New Jerusalem News

by John Enright

  Lord Witherspoon felt like saying, “No. You don’t understand. She is just the daughter of a friend. We were talking real estate.” But instead he discovered that his fly was still unzipped and, as Dominick now, he lingered there at the elevator after the doors had closed in order to give the couple a head start down the corridor. He heard the man say something that made the woman laugh. He zipped up his fly. Ah, romance.

  When Dominick got back to Mt. Sinai, no one was home and the house was cold. The Jamesons’ car was gone. There was several days’ mail in the mailbox and two New Jerusalem Newses in their clear plastic sleeves near the front steps. There were two unwashed coffee cups in the sink. It was just another deserted house, but it was home. Funny how that worked. When you have a base—no matter how temporary or borrowed—and leave it, when you return there, it is home. It was that way with campsites and hotel rooms and even weekend house visits. If you leave and return, the place you return to is olly-olly-home-free “home.” Your stuff is there. You can take off your shoes and empty your pockets, change your clothes. Safe haven. Home—its deep root was the Greek kei, meaning to lie down, to rest, then to lie down with others, and so on to heim and subsequent uses, all the way to what missiles do before they explode. Was there an older word than home?

  Dominick went to bed. Lord Witherspoon’s rich repast at Morton’s the previous evening had brought on intestinal havoc and he had slept poorly. The drive home had exhausted him. He was feeling his age and would rather not think of it. Lie down was what you did when you got home—rest, hide behind the gates, beneath the covers.

  Next morning he still had the place to himself, and he started to worry. He couldn’t remember Atticus saying anything about a trip, and they had left the house in a bit of a mess, as if they had been searching for something before they left. Where would they have gone? Dominick knew none of their friends. He had no numbers to call—except for Angelica’s, and he could hardly call her to inquire about her parents’ whereabouts. What if Atticus’s forever time had suddenly arrived and he was in a hospital somewhere or a funeral home? But then surely there would be friends or relatives coming to the house, phone calls. Dominick prized his solitude, but this silence was unnerving.

  There was Ms. Arnold over in New Jerusalem, but Dominick had never had her number, only her address. When the next day arrived with still no Atticus or Lydia or word, Dominick caught the ferry to New Jerusalem. His supply of Churchills was running low, so a visit to his tobacconist was also in order. It felt good to be back in his local garb, his denim jacket and knit watch cap. The midmorning ferry was nearly deserted. The wind off the bay was like a frozen knife, and all the other passengers remained inside. Dominick had the open deck and the railings all to himself. He found a snug corner on the lee side out of the wind where his view was up the bay, which was also nearly deserted—no sailboats, no fishing boats, just an empty, rusted freighter resting high at anchor off to the left of the channel.

  Dominick knew from old maps that both shores of the bay and its many islands had once been spotted with forts and coastal batteries from three centuries of waiting for war. Each new installation had been state of the art of defense for its time, and each had been eclipsed by the next advance of offensive ordinance. But not since the Revolution—how many American wars before?—had a shot been fired there against any enemy. War was such an excellent industry. The profits of endless paranoid preparation, with the added bonus that if hostilities actually did occur your product was either fired away or blown up and had to be immediately replaced, at your prices. Not one of those forts and batteries, camps and bases was still in service, useless defenses against ballistic missiles or terrorists. Most were abandoned, overgrown, and forgotten a few were now parks.

  Dominick’s favorite bay war story was from early in the Revolution when a farmer on their island had, on his own initiative, jammed the barrel of a small canon between two boulders on the shoreline of his farm to take potshots with rocks at passing Royal Navy vessels. When he finally hit one—took out a sail on a little sloop—the tars came ashore and spiked his gun. A Second Amendment kind of guy before there even was one, a local hero. Of course, they burned his house and barn and crops and took all his livestock and him. What war was really all about was things changing hands. Dominick wondered how the hero’s wife felt about it. Somewhere up that bay was Old Grofton, where the LNG port was going in. There would not be any patriots taking rock potshots at those ships going by. The ferry turned into the wind so that there was no lee, and Dominick ducked inside with the rest of the passengers. A small boy shot at him with a toy gun, and with his finger Dominick shot him back.

  He stopped at his tobacconist and the Portuguese fishermen’s bar before heading on to Ms. Arnold’s house. She seemed pleased to see him. “Lord Witherspoon, what a pleasant surprise. Come in, come in.”

  “I was just in the neighborhood, thought I would pop in to say hello.”

  Ms. Arnold led him into the front parlor. “Lydia, dear, look who is here,” she called. Lydia was seated in a chair in the front window. She had her iPod ear pods in. She must have seen him walk up to the house, but when she turned to face him there wasn’t a hint of recognition in her face. “Lydia, you remember Lord Witherspoon,” Ms. Arnold said, as if introducing someone from her garden club.

  “Where is Atticus?” Lydia asked. Then she turned back to look out the window.

  Ms. Arnold took Lord Witherspoon to the kitchen. “Poor dear has had a bit of a shock, I’m afraid. Her house was raided earlier in the week, awful experience. I understand they went through the entire place basement to attic, tearing everything apart, looking for god knows what. I never did trust that little weasel of a husband of hers. I guess the authorities finally caught on to him. You do know how he made all his money, don’t you? Building submarines. That’s right. The company he worked for built those giant submarines, like Sean Connery’s. She just sits there by the window with those things in her ears waiting for him to come back.”

  It was hot in the kitchen, which smelled like a roast was cooking. Dominick took off his cap and jacket and draped them on the back of a chair. “Ah . . . and where is Atticus?”

  “God knows where he goes. They came here after the invasion. She couldn’t stay in that house. I’ve got plenty of room. Poor Lydia, she comes and goes. She’s better when he is around, but he’s gone all day and a few evenings. Where are you staying now, Lord Witherspoon? Just visiting?”

  “Oh, with friends on the island,” he said, confused. Had he only been gone the two days? Again time had done one of its peculiar folds in the plain. Everything changed. A year could have passed since he last took a seat at Ms. Arnold’s kitchen table. “Submarines, you say? I didn’t know.” The house had not been in such bad disarray.

  “Yes, the ones that fire missiles. And he is from the other side of the commodore’s family, the side that left and came back. He is part Indian, you know.”

  “Part Indian.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “That would have been a long time ago.”

  “Memories are long here. Will you stay for dinner, Lord Witherspoon? Just a simple family meal, but you are welcome.”

  “Lydia didn’t recognize me.”

  “Like I said, she comes and goes. I think it’s that music that she listens to. What do they call it? Those awful Negroid-sounding rhyming songs with no melody? Wrack? And then she’ll go on about how terrible the Meriwether family is. Why, there haven’t been any Meriwethers hereabout since she and I were girls. Poor dear.”

  “Are you expecting Atticus back this evening?”

  “I don’t expect anything from that man. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t just leave Lydia here with me indefinitely and never come back. He’s been very angry, not at all nice to be around. But do stay. I’m afraid I can’t offer you a drink. Atticus has drunk all the liquor in the house.”

  “You would have no idea how I could contact him?”
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  “Stay for dinner. He might show up.”

  Dominick left a sealed message for Atticus instead. If he stayed much longer he would miss the last ferry back, and he needed to get out of that house no matter how good the roast smelled. He had supper instead in the village, fish and chips at one of the restaurants that stayed open year-round in the block above the ferry. On the boat ride home he had decided he would grow a beard. It would come in white, like Sean Connery’s in that movie. He would keep it trimmed. The fish and chips were good, but it was not the roast he craved.

  The “raid” on Mt. Sinai meant a search warrant, surely federal, had been issued. The ICE guys were grasping at straws. When he got home, Dominick went through the piled up issues of the New Jerusalem News, looking for updates on the Old Grofton bombing. All he found was one story saying that although there were no suspects yet in custody or identified, the investigation was ongoing and deepening and that other law enforcement and intelligence agencies had become involved, including Interpol and British antiterrorist agents. The president had issued a statement condemning the attack and vowing federal vengeance against the “cowards and enemies of our God-given freedoms.”

  Dominick went to his room and looked through his things. He had not noticed anything amiss before, but now he saw that the books on his end table seemed out of order—the lighthouse book he had just finished was at the bottom of the pile—and that a notebook in which he wrote down memorable quotations was not where he normally kept it. Someone had gone through his drawers as well, because the white clothes and the colored clothes were no longer clearly segregated as he always kept them. But nothing seemed to be missing.

  He went back down to the kitchen, where he could hear the phone if Atticus called, and poured himself a drink—bourbon tonight because he was feeling like an American, a wronged American, a volunteer for the whiskey rebellion. Maybe he would let his hair grow long as well. He wondered if the house was being watched, but he didn’t bother going to see if there were any suspicious vehicles in the road. He wondered if the house was being bugged, if they had planted microphones like in the movies. Atticus didn’t call.

  That night Dominick awoke himself with his own snoring, in his dream mistaking it for a lighthouse foghorn. He had been following an albatross that led him to the edge of destruction on the rocks in the fog before the warning sound awakened him. He switched pillows and rolled over and went back to sleep.

  Chapter 9

  Crows. It was crow time. They owned the new dead season when the woods were just black branches against a brooding sky. All the sunshine birds were gone. The only calls were caws and the now-and-then lament of seagulls higher above. Black rulers of an empty roost, strutting across brown lawns, pecking at macadam road kills, unbeautiful birds with attitude. What sort of creatures thrived at margins, this border time at the edge of snow? They traveled in brazen gangs now. They distilled starkness.

  Dominick watched them from the windows of the house. He was still there alone, although Atticus stopped by at times to check on things or fetch something, always hurrying back to Lydia in New Jerusalem. They had left Ms. Arnold’s and moved to the seasonally vacated home of another friend, Lydia refusing to return to her violated Mt. Sinai. Wild birds were the perfect pets. Their freedom freed you. The pleasure they gave was gratis. Here he was in the cage of this house, looking out at them free on whatever wind. Free to be crows.

  Dominick’s camera bag was still in the trunk of his car. He had never brought it in when he moved from Brenda and Charlie’s, but he thought of it now that the weather was turning colder. He had not taken a photograph in months. It went that way sometimes. It was as if for a stretch of time he could not see anything, and then suddenly everything would become very clear. Baseball batters talked like that, whether they were seeing the ball or not. For Dominick it was as if all of a sudden his eyes were a viewfinder and his mind worked through f-stops and apertures, focal lengths and shadows. Always in black-and-white—the posing crow’s absolute absorption of light against that marbled sky.

  He went out to the car and brought in his camera bag. It was like meeting an old friend in a pub for a drink—well, many drinks. He and his cameras and lenses went on a binge. He had left all his black-and-white film stock in Brenda and Charlie’s freezer. After he shot all the film in his cameras he drove over there, found the key to the house where Charlie had shown him, and retrieved it all. He felt ten years younger. On the way home he stopped and reloaded and shot black-and-white cows in a field and a one-shade-of-gray horse against a line of another-shade-of-gray trees. He was a danger on the road.

  Not since graduate school in England had Dominick spent a winter in the north. He was a migratory not a hibernating creature. He had forgotten the slanting distant light of a November afternoon, forgotten the thin transparency of frozen air, the vulnerable fragility of barren trees. The cold had never bothered him much. It was the inconveniences of northern winters that had always drawn him south to Florida or the islands. He was a camp follower of the highest tax bracket, and the idle well-off liked it warm. In recent years he had noticed, though, that the fewer people he had to be around the better, and in his memories winters were the cloistered season, a time of solitary walks and empty rooms, a black-and-white time. Now he had a place entirely to himself, with zero social obligations, the human world stripped back to basics. He didn’t even have to speak. He could just shoot.

  He did have to get his film developed, however, and purchase more. Neither of these once simple transactions was a given any longer. Black-and-white film photography had ceased to be commercial. Stores no longer sold black-and-white film. Getting film developed and having prints made had become a specialist’s trade, or you did it yourself. Dominick checked the Yellow Pages and made a few phone calls, but no one locally had a clue. Try in Boston was the most common suggestion. He was left with the quandary and photos he couldn’t see.

  The New Jerusalem Historical Society Museum occupied one of those houses with a bronze plaque beside the front door. This one was a tall Victorian, returned part of the way to its original rococo splendor, but with too much of its once-buffeting grounds now an unfortunate parking lot. Dominick had trouble finding it in the warren of the old town streets. It was a nasty afternoon of cold spitting showers and shifting winds, but he was on a mission. He wanted to look at photographs, old photographs. He might not need a community, but his photographs did. How had this landscape appeared to earlier cameras? What thematic traditions might his photos be accidentally mimicking, mocking? How did this place come across arrested in black-and-white a hundred and more years before?

  Dominick paused on the porch beside the plaque to stomp the rain from his shoes and remove his wet knit cap. It had been ten days at least since he had last shaved. In his dark turtleneck sweater and wet denim jacket with the patches on the sleeves and his bristling stubble face he would look like some bum coming in out of the cold and rain. Would some old maid curator just try to shoo him away? As he opened the door and stepped into the foyer, a voice did call out to him from somewhere, but it was a man’s voice. “You can hang up your wet jacket there by the door.” Dominick looked around, and sure enough beside the door was an empty, very antique-looking coat rack fashioned from deer antlers. He hung his jacket and his knit cap there. “How can I help you, sailor?” the voice asked. Dominick couldn’t see the source of the voice until he walked further into the foyer and looked through an open doorway to his left into a well-lit room that looked to be the library. Standing behind a counter there was a tall man with a shock of white hair. The man laughed. “I could see you in the hall mirror there as you came in. A bit of a nasty day out there?”

  Dominick just nodded. He was now standing at the juncture of a foyer, a hallway, and two large rooms with open sliding doors. In front of him an ornate carpeted staircase with a sweeping banister led up to a stained-glass-window landing. The house was warm, and everywhere he looked old furniture, framed prints and
paintings, and glass display cases glowed in indirect amber lighting. There was the smell of paste wax. No one else was around, just the past cast in amber.

  “No other visitors today,” the man said as if reading Dominick’s mind. “Off-season, the weather, the general lack of interest in finished things. What brings you?”

  “Photographs,” Dominick said, “old photographs of hereabouts.”

  “Anything specific? Is your family of here?”

  “No and no.”

  “Well, feel free to peruse what we have hanging, and I’ll pull out a few albums for you to look at as well. Would it be ships and fishing that interest you?”

  “No, not really. Landscapes, houses, period shots. If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “No trouble at all. It’s what we’re here for. Might I ask if there is a purpose for your search?”

  “I take photographs,” Dominick said. “I want to see what other photographers saw here.”

  The man came out from behind the counter where books and papers were spread. He was as tall as Dominick, but trimmer. He was impeccably dressed in a dark-brown wool suit and forest-green tie. He was very handsome in a self-preened way. He extended his hand to shake. “My name is John Starks,” he said. “I’m curator here, and I would be quite happy to assist you on your search. You are?”

  “Dominick,” Dominick said, “just Dominick.” He was definitely not Lord Witherspoon. They shook hands.

  The next several hours passed quickly and pleasantly. Mr. Starks had a fine eye for photographs and knew his collection well. He avoided all studio portraits and posed family scenes. “I have few interior shots without people in them,” he apologized, “and not real people anyway, more like mannequins posed in period costumes.” In the outdoor landscape, panoramic, and real estate photos that they looked at, people were either totally absent or just small, indistinct, insignificant figures. The seascape views of the bay were among the most interesting. This was where the unnamed photographers with their boxy wooden cameras and fragile glass plates had felt most free to indulge their aesthetic expression. There were several truly majestic skies, studies in contrast and chiaroscuro. “Amazing what they could do,” Starks said. Dominick could only imagine the labor involved—hauling all that heavy, breakable gear in a horse-drawn buggy over farm trails to a cliff edge to set up and hope for the light to be right and for the rain to hold off. No point and shoot, better pack a lunch.