by Marge Piercy
Emily Ann was too good for this earth, and that was the cause of her troubles. This bitter world was hard on everyone’s nerves, but that a woman so sensitive and pure, so good to the marrow of her bones, would succumb to its pressures was no surprise. She had everything a woman could ask, as she herself said a thousand times—a fine home, three children, a town in which she was a veritable queen—but what she needed was a world clean of petty rumors and people who lied for the sheer pleasure of causing pain. It was the indictment that claimed his wife of forty years. All those whispers about a mistress and a love nest, as if he was some Turkish pasha with a harem; those charges of sweetheart contracts and that bad business with Kevin, their second-born, Emily Ann had endured; with help from the doctors they’d gotten through her bad spells. But the indictment had been too much. Two months or three, that was all she’d ever needed to be away up in Boston; then she’d come home, how did she put it? Refreshed. But she had never come home again after he’d been hounded into court, and those who had pursued him had killed her as surely as if they’d hammered a stake straight through her heart.
For a long while he thought it was revenge he was after. He would sit in this chair, staring into the marsh as the shadows lengthened. He would watch as the tide receded and the herons returned to feed, imagining the pain he would deal his enemies. But for all that he had endured, he was not a vengeful man. To be sure, he could deliver an eye for an eye, but to waste time brooding about his enemies was only to play into their hands. Time was his real enemy.
Johnny had built this town not by thinking about it but by making the contacts that mattered, by forging alliances with the governor and the legislature. When he had first moved to Saltash, the selectmen saw Boston as the devil; one, Larsen, boasted that he had never in his life had a reason to go over the bridge—and the idiot died of a burst appendix, diagnosed by a local physician as gas. They tried to make Johnny ashamed of where he came from. Washed ashore, they called him, the mick from South Boston. But it was Boston State House money that built the highway to this town and the pier and dredged the harbor deep enough for yachts. It was all his trips to Boston, three and a half hours each way in those days, that made Saltash a place to visit and put its men to work. “John Mosley Lynch,” Emily Ann used to say. “Just what do you do from seven in the morning till twelve at night?” What he’d done was build this town.
They tried to push him out. Those who’d moved into the houses he built, on the land he had cleared: in forests so thick the sunlight didn’t shine, off roads no wider than wagon trails. First it was counsel to the town. Thank you very much, if you please, we’ll find our legal advice elsewhere. Then selectman. Defeated after two decades on the board by fifty-four votes. They wanted him stuck in an office with three yattering women who rented summer cottages. They wanted him dead and buried.
At a quarter before twelve, apologizing lest she make him late for his one o’clock meeting, Maria brought in the new girl. Maria had worked for him for twenty-two years and knew enough about this town to run it. She was a small Portuguese girl, mother of five, and he’d watched her age over the years as if watching his own face in the mirror. Dark, sensual Maria, whose body had moved with the grace of a cat, with black curly hair and a magnificent round rump. Was she really the gray-haired matron who stood before him? She used to leave the office a half hour early and meet him at the cottage by the lake. She liked to be completely naked when he arrived. She never turned the lights on and didn’t like to talk. They knew each other’s secrets. Her husband, Pepe, was captain of a scallop dragger; a pot smuggler Johnny had bailed out of trouble more times than he cared to remember. His drinking was under control unless the fleet was frozen in, when he got bored and beat his wife. Johnny never told Maria about the warning he gave Pepe, that if he hit his wife again, he’d bill him for every cent he had, including the boat.
“Mr. Lynch, this is Crystal.” Maria dropped the girl’s résumé on the desk blotter. In twenty-two years she had never touched him in the office. “Crystal Sinclair.”
This was a big girl, a head taller than Maria, substantially built, with strong wrists and a fine heavy bosom. Her white blouse was frayed at the collar and cuffs. There was a yellow stain just below the left shoulder. She needed this job. Good. He didn’t want a retired woman, back to work after she’d moved down here; he wanted loyalty. Thirty-two years old, according to the résumé. Same age as his son Kevin. Well, they needed youth around here. Strange, the color of her hair, not blond or silver, but something in between. She was a pretty girl. Her smile was confident and she held his eyes. He liked that.
“Sinclair,” he said. “You wouldn’t have known a Dr. Sinclair?”
“I’m his daughter.”
“No, sir! Well sit down, sit down. He did have two daughters,” the sorry bastard. “You know we haven’t had a dentist in this town since he … moved on.” Johnny scanned the résumé with interest. It didn’t surprise him that she’d been educated out West. “University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Fine school. Fine school.” He didn’t know a damned thing about it except they had a basketball team. He’d never been to Las Vegas. Never had the time or interest to gamble. There was something (he didn’t want to stare) coquettish? made up? about her. The dark lipstick. The perfume. The tight skirt. Nothing that put him off, exactly. It just wasn’t Saltash. “I see you’ve worked in a law office before.”
“Well, I’m not really a legal secretary.”
“But you’ve worked with computers. You’ve got WordPerfect, Word, Excel.” None of it meant a thing to him. “And what brings you back here?” He watched her carefully. He listened for the stammer, the hesitation. The eyes flitting to the floor. Her gaze didn’t falter. She was sharp, this one. She’d have the other girls eating out of her hand.
“I wanted a good education for my son.”
“You have a boy?”
“He’s just turned eight. And, well, I know we have a great school here and it would be perfect for him.”
“You thought right. What’s his name?”
“Laramie.”
“After the western town!” What the fuck kind of thing is that to name a child? “Very nice, very nice.” He noticed there was no wedding ring. As soon as he saw her address, he knew her story. Four twelve Dock Street. The closest Saltash had to a housing project. But he wasn’t a man who judged people by their morals or their circumstances. Frankly, he thought their politics a better gauge of character. Do you believe in caring for the sick and the hungry or do you babble a few words on Sunday morning? That was the test. “Well, Crystal.” He rose, offering his hand. “Welcome aboard.”
“Then I have the job?”
“You had it before you walked in. I’m just the rubber stamp around here. Maria’s the real power behind the throne.”
The meeting was two towns over, fifteen miles up the highway, in the bank’s main branch. He was five minutes early. Bernice Cady came out to meet him and escort him back. Bernice had polio as a child, and if her bad leg dragged slightly as she walked, she still walked as fast as anyone he knew. Her family had discouraged her from applying to college and assumed that she’d look after her widowed father the rest of her life. Johnny remembered her buck-toothed smile, her bony arms waving, full of questions, whenever he read stories to her class. When she graduated high school, she asked him for a job at the bank, and in spite of the other board members’ reluctance and her father’s disapproval, Johnny saw to it she became a part-time teller. The kid surprised him, landing the job full-time within a year. Then she became head teller, branch manager when the local bank merged, most recently a loan officer.
“Mr. Lynch, I’m sorry, no one’s back yet. They called to say they’d be a few minutes.”
They were still at lunch. Years ago this meeting would have been called for lunch and drinks in a private room in the best restaurant in town. Now, he could wait. Bernice couldn’t do him any special favors, other than tell him the truth: it was going to be
a hard sell. She saw him daub the bead of perspiration from his cheek and she knew what he had left in the world: the house he lived in and 120 acres behind the dike. He had a pain like a burning lump of coal in his chest, and it only got hotter when her bosses walked in. Two boys of forty, one bald with glasses, the other smelling of onions, both in navy suits, Roger and Steve with the power of money.
“We like your plans, Johnny,” Roger the bald one said. “The timing is good. There hasn’t been a significant development in Saltash in years.”
“About twelve,” he said. “Since the bottom dropped out. And there won’t be another. There’s not a more beautiful spot on Old Cape Cod. You have to see those hills in the light of the moon. The dew turns the color of silver.”
The two boys exchanged a glance. Bernice looked away. He knew he sounded like a fool. Steve spoke, and the smell of onion was unbearable. “We’re worried about the dike, Johnny. There’s been a lot of talk about opening it. If that happens, your acreage is cut by seventy-five percent and the rest is soggy ground.”
“That talk has been going on for years.”
“But times have changed, Johnny. The town has changed. It’s full of new voters.”
“If the fools vote to open that dike and the river floods the basements and ruins the property values of fifty luxury homes, owned by doctors and lawyers and the kind of people I’m attracting, the town is looking at a lawsuit that can bankrupt it.”
The bald man crossed his legs. “If the homes are built and sold first.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, how can I build them until I have the money?” And what’ll I do without the money? he thought. He had never been a man to take expensive vacations or wear extravagant clothes. He liked a new car. He liked to help his children. The bills for Kevin alone were as much as a man made at the height of his career. He’d never gambled with stocks and bonds. Land was where the money was—and he’d had to sell most of it to keep himself out of prison.
“Johnny, you know how much we want to help.” He knew the smelly little bastard didn’t give a shit about anything but covering his own ass. “But how can we commit to this project when we don’t know the houses will be built and sold first? We can’t afford to be stuck with ninety acres of soggy land.”
Bernice shocked them all by speaking up. “What do we need, Roger?”
“Some guarantee that the dike will still be standing and in place until all the houses go up.”
“And what guarantee could I give you?” Johnny felt hopeless.
“There’s a seat open on the Board of Selectmen this May. As I understand it,” Bernice said, “you have two votes for the dike standing and two committed to tearing it down.”
Johnny looked straight into her eyes. “And if the swing seat voted to keep the dike in place?”
“I think that would go a long way toward convincing this committee. Roger?” she asked, and the bald man nodded. “Steve?”
Steve cleared his throat. “Yes. Well, as I said. We would like to do business with you.”
When Johnny returned from lunch, something lemony, something fresh, lingered in the air around his desk. The new girl’s perfume? The room felt brighter somehow. No, he hadn’t gotten what he wanted. But Johnny Lynch had never expected a thing without working for it, nor the rules to be stacked in his favor. What he asked was a shot at the prize. He felt heady. He felt a lightness in his step. Public opinion was against him. He’d have to work behind the scenes. But he liked a vigorous campaign. A good fight alerted his senses. No time to mull over the past. There was too much work to do.
JUDITH
Five years after Gordon and Judith were married, when she was thirty-two, Gordon retired from Brandeis and wanted to live on Squeer Island year-round. It was a hard move for Judith, for it meant giving up her chance at partnership in her Boston law firm, fought for grimly year after year. On the other hand, it meant she could approach the image that had remained in her mind since France of a more gracious, sensual life, integrated into a landscape. Saltash was beautiful, sloping down toward the busy harbor, the hills crowded with Victorian captain’s houses, older Capes, mostly white, some painted pale blue or green or cobalt or barn red. Town center was a combination of white steepled churches on High Street and the incongruous but handsome redbrick Town Hall built in 1870, to replace a structure destroyed in a hurricane. The aesthetic of the place appealed to her, the famous light, the sea, the dunes, and of course the compound on the island. Here they would change their life. They would spend far more time together than had been available since they married, with her working at least twelve hours a day and often weekends, and Gordon teaching full-time and then flying around to lecture all over the country.
Judith became a partner in a two-person law firm in Saltash, with Austin Bowman, a man older than Gordon. By her fourth year living in Saltash, Gordon and she were fully involved in the effort to defeat the Johnny Lynch machine. Johnny Lynch controlled the entire town government, but they saw a chance to elect at least one selectman who would not be loyal to Johnny: a beginning, anyhow. It would take years to get a majority, they knew. One February morning, when fog lay over the ice in the Bay, her partner Austin called her shack just as she was about to head to town. “This guy Lyle,” he said in his raspy voice. “I don’t think he can cut it. Johnny is running his man hard and spreading rumors Lyle wants to raise property taxes. For our first real contest with Johnny, we need a stronger candidate.”
Austin was close to seventy and on the verge of retirement, or so he said. He had been saying that since she joined his practice. She said, “Lyle makes a decent speech. People seem to trust Lyle.”
“Some do, some don’t.”
“Suppose we get a reporter to interview both candidates about taxes. That will give Lyle a platform to insist he doesn’t want to raise them.”
“But, Judith, we need to raise taxes for a new water system.”
“Austin, even if we win a seat on the board, one selectman out of five can’t push that through.”
Austin cleared his throat. “I want you to talk to someone. He’s thinking of running, and he might be better for us to back. War hero from Vietnam. Lost a foot. Many relatives here.”
She agreed to meet with the putative candidate at four-thirty. That would cut it close to get back over the bridge before high tide. The damned rickety bridge that high tides submerged had seemed amusing and romantic when they were summer people. Now that they lived on the island year-round and she had to make a living on the Cape, it was a nuisance to her—but Gordon had a real attachment to the island and its inhabitants and its customs. She had a cot in her law office so she could sleep over when the tides were not cooperating or when she must appear in court. She respected Gordon’s attachments. The bridge might infuriate her, but the view from the bridge was one of life’s pleasures, the bay full of islands, the great blue herons when the tide was low, the tern acrobats.
Austin did not like her sleeping in the office, considering it unprofessional. When he finally did retire, she was going to move the practice to a better office with a small apartment attached. That would make life easier. By the time she got off the phone, she had twenty minutes to dress and get herself across the bridge to her office to meet a client.
When she ran into the main house, Gordon was at the kitchen table, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, the telephone clamped between his chin and his shoulder. “So the manuscript is late,” he was saying. “The economy won’t go into recession because of it. It’s taking longer than I estimated, yes, but I’m making a more interesting and comprehensive book than if I hurried. I had a couple of bouts of bronchitis this winter, and it slowed me down.” He nodded to her as she passed. Either his agent or his publisher, having fits because his book was not finished by deadline. She was perhaps excessively punctual, someone who did not like to keep anyone waiting, whose life was timed to the minute. Gordon was casual about deadlines whether they were getting to the
supper table or showing up to a meeting. To him, time always seemed far more elastic than to her.
Practicing law here was a motley operation, now a drug dealer, now a divorce case, a suit against the town, restraining orders, whatever local life tossed up. She was getting a reputation as a good hard lawyer, the first choice of people in trouble around Saltash. Some of her clients she liked and some she detested, but she gave them all their money’s worth, a well-prepared brief and a good fight in court. She was at her best in the courtroom. She thought well on her feet. It was nine-tenths being prepared and one-tenth pure competition. She liked to win as much as she ever had. She would never be done proving herself. Now she had ten minutes to drive the rutted sand road and cross the bridge before the tide rose.
Her biggest case at the moment was a woman suing the local pizza parlor. The woman, a vigorous fifty-year-old who liked to keep in shape, had fallen through a rotten plank on their deck. Her spine had been injured and her arm broken in three places. She had lost some control of her right hand and she had recurring numbness. The problem was that the pizza parlor had been carrying minimal insurance. The insurance company was refusing to pay, claiming the woman had been careless. The owner claimed that the suit was putting him out of business, the only pizza available in winter for five miles around.
When Judith went into town, about one person in four glared at her. “You’re the grinch who stole pizza,” the fish man roared at her.
Her first two years in town, she had felt invisible. Now that was all changed. She was visible, all right. She liked her client, Enid Corea, a no-nonsense woman who boarded dogs and had served until her accident as the town dog warden and crossing guard. Mrs. Corea smelled of the kennel, was a cheerful woman whose husband had died on the highway and whose children were grown and departed. She needed the money, and Judith meant to get it for her, even if the suit did close down the only pizza parlor for miles.
