New Jerusalem News

by John Enright

  It struck Dominick that Angelica had not mentioned Lord Witherspoon’s name. Had the FBI not mentioned him to her as one of their suspect foreign agents? Of course, they had no way of knowing that she had met with His Lordship, and surely by now their British counterparts would have informed them of His Lordship’s nonexistence. And he, Dominick, whose car was in the drive and whose coats were on the wall and who had been sitting in the dark ten feet from them—and whose member Angelica had recently attempted to fellate—might not have existed at all. Even in the photograph of him and Atticus on the trawler, he went unidentified, just “another, bearded sailor.” Call him Nick.

  Maybe it would be best if instead of bursting onto the stage, both Dominick and Lord Witherspoon vanished as far into the wings as possible. Way too many questions to answer otherwise. Maybe, as soon as the coast was clear, he should pack up all his things, load the car, and head south. Savannah was nice this time of year. He could rent a small boat and take more seabird photos somewhere his hands didn’t freeze on the camera.

  As it happened, any entrance Dominick might have made was preempted by an entrance from the opposite direction. Dominick heard the back door fly open and then shut, then Lydia’s voice, sounding just like an outraged mother, “Of all the nerve. Of all the nerve.”

  “Mother! Mother, put that down!”

  “Lydia! Lydia, stop right there. Now give me that. Hand it over.”

  “You come in here, you . . . you witch, out of nowhere, and tell us we have to leave our own house? I should have drowned both of you when you were born. So, you’re on the side of the black helicopters, are you? Accusing your own father of all sorts of things. I rue the day I gave birth to you. Now, you get out of my house and stay out, or I’ll take that sickle to your made-up face. Go on get out!”

  “I do not believe this, mother. You wandering around the grounds in your mink. You threatening me with a garden tool. And what is this? Burned bread nailed to the wall? I’ll have you arrested. I’ll have you committed. I’ll have you out of this house. You’ll see.”

  “No, you won’t, Angie.” It was Atticus talking, sounding calm and in charge. “You won’t do any of those things, not in this town, not while I’m alive. I think you better leave.”

  “I am not going to be thrown out of my own house!”

  “I’ll give your mother her sickle back.”

  “Daddy! Alright, I’ll go. Who wants to stay in this freezing house anyway? But you have not heard the last of this. You are both crazy.”

  “Good riddance,” Lydia said.

  Angelica had one more pronouncement to make from the front hall, yelled loud enough that Dominick could hear it on the cellar stairs. “Everyone is against you, you know. You haven’t a chance.” The front door slammed.

  Dominick waited a minute before opening the cellar door, and it was as if he were still invisible. Neither Atticus, who was studying the rusty dull sickle he was holding, nor Lydia, still in her mink and tearing the burnt toast off the wall, noticed him. He took a step into the kitchen, feeling like he was intruding on a private family moment. Then he saw the handbag on the kitchen table, a large, expensive-looking handbag. It had to be Angelica’s. She had done it again. He wondered if she did it on purpose. Dominick stepped quietly back through the door and shut it softly behind him.

  In less than a minute Angelica was back in the house and coming through the kitchen door from the hallway. Without a word to or from her parents, she grabbed her handbag and left again. Again the front door slammed. She sprayed gravel on the underside of her car as she gunned it backwards out of the driveway. It was like her curtain call, coming back for her purse.

  It was like barnacles on a docked boat. If he stayed in any one place for too long, things just accumulated—clothes, books, stuff. Dominick would have to do some triage and jettisoning of things if he was going to pack and depart. He started right in on it. He was headed south, so the winter wardrobe could stay behind. He would chose just a few of Atticus’s books to take on permanent loan. Then he heard the helicopter again, hovering high above. What in the world were they doing? The afternoon light was fading. Were they waiting for someone to leave, so that they could follow them? Where would their quarry go? To another coconspirator’s house? There was only the one way off the island. Or was it just psychological? Trying to get someone in the house to panic and leave?

  Dominick stopped packing and sat on the bed. Why had the feds sicked Angelica on them? She said it was because the feds wanted her to spy on them. But the fact that she did not live there and was not welcomed there made her a poor choice for spy. No, they recruited her and sent her in there just to stir things up, to increase the pressure, to see if they could make something pop, like shooting the cue ball into a cluster of balls with no particular objective in mind other than just breaking things up to see what happens. The purpose of the helicopter was to see if there were any immediate results from Angelica’s visit and to apply some paranoid pressure from above. They knew they could be heard in the house. They were there to be heard.

  Dominick realized that if he did leave, he would then become an individual focus of interest. It wasn’t just the helicopter. The helicopter was just sort of the sacrament, the outward sign of their surveillance. They knew who he was and by now they would have discovered his credit card and banking records, his rap sheet from the old Florida bust. Who knew what else? They would follow and track him even if he slipped away. For all he knew they already had a tracking device on his car with hopes he would lead them to other terrorist cells, make their boring jobs mean something.

  He unpacked what he had packed. Better to hide in plain sight and act innocent, at least for now. After all, he had to remind himself, he was innocent. When he decided not to leave, the helicopter left.

  Chapter 13

  There was a fireplace in the rear parlor at Mt. Sinai. From the looks of it, it had been well used in its day but not recently. Dominick asked Atticus about it, who said the chimney hadn’t been cleaned in years. Dominick had seen the stacks of rather ancient-looking firewood under an eave at the back of the house. He hauled some inside and started a fire with papers from the recycling bin. Atticus had gone out. Lydia was off in her somewhere else world. The flue was cold and wouldn’t draw, and smoke started coming into the parlor. So he crumpled up and piled on more paper and kindling until flames were licking up into the flue opening. He was counting on there being no birds nest or blockage farther up. Smoke was still coming into the parlor, so he piled on more kindling, trying to get the fire hot as quickly as possible. This would either work or become a smoky disaster. With a whoosh and plop a large clump of twigs and leaves fell out of the flue onto the fire and burst into flames, and the chimney began to inhale. He still had to air out the room, however. He opened a window and the door to the front hall and then the front door. A chill breeze swept through the parlor—the opposite intent of the fire. He went and put on his denim jacket and knit cap and returned to tend the fire.

  What had Angelica referred to their living here as—camping out? Perhaps he should search the kitchen for marshmallows. But the smoke cleared quickly, and he closed the room up again. It would still take some time and fire tending before the room heated up at all, but now there would be an option to his arctic room. The parlor had cozy potential. He pulled a stuffed settee and a reading lamp over in front of the fire, then an end table and a stuffed wingback chair. He went to his room for his book and then to the kitchen for a glass of scotch. The parlor was warm enough now for him to take off his jacket and cap. He lit a cigar and settled back into the settee to watch the fire and enter a nicotine meditation.

  The fire was like a pet that he fed and that in turn kept him company. As always the life of its flames was hypnotic. How basic was that? How all the way back did that go? Fire, the first psychedelic entertainment—just your mind and the inanimate dance of the flames. Campfires made myths tellable. What was TV but a hearth light flickering at you? But T
Vs were cold. They gave off no heat, no comfort. How many cords of wood was it Starks had said a New England farmhouse would burn in a year? All that staring into fires on early unfriendly dusks like this, all the questions to ask yourself, searching for elusive self-justifying answers.

  One history everyone got to write was their own for themselves. Such histories were especially unreal, beyond inaccurate. Too much was too easy to forget, like the damage one left in one’s wake. You never got to see that; you’d be long gone. As long as there was forward time to look ahead to, the past was just random memorable mileposts with vast blank stretches between them. All mirror images were vain. But then no one had a better view of your life than you. Anyone else had only a snippet here or a snapshot there, and everyone lies in their letters. Who wrote letters anymore? Probably these days they lied online, creating persona that existed solely in digital space. A life lived as a lie was probably best ignored anyway, like a Photoshopped image of a scene that never existed.

  Lydia stuck her head in the hall doorway. “I smelled smoke,” she said. “Is that you, Lord Witherspoon?”

  “No, just me, Nick.”

  “St. Nick. Is it Christmas already?”

  Ah, a pair of made-up lives, Dominick thought—St. Nick and Christ—celebrated together. “No, not quite. There’s still time to wait. Come on in, Lydia. Take this chair by the fire.”

  “I’ll get myself some tea. The fire is nice.”

  When Lydia returned, Atticus came with her, and the three of them sat in front of the fire—Atticus in the wingback chair, Lydia and Dominick on the settee. They sipped their drinks and watched the fire as darkness settled in outside. Nobody spoke. They listened to the fire.

  There was a school bus in the parking lot of the New Jerusalem Historical Society Museum, and inside was a class of students, maybe eighth graders. John Starks was busy, surrounded by kids. Dominick caught his eye and pointed to the case where the historic photo albums were kept. With a nod and a wave Starks gave him the okay. Dominick was only there to see if Starks had developed the roll of film he had dropped off several days before, but as long as he was there and had to wait he might as well look at old photos.

  Dominick had taken his time walking from the ferry dock to the museum—a stop at his tobacconist and a few other shops, a circuitous route. Maybe he was just feeling self-important, but he had the feeling he was being followed. When he had walked onto the ferry he had glanced back at the dock and saw a man standing there in the cold, not in line to get on the boat, with one hand on his ear and talking into his shoulder. He was wearing city clothes not island clothes.

  When they got to the New Jerusalem dock maybe another forty walk-on passengers disembarked with him. He split quickly from the crowd and headed up a side street. No one seemed to follow him. But at the top of that block was a square where all the streets up from the dock met, and there was a woman there in a blue down ski jacket talking on her cell phone. During his wandering to the museum he saw her several more times, window shopping, walking away across a street, waiting for a light at an opposite corner. She was a good-looking young woman, hardly more than a girl. Maybe that was why he kept seeing her. Did the FBI employ people like that? On the last few blocks to the museum he did not see her or he would have kept walking. So this was intro to paranoia? Black helicopters and pretty girls? Men addressing their lapels?

  “You know, maybe you should just let your beard grow, it’s coming in so full and white. Christmas is coming up. You could get a job as Santa Claus.” Starks had seen the last students out the door.

  “Ho ho. Maybe next year. I’m not quite ready for that role yet.”

  “Looking for anything specific today?”

  “Actually, I was looking for photos of Darby Point. If that’s what it was called back then.”

  “It was also once called Strawberry Point and then Fort Darby for a while. Hold on, I think there may be two or three Fort Darby photos, gunnery crew posed with their cannon sort of things, not your cup of tea.” Dominick returned with a black archival box with loose prints inside and started flipping through them. “Might I ask why our photographer of birds is suddenly interested in Darby Point?”

  “I was there photographing birds. That seagull roll of film I gave you. Just curious, you know, the way it looks now and the way it looked then.”

  “The birds have changed,” Starks said. He had brought back to their table a manila envelope along with the archival box. He pulled out several eight-by-ten prints and laid them out. “These predators weren’t there back then.” They were the photographs Dominick had taken of the black helicopter as it hovered above the trawler. “Nice shots. Look how they match up.” And Starks spread out a similar number of seagull shots in which the white-and-gray birds hung and twisted and looked at the camera just as the opaque helicopter seemed to. They both laughed.

  “I was feeding them potato chips,” Dominick said. “Probably not good for them.”

  The old-fashioned store bell above the museum door that jangled when someone came in made its sound. They both looked up toward the mirror at the end of the hall where you could see who was there. It was the girl in the blue down ski jacket, looking innocently around. Then the bell jangled again and a man entered, also warmly dressed.

  “Customers,” Starks said, “out of towners,” and he went out to greet them.

  Dominick picked up the prints of his photographs and put them back in the manila envelope with the contact sheet and negatives. Then he placed the envelope with the other old photos in the black archival box, which he closed up and put on the floor beneath the table. He wasn’t sure why, but he was becoming sufficiently paranoid to suspect that taking photos of black helicopters might somehow be a crime. He casually got up and put on his jacket and cap and headed for the door.

  He had to walk past Starks and the girl in the main hall. “Thank you for your help,” he said without stopping.

  Starks seemed mildly surprised but said only, “Oh, you’re going? Well, you’re welcome. Come back again.”

  The man who had followed the girl in was still standing by the door, his hands clasped behind his back, pretending to examine an old chart on the wall. As Dominick brushed past him to open the door, he couldn’t resist. “Agent,” he said both as greeting and farewell. The man didn’t respond.

  By now Dominick didn’t care if he was being followed or not. He had to remind himself that he had nothing to hide. He headed out for and found The Harp and went directly to the quiet corner booth where he and Starks had sat. A different waitress. He ordered an ale and pulled from his jacket pocket the book he had brought to read on the ferry, a paperback collection of essays by the New England historian Samuel Eliot Morison. He was on his second ale and reading about clipper ships when Starks showed up and joined him maybe forty minutes later.

  “If you’re not careful you may end up as a member of The Harp’s royalty as well,” Starks said as he sat down. “I doubt any of these other customers have the FBI following them around.”

  “Maybe you will now.”

  “I’ve already been knighted. What’s up, Dominick? Your sudden interest in Darby Point, your photos of the black-op helicopter, the FBI asking questions about you?”

  “So, that girl was FBI then? She showed you a badge?”

  “ID, Penelope something. She had bad breath, by the way. I’ll bet their medical insurance doesn’t cover dental.” Starks was drinking Irish coffee again. “She asked what you were doing there.”

  “And?”

  “And I told her the truth, that you came in and asked to see old photographs, that I didn’t know your name, which I don’t.”

  “Darby Point?”

  “Never mentioned it.”

  “Developing photos for me?”

  “She didn’t ask.”

  “The guy with her?”

  “He wasn’t. Ukrainian gentleman, barely spoke English, just a tourist coming in from the cold. I suspect he had been following
her around for purely prurient reasons. He stayed around after she left. I had trouble getting rid of him.”

  “What is the world coming to when you can’t tell the difference between a Ukrainian tourist and an FBI agent?”

  “I just wish you answered questions as well as I do,” Starks said, getting the waitress’s attention for two more drinks. “For instance, did you know that you are just about to miss the last ferry back to your Gilligan’s Island?”

  “I thought I would give them something to ponder.”

  “And perhaps give a few of our worthy public servants the chance to earn some overtime? Where will you be staying tonight, then?”

  “Probably down at the Harbor House.”

  “No, come out to my place. I’ll fix us some dinner and ply you with drinks. I want to get some answers out of you, hear your story. You are a mystery to me, Dominick.”

  There were in Morison’s essays certain historic figures whom he especially admired—shipbuilders or captains—the surface of whose lives was so perfected that the men themselves became obscured behind it. They were notorious for their attention to order and detail, as if they had lived only to be memorialized, stuck in some maritime museum, a portrait with a name plate, very public but unknowable men. During the course of the evening at Starks’s house Dominick came to view his host in a similar way. There was something so practiced and perfected about John Starks’s solitary style of life that it drew attention away from the man himself, the way his polished wood floors reflected the light. The man’s house was like himself—pleasingly calm and confident, uncluttered and open, but unrevealing. Perhaps what rhymed about such lives was their seeming lack of need. These were men who asked no favors, who needed nothing you could give them. There was no valence there, only self-sufficiency.

  Frank Sinatra sang while Starks fixed dinner after another shared pipe of hashish and some ales. Dinner was simple, just salmon and salad. Talk was easy because nothing was forced or needed to be edited. Starks’s candor eased honest banter, and topics ran the range of free association. They discovered they were within a year of age, but neither of them talked about their families or their youth. Men play this chess game of personal display when learning one another—move forward the pawn of a funny embarrassing memory, then follow with a rook’s assertion, always guarding the hidden queen. It was established where each of them had been when they learned of Jimi Hendrix’s death. Dominick had been at Oxford. Starks had been sitting in a café in Piazza San Marco.