, and a deal was made through a lawyer or a judge to hand over the baby to the adoptive parents as soon as it was born. Easy. No traceable records. The girl would return home before a year was out and resume whatever life she’d been living. There was a birth certificate, his mother said, issued by a hospital in upstate New York, but that wasn’t much of a clue: there were homes for unwed mothers tucked in out-of-the-way places all over the country, and once the adoption had gone through, the birth mother’s name would be expunged. Someone with more imagination than his mother might have made some inquiries, but Ruth Allen, née Ingram, chose to let it be. She had two perfectly acceptable parents who would have been stung if she stirred up that hornet’s nest.
Rusty took a beer from the fridge, popped it open, and put his feet on the dining room table (cherry, Thos. Moser; the new tenants were buying it at cost), satisfied with his detective work. Riverton, New Hampshire. He leaned back in his chair, and because there was no one there to high-five, slapped the table once, hard, so hard his hand stung, and that felt good, too. He was smiling—he hadn’t smiled this broadly in he couldn’t remember how long. It was a little kid on Christmas morning kind of smile, a dizzy drunk kind of smile, only he wasn’t drunk, not on alcohol. Rusty lowered his computer into his lap and began typing, navigating to the abandoned property website, eager to file for the jackpot
he was imagining on the other side of the screen. Free money—what could be better? Two lines in, though, he was brought up short. To make the claim he’d need a permanent address and soon he wouldn’t have one.
“Damn,” he said, and decided, right then, that the only sensible thing to do would be to get in his car and go to Riverton. It had to be cheaper there than New York or New Jersey—what wasn’t?—and he could file from there. That was his plan: No plan.
Did Riverton have a high season? Rusty wondered as he made his way through the worst of Connecticut: Bridgeport, then New Haven. From what he could tell, Riverton was like these, a worn-out industrial city that had shown so much promise a century ago, and then, almost without warning, became a has-been. “Like me,” Rusty thought, but not unhappily. It was a gorgeous day, he was driving in a car that fit him like a bespoke suit, and he was free in the way Janis Joplin had wailed about freedom. Back when he carried the American Express black card and the suit guys at Barneys knew his name, the idea that freedom meant nothing left to lose struck him as complete hippie crap. He liked his life. He liked his stuff. Freedom was not having to worry about any of it since it was all fungible. Freedom was being able to put an Aeron Task chair out on the street because an Eames Executive was more comfortable. But today, going 82 in a 65 mph zone up Interstate 95, he got it. His closet was empty and it wasn’t even his closet anymore. He was unencumbered. He was free.
At 4:38 when Rusty Allen pulled into Riverton, the streets were largely empty and the river was giving off an unappealing brownish glow, and the only building that suggested a more prosperous past was the library anchoring the town green. Rusty drove by, making note to go there once he was more settled—settled meaning finding an inexpensive place to rest his head and figure out his next move. He knew there were a couple of bed-and-breakfasts outside of the city, but the last thing he wanted was having to chat with retirees who were crossing New England off their bucket list as their host shoveled pancakes and homemade jam onto their plates. No thank you to that.
Eventually, after driving around for the better part of an hour, rounding the city in ever-wider circles, he came upon the Tip-Top Motor Inn, a mom-and-pop motel up on a hill with a sign outside advertising color tv and only two cars in the parking lot. The mom and pop in question were a youngish Indian couple who had left an older relative in charge while they ran a string of convenience stores not far from the highway. The older relative, a man named Mr. Patel, was heating curry on a hot plate in the office, and the smell permeated the small reception area where Rusty was trying to negotiate a good rate.
“You have a Mercedes, I can see,” Mr. Patel said, pushing back. Rusty tried a few more entreaties but Mr. Patel was having none of it. “Two-fifty for the week, two hundred for four days, one hundred a night otherwise.”
“I’m here,” Rusty began, making sure to lower his eyes and his voice, “because my mother died.”
“Ah, I see,” Mr. Patel said, and gave him the room for $50 a night or $200 for the week.
“Thank you so much,” Rusty said. “And tell me, is there somewhere nearby where I can get such a good-smelling curry?”
“I will ask my wife,” Mr. Patel said, handing over a key attached to a wooden block with the number 7 written on it in blue ballpoint, mostly faded.
Room 7, inexplicably two doors down from reception, was clean enough but musty. It might have been months since someone occupied it. Rusty was just opening a window when there was a knock at the door and a small Indian woman stood there holding a plate of curry and some silverware.
“Wow!” Rusty said. “Room service! This is amazing. Unexpected. I meant was there an Indian restaurant in town.”
The woman—Mrs. Patel—walked past him and into the room and set the plate on the dresser. “Not in bed,” she said, and gave him an imposing look.
“Of course,” he said, though just that second he’d been imagining sitting up in bed, eating curry and watching baseball on the color TV. “How much do I owe you?”
“Mr. Patel,” she said, which he took to mean he’d have to settle with her husband.
“It is very good, yes,” Mr. Patel said, when Rusty saw him the next morning. It was a statement, not a question.
“Very good,” Rusty said, and was about to describe the vindaloo he’d had at Veeraswamy in London but then thought better of it—the man might raise his rates. “How much do I owe you?”
“Five dollars,” Mr. Patel said, “but not last night. Last night you were our guest. Tonight, five dollars.”
And so it was settled that as long as Rusty was staying at the Tip-Top, he’d be eating what the Patels were eating.
Riverton, he decided—though he wasn’t sure he was actually in Riverton anymore—wasn’t half bad.
* * *
Sunny/steering clear
It’s hard to steer clear of someone when the library is basically empty and he’s the only one who needs help and you find him intriguing because he’s not like anyone you’ve ever met before. The help he needed was a simple computer reboot—we’ve got old Dell Dimensions that are constantly running into trouble—and also for me to put more paper in the printer. Theoretically we’re supposed to charge ten cents a page, but no one ever remembers to collect it, which may be why the library is running out of money. Barbara says that if the printer money went straight into the employee coffee machine, everyone would remember. It doesn’t, and I still wouldn’t, since I don’t drink coffee.
Because I was helping Rusty with the printer, I got to see what he was printing, and it didn’t make much sense. It was stuff about the history of Riverton, even though we have a whole shelf of books about the city. I like the books of photographs best, especially the pictures of mill workers, who are mostly girls my age sitting at weaving machines, row after row of them. When I told Rusty he could take the books out instead of copying them, he said that he’d need a library card to do that and that he’d been staying at the Tip-Top Motor Inn (which of course I knew), and he didn’t think a motel would qualify as a permanent address like the library required and he wasn’t sure if the Tip-Top was even in Riverton anyway.
“I don’t think my post office box qualifies, either,” he said. And I said something like, “Not unless you can sleep in it,” and he laughed and said that his room at the Tip-Top wasn’t much bigger.
He seemed a little lonely, like he just need to talk to someone, about something, about anything. That’s the only reason I could think of why he’d want to talk to me, and ask questions about my job, which I had to tell him wasn’t a real job, it was what I was doing because I’d stolen a book from the bookstore, and when I told him which book, he laughed so loudly that Evelyn shushed him from the other room. He asked me about my school, so I told him about no-schooling, and he asked me what my passion was, and when I said stories and writing, he said, “That’s good, too small to fail,” and laughed again and it hurt my feelings, and I decided that Steve was right and I should’ve steered clear of Rusty and I started to walk away. “Hey! It was an inside joke and the joke is on me. Really.” And he started to say something about the financial industry, and about how everyone said the banks were too big to fail, and about how there was all this human collateral and wasn’t that failure, and then he apologized again, calling out, “Sorry!” as I was going down the stairs, so loudly that Evelyn shushed him again.
* * *
Everybody has roots.
—William Carlos Williams
When you work in a library, you see all sorts of people; Kit had never seen anyone like Rusty Allen. He made no sense. He wore expensive clothes, but could use a decent haircut. He should have been at work or looking for work—“should” being a judgmental word, she knew, but what thirty-nine-year-old hung out at the library for much of the day?—but instead seemed to be researching Riverton history, but taking no notes. He had started out keeping to himself, but now he was friendly, almost overly so. He appeared to belong to no one—a stray dog, just
like her.
It was hard not to think about him when he seemed always to be in her line of sight. She found herself watching Rusty, observing him surreptitiously as if he were a deer in the forest she was tracking from her tree stand—and didn’t know why. And then she’d get up from her desk and he’d nod as she went by; she’d walk back and he’d stop her with a question about anything and she would linger for a minute and then claim she had to get back to work, even when he was the only patron in the room.
“What happened to the Riverton National Bank?” he asked one day, explaining that it showed up in old telephone books and in old photographs, but seemed to have dematerialized.
“I use TD Bank North,” she said, and then wondered why she’d told him something both personal and beside the point, and rushed back to her desk.
“You need to talk to the Four,” Kit told him later, and explained that if he came in the morning he’d find Patrick, the Richards, and Carl. “Patrick delivered all the babies of Riverton for the better part of fifty years, Carl cut their hair, and one of the Richards drove them around when they couldn’t drive themselves. The other Rich is a business guy. The two Riches are cousins but they look like brothers. I think they had the same grandfather. You can tell them apart because Rich the taxi driver only wears Hawaiian shirts. He says that Hawaii is a state of mind. You’ll like them.”
Whether they would like Rusty, she thought, was another matter altogether. She imagined they’d be put off by his trendy clothes and city manners, but the next morning, there he was, in khaki pants and a sky-blue polo shirt, sitting among them, chatting away.
