by John Enright
“Are you calling Lord Witherspoon’s bluff?” Dominick missed the shot.
“Do you think I’d have you back if I thought you were a real English lord? Is it just theater to make the seller feel like the realtor is doing her job? Or is it staged to make other potential buyers think they have competitors? Or was the purpose of your visit simply to get Lydia and I used to the fact that strangers, foreigners, might come bursting into our home at any time? Why else would that realtor woman not show up?”
Dominick waited while Atticus took and made his shot. “If you don’t want to sell the place, why did you put it on the market?” Atticus made his next shot, too, leaving just the eight ball up against a cushion.
“You haven’t answered my question. End pocket,” Atticus said, pointing with his cue stick, an impossible shot.
“It was just an idea for a way to spend summer afternoons, really, visiting rich peoples’ houses, an off-the-beaten-track mansions tour. No hidden motives, no harm intended. Maybe we have sparked a little false hope here and there.”
“No one is paying you to do it?” Atticus missed his eight ball shot, scratching.
“That would make it a bit like work, would it not? No time off to play pool.” Dominick leaned his pool cue against the wall and took his and Atticus’s glasses to the sideboard to freshen. “Now you answer my question.”
“Lydia and I are not selling the house. Mt. Sinai isn’t ours to sell. We just live here now, temporarily.”
“I thought your wife grew up here, summers anyway.”
“Oh, yes. The house has been in her family since it was built a hundred and twenty years ago, still is actually. Last year we did what everyone said was the smart thing to do to avoid estate and inheritance taxes. We set up a trust fund for the kids, sold the house in Westchester, and moved in here full-time. Mt. Sinai was part of the deal. It belongs to our daughters now.”
“And they put it up for sale? Cold.”
“To get us out of the cold, supposedly, and into some safe, warm Florida condo.”
“Not ready for that yet?”
“You ever been to Florida?”
“Know what you mean. Dantesque, deadly.”
“Best avoided.”
“Sorry about your daughters.”
“Oh, they’re good girls. They think they mean well, but both of them are married to zero-sum accountant types for whom Lydia and I are just impediments to sound fiscal management.”
“That was pleasantly bitter.” Dominick handed Atticus his fresh drink. “No way to stop them?”
“You don’t have any children, do you?” Atticus said. “Or you wouldn’t have asked that. They are our daughters. The whole point has always been what’s best for them.”
“Like a big cash influx by the end of this fiscal year?”
“Sometimes it’s like that.”
“Life is what happens while interest rates change.”
“So rack and break. I scratched.” Atticus ended the conversation, turning away, a small gnarled man, standing as tall as he could against the light. Real life is filled with equalizers.
It took Dominick a week to decide. Brenda and Charlie were off to a wedding on the Cape, so he had the place to himself, which meant the air-con was off and all the windows were open and the floors got wet when it rained. The Persian woman realtor was clearly losing it, but after a couple of days she returned his calls and—surprised—accepted Lord Witherspoon’s verbal bid on Mt. Sinai. The bid was ridiculously low—two-thirds of the asking price—but not so low as to be dismissed, negotiable.
Dominick was fond of Brenda and Charlie. They were easygoing hosts, but there was always a point when it was best to move on and save that place for a future visit. Dominick had pretty much always lived as a guest in other people’s homes. He knew better than anyone the protocols, the fine art of being a houseguest. When the host couple started whispering in the house it was time to find a new nest to borrow. Mt. Sinai felt like the next new place to be, and it was large enough so that he could be almost alone even with Atticus and Lydia still living there. What would the winter be like? The three of them in the old manse?
Of course, Atticus and Lydia would have to agree to give up a guest room in exchange for his services. Dominick would present the deal to Atticus, guaranteeing that he could delay and complicate the negotiations on Lord Witherspoon’s bid for Mt. Sinai virtually forever or at the very least until one of them had a stroke or they got tired of having Dominick around. His only bad habit was his cigars. Of course, Dominick had neither the money nor the intention to buy the place, but, playing Lord Witherspoon, he knew that he could keep the house in limbo and off the market. Screw the daughters. They could wait their proper inheritable turn. This was New England not King Learland.
The next time Dominick invited himself over to the Jamesons’ he brought a gift, a hand carved and painted wooden duck decoy of old but unknown provenience that he had picked up somewhere. He introduced it as the Witherspoon duck as he presented his scheme to both Atticus and Lydia over tea at the kitchen table. Lydia asked Dominick if he had a preference as to which way his room faced.
Chapter 2
After Labor Day the boats began to disappear from the marinas and their embayment anchorages along the shoreline. One by one they were hoisted up onto the hard, demasted, and shrink-wrapped in white plastic. The process fascinated Dominick. Like many expenses he never incurred—property taxes, mortgages, insurance, alimony, rent—this bizarre expenditure mystified him. Atticus tried to explain that a winter in these waters could be very hard on a pleasure boat and that the cost of maintenance and year-round insurance actually made a haul-out cheaper, but Dominick could not get it. “It’s like putting a forty-foot toy in your attic every year,” he said. “Surely your father and grandfather never did this.”
“Some boats, the big boats, still winter in the water here or head south to Bermuda or the Caribbean like in the old days,” Atticus told him. “Around this time every year when I was a boy, I used to crew my dad’s yacht down to a Florida marina. That was always a good time. Take the train back. I was always late starting school.” Atticus’s dad’s sloop had been called Covenant II. There was a portrait of it, under full sail on a starboard tack in heavy seas, in the dining room at Mt. Sinai. But there was no longer a boat in the family. The last one—something considerably smaller than Covenant II, Dominick was told—had been liquidated along with the rest of the estate. Liquidation seemed a proper fate for a boat, Dominick thought. The topic was a sore spot with Atticus.
The end of summer also meant the end of the summer people. The streets of the village were returned to the care of the locals. The SUVs with out-of-state plates and the nifty convertible sports cars went wherever it is they go when the days get shorter and the nights get colder. At first Dominick felt a bit deserted, left behind. He was, after all, one of them, a fair-weather visitor. His limited wardrobe was all summer clothes, plus a couple of ascots. It had been many years since he had stayed north for the winter.
It was Lydia who took him to the thrift shop in the basement of St. Edgar’s Episcopal Church, open only on Wednesday and Saturday mornings. Dominick’s XXL-Tall pear shape was not a common one, especially here in New England, where the beer bellies and fat asses so popular now among most American males had not yet become fashionable. Dominick knew from his research that his height, size, weight, and shape—none of which had changed in decades—matched almost exactly what was known of General Washington’s founding father endomorphism—perhaps the most physically fit of all the presidents and definitely the finest horseman. Dominick’s great-aunt Dorothea had always claimed a sort of Washington-slept-here family descendance from the first president, though they would never let her into the D.A.R.
Dominick flicked through the rack of “pre-owned” men’s jackets, looking only for ones with the longest sleeves. Elsewhere in the shop Lydia was searching for the largest men’s sweaters and woolen shirts. The relative we
alth of the island was reflected in the fancy brand names of its castoff clothing, only the best and barely if ever worn. Dominick pulled out a North Face down jacket that looked like it might fit. As he was trying it on, a woman spoke from behind him: “Lord Witherspoon, what a happy surprise to have you back among us.” It was one of the realtors he and Brenda and Charlie had dealt with, maybe that first one, with the dark sweat stain down the back of her green silk blouse.
“Ah, yes, back again. Hello,” Dominick said, putting the down jacket back on its hanger and sticking it back on the rack. “Flying over, I thought I would stop by and visit your charming village in a different season. Not much to do here off-season, is there?” He moved away from the men’s clothes rack to examine a shelf of books. “I mean, here I am reduced to church flea markets for entertainment. Have you read this?” He pulled a John Grisham novel from the shelf.
“No. I don’t read pulp airport novels, probably because I don’t get to fly away very often. I hear you made a bid on the Jameson place. Here to rethink that? Prices are still in play, you know.”
“Just passing through,” Dominick said. He put the book back on the shelf. Lydia walked up behind him and held a bulky Aran Islands cable-knit sweater up against his shoulders, shook her head, and walked away.
“Bargain hunting?” the lady realtor asked, sardonic, ironic, dangerous.
“Always,” Dominick said. “Especially for investment properties. Ta-ta now.” And he walked to the exit and up the steps and went and sat in his car until he saw the realtor lady leave. Then he went back to fetch Lydia. He bought a used copy of a coffee-table book entitled Great Bordellos of the World, which he felt obliged to remove from the Episcopal Church basement. Between St. Edgar’s thrift shop and the Salvation Army—“Salvation Armani” Lydia called it—over in New Jerusalem, Dominick built a basic winter defense wardrobe. Nothing matched, but that seemed to echo the local fashion sense.
Dominick’s sole quandary about his new attire was it provenience. Somewhere in his heritage a hex had been placed on dead men’s clothes, and a few of his new plaid shirts and woolen sweaters and especially a pair of rubber winter boots never seemed like his but borrowed. He knew that these were widows’ thrift-shop gifts, the passed-on harvest of closets cleaned out after himself had passed on. There was one well-worn denim jacket with leather elbow patches hand sewn on that he especially took a liking to. He often wondered during the course of the winter as he wore the jacket to town, to the gas station and the grocery store, if there were not locals—maybe even the widow herself—who saw it and recognized it and thought immediately of its original occupant—a man his height and size and wingspan—then had to swallow that memory when a stranger was standing there.
Dominick also noted that while he had heard women brag about pieces of fine clothing picked up as flea-market steals, men—of his acquaintance at least—never bragged about their secondhand clothes. When he shared this observation with Atticus, his host had no idea what Dominick was talking about. Secondhand clothes?
New Jerusalem was the closest mainland town, the place where their island ferry dropped them. It was an old fishing and shipping port down on its luck for a hundred years but rebounding a bit with the new visitor industry age. Derelict dockside districts that no one had gone to the expense of demolishing had become slowly gentrified for the summer trade. But a block or two back from any Harbor View boutique the old houses on their narrow streets still pushed up against one another as if for warmth, crowding the cobblestone right-of-ways. There was still an old-world smell there of dampness and mold, old wood and things left alone too long. Up one of these alleys was a tobacconist’s shop that sold Dominick’s cigars. At the next corner was a Portuguese fishermen’s saloon.
Dominick would not take his car on the New Jerusalem ferry. He would find a side street parking spot near the village ferry dock and walk on and off. It was much cheaper, and everything he needed in New Jerusalem was within easy walking distance of the wharf where the ferry docked. In his new-used local mufti, including a blue knit watch cap, he passed for a local and nobody noticed him. He was not Dominick or Lord Witherspoon here; he was nameless, which was nice. Even in the Portuguese saloon no one ever asked his name or offered theirs. Dominick prized the anonymity.
At some point in October the ferry changed from its on-season to its off-season schedule. That possibility had never occurred to Dominick, so one brisk dusk as he returned to the New Jerusalem wharf to catch his ferry home he was surprised to find the wharf deserted and the gate to the ferry dock closed and locked. Only then did he see the posted notice of the new shortened hours. He had missed the last boat. Perplexed, he returned to the Portuguese saloon and resumed his seat at the bar. “Missed your last ferry, did you?” the bartender said as he placed a fresh glass of ale in front of Dominick. Dominick wondered where he would spend the night.
Dominick had never fallen for that cell phone entrapment scam nor bought one, but when he looked around he could see no public telephone in the bar. The bartender confirmed that they hadn’t had one of those in years. “Not since everyone started carrying their own.” A man down the bar, a regular, leaned over and handed Dominick his black compact gadget. “Here, mate, use mine.”
Without looking at it Dominick handed it back. “No, no. I would only break it.” Dominick had never used a cell phone. “But if you would dial a number for me.” He gave the man Atticus and Lydia’s number to dial, then took the phone back and walked away from the bar. The phone rang many times. Dominick could see it on its assigned end table at the end of the hall. It was an old black office-style phone with a polite ring. If the kitchen door was closed you could barely hear it in there. He waited. No message machine or voice-mail service kicked in. It just kept ringing. Finally Lydia answered with a surprised “Hello?” as if she had just found a kitten abandoned inside her front door.
Dominick only wanted to let the Jamesons know he had missed the last ferry and would not be home that night. He knew they would worry; they had little else to do. There would be plenty of empty tourist rooms in New Jerusalem in October. He would find a place to stay. But Lydia would hear none of it. She gave him the name and address of a friend. She would call ahead and let her friend, a Ms. Arnold, know to expect a guest for the night. “And do bring her a bottle of port, dear. Spend what you’d spend on a room for a bottle of something vintage, ruby. Martha is much more entertaining on good port.”
It was three days before Dominick finally caught a ferry back home. He had had no idea how interesting New Jerusalem could be in the off-season. Of course, Lydia had told Martha that the houseguest she was accidentally sharing with her for the night was Lord Witherspoon. Whether Mrs. Arnold believed this or not was of little matter, as she really did not care. “It gets so boring here,” she told Dominick early on their first evening, “with just the same old farts.” She would not let him drink the port—“a woman’s drink”—and put out a bottle of aged single malt for him. They sipped their separate drinks neat. “No iced drinks after Labor Day,” she announced.
Martha kept him busy—joint errands around town and manly things to do around the house, like changing lightbulbs, tightening doorknobs, exchanging screens for storm windows. From the start she called him Lord Witherspoon and would not give it up even after he asked her to call him Dominick. She rather liked calling him Lord Witherspoon. In return he called her Mrs. Arnold until she corrected him with the information that Arnold was her maiden name; she had never married. “But I do miss having a man around the house. It was so nice of Lydia to loan you to me.” Dominick could not guess her age, although she had fond memories of World War II, which had ended well before Dominick was born.
For a day, Dominick’s lack of a change of clothes didn’t seem to matter, but the second night Ms. Arnold wanted to go out for dinner, and Dominick’s patched denim jacket, green woolen turtleneck, and dark watch cap just would not do. The night before, Ms. Arnold had shown him his guest bedroom an
d said good-night. They were both a bit tipsy by then, and Dominick hadn’t really seen the room, just the bed. Now Ms. Arnold took him back to the room and opened the closet, which was hung with men’s clothes—jackets and slacks and suits and sweaters. “My brother Ben’s. I never could bring myself to get rid of them. He had such wonderful taste in clothes. There are shirts and things in the dresser. See what you can do, Lord Witherspoon, and perhaps a bath? I’ll make reservations for eight o’clock. You will need to wear a tie, I’m afraid.”
Brother Ben had been a big man, bigger even than Dominick. The first suit he tried on—after his bath—fit him swimmingly, tailored for a mogul with yards of fine fabric. Its double-breasted cut was so forties retro it was almost back in style. He found socks and suspenders and, still folded in crinkly paper from a Chinese laundry, a starched white dress shirt that was actually a size too large for him around the neck. There was even a selection of silk cravats. There were no shoes. Dominick did what he could to buff up his scuffed brogans. Downstairs in the parlor at a quarter to eight when he met Ms. Arnold—dressed all in black like a widow except for the pearls at her throat—she said, “Ah, the real Lord Witherspoon emerges from behind his proletarian camouflage.”
In the dim indirect and candle light of the ristorante, Martha Arnold was really quite striking. In the purposeful gloom, her pale face was striking above her high black lace collar and her string of pearls. Her thick white hair pulled back and up in a casual chignon held by a silver comb completed the regal look. She liked being dressed up, and out in public. Dominick had to admit that he was enjoying it too, disguised by his period costume and his nom de plume. “Lord Witherspoon party of two” still turned heads even in this fanciest of New Jerusalem eateries. They got a good table, removed but where no one could miss catching sight of them. They ordered only the best from the menu. Ms. Arnold vouched for the freshness of the oysters. They would share a lobster and the prime rib.
