The Center of the World

by Thomas van Essen

  The sound of an opening door attracted my attention and I looked down. A figure dressed in black stepped quickly across the terrace. Turner, for it was he, has a queer stiff-legged trot, but he made his way with remarkable speed across the field and up the hill on my right. He held his hat onto his head with one hand while the other clutched a large portfolio which contained, I assumed, his drawing materials. When he reached the top he sat down on the bench and began to work. As I watched, the sun crested the hill and its image appeared in the glassy water. My words cannot do justice to the scene, and I was curious what Turner’s chalk and pen would make of it.

  I got dressed as rapidly as I could. It promised to be a beautiful morning and I wished to take up my lord’s offer to accompany him as he went out for deer. There had been conversation the night before of the need to cull the herd. His Lordship had said it was “not the usual way of things” and that it might interest me. Before tendering the invitation he had asked me a number of sharp questions. I had told him that I could not shoot and had no desire to do so, but that I could ride tolerably well. My father, though a poor clergyman, had been, through the kindness of his friends, a keen hunter and had taught me to ride. That was enough for Egremont, who said, “Come along then. It will be good for a young puppy like you to take a bit of air.” He said we would ride to the shooting grounds by a roundabout way so that I might get some exercise and taste the flavor of the neighborhood. “You will do well,” he said. “Just stay out of the way when the game appears.” I wish to God I had listened.

  When I arrived at the stables, Mr. Hobb, the master of the stables, introduced me to my mount. He apologized for the quality of the beast, but said she was “a good-tempered old creature who knew her business well enough.” I am no great judge of horseflesh, but I could see at once that in all his years of riding my father had never sat on so fine a horse. But such is the way of things at Petworth.

  The morning lived up to its promise, one of September’s gifts. We were a party of about five, with Egremont taking the lead, a number of servants bringing up the rear, and a cart following. In spite of his years, His Lordship took what seemed a young man’s delight in showing us how to ride. At one point we came to a low hedge that bounded a meadow. There was an easy path around, but Egremont, after glancing back at the rest of us, took the hedge with graceful confidence. I tried to remember what I knew about riding, but in truth the horse knew more than enough for both of us and I cleared the barrier with no bad outcome beyond a delicious pounding in my heart. It was a glorious morning to be alive.

  We rode on for about half an hour, sometimes at a gallop, sometimes at a walk, as Egremont pointed out some of the beauties of his English Paradise. Petworth Park is notable for the variety of its scenery: woods and forest, streams and ponds, glens and meadows and fields. Much of the park looks as cultivated as a city kitchen garden, but then you turn a corner and see a forest as wild and free as the farthest reaches of Canada. I half wished that the shooting would be put off for another day so that I could enjoy the riding uninterrupted.

  At length we arrived at the edge of what I was later told was the greatest stretch of forest on the estate. Towering trees that must have been planted at the time of the current lord’s father’s father’s father came to the edge of a delightful and uncultivated meadow. Wildflowers of yellow and white dotted the soft green grass.

  Egremont and the others who had come to participate in the sport dismounted as their guns were brought forward. The shooters lined themselves up along the edge of the meadow, but I stayed on my horse to get a good view of the scene. Behind me the servants waited. Egremont pulled a watch from his pocket and studied it for a moment. At length he gave a signal and a gun behind me was fired into the air. We were all very still. After about a quarter of an hour we could hear the faint sound of human voices shouting in the distance. The sound grew louder and louder as a party of Egremont’s tenants approached. Soon I could hear the faint thundering, if you will allow the phrase, of the frightened deer as they fled toward us and their doom. Egremont and the others brought their guns to their shoulders. Excitement visible on their faces, they glanced toward the forest and then at each other. The sound of the hoof beats grew louder and then louder still, until all at once fifteen or twenty of the park’s famous deer exploded into the meadow. Egremont was the first to fire, and then there was a fusillade as the others followed suit. I watched in horror as first one, then a second, and then a third of the speeding creatures crumpled to the ground, their motion carrying them forward as they died. The shots continued, more deer fell, until a cloud of gun smoke hung like a curtain between me and the meadow.

  I turned my eyes away from the slaughter and toward the edge of the wood, where I saw one of God’s great creatures, an enormous stag, almost twice the size of his murdered cousins, standing just off the verge of the forest. For a moment, the stag’s eyes met mine and, I hardly know how to say this, I felt a flash of more than human sympathy as the noble animal seemed to be trying to decide which way to flee in order to save its life.

  I had been hanging toward the back as I was instructed to do, but I must have unconsciously urged my horse toward the edge of the wood. I looked away from the stag and saw that Egremont had seen it as well and was reloading his piece. When this was accomplished he took aim. I cried out in alarm, for although I was more than twenty paces from the stag, I was uncomfortably close to Egremont’s line of fire. Quicker than thought itself, the stag turned and disappeared into the darkness of the forest. I heard the sound of its hooves as it clambered into the shadows at the same time that I heard the blast of Egremont’s gun. He missed his mark and threw the gun to the ground in fury. He turned to me, his face disfigured with anger and contempt. Even though I was seated on a horse and looking down at him, Egremont appeared to rise above me in his rage. He showered down a stream of invective unlike anything I have ever heard before. At length his anger began to subside and his face to return to its normal color (for he had turned an alarming shade of crimson), but he said, in conclusion, that I ought to be ashamed of myself for I was “a disgraceful young sodomite.”

  I cannot recall all the insults he heaped on me, but that last phrase is indelibly etched in my memory. A sense of shame and humiliation enveloped me like a dark cloak as I sat there waiting for the party to remount and head back toward the house. None of my companions, who had laughed and joked with me as we made our way across the fields, would now meet my eyes. I rode along behind them, looking, I suppose, like a man whose very spine had been stolen from him.

  I knew that it was impossible for me to stay at Petworth any longer. I resolved to leave as soon as I could.

  . 6 .

  I THREW STUFF in the dumpster for another hour, but Mossbacher’s visit had taken the edge off my ambition. One point four million dollars. That seemed like a lot of money.

  It was lunchtime. Susan would be around Albany. I made a sandwich with a thick layer of ham, some salami, a lot of cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and good olive oil. Taking a bottle of beer out of the refrigerator, I paused for a moment, feeling guilty, and then grabbed a second. I thought of my father being pretty well shit-faced by four in the afternoon, but then I remembered that I was on vacation and that there was nobody around to tell me what to do. I read someplace that married men lived longer than unmarried ones because their wives were always telling them to eat less and see the doctor more. It hardly seemed worth it.

  Plopping myself down on the Adirondack chair, I settled the plate on my lap and looked out over the water. This was where I used to sit with my parents when I was happy. I took a sip of beer. The morning had started out damp and overcast, but the cloud cover had been carried away to the north. There were just a few white clouds in the blue sky. It was so pretty that it looked like a cheap postcard.

  This was the afternoon of July 6, 2003, the day before everything changed for me. The last time I had been alone at the lake had been just six weeks after the attack o
n the World Trade Center. On that October weekend the trees were bare and a bone-chilling rain was falling so hard that I couldn’t see across the lake. Everyone was still in a daze and trying to wake up to the new world. My father, who had only four months to live, had called from Florida and told me that I needed to drive to the lake house immediately and find a manila envelope that was hidden in his bedroom. “Don’t open it,” he said. “I want you to send it to me insured and registered mail. The best kind of mail there is. Spare no expense. And if you think you have better things to do, I have better people to leave the house to.” There was, apparently, a set of cousins somewhere who hadn’t disappointed him as much as I had.

  I asked him what was in the envelope.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” he said. “But let me give you a hint. I want you to insure it for ten thousand dollars. You got anything worth insuring for ten thousand dollars? That’s my point.” I knew he was half senile and about to die, and yet I was still as afraid of him as I had ever been. I was fifty years old and still waiting for him to say he loved me.

  I drove up through the cold rain and found the envelope where he had said it would be, buried under old pajama bottoms and a few Playboy magazines from the seventies. It was sealed at both ends with duct tape. My father had printed the words CONFIDENTIAL: DO NOT OPEN UNDER PENALTY OF THE LAW in block letters on both sides. I drove to town the next day and dropped it off at the post office. When we were cleaning out the apartment in Miami after his death, I found it unopened. It contained telephone bills from around the time of my parents’ divorce. Some of the numbers were circled or underlined.

  It was a good sandwich and plenty of beer, but I don’t recall enjoying either. I remember I was still hungry when I was done. I am not as hungry anymore.

  The Mossbachers waved as they took the powerboat out of their boathouse, and I waved back. Jeffrey was driving while Rita helped their two children into life jackets. I didn’t care for Rita much, but I had to admit that she looked good in a bikini, even at a distance. I wondered how much Jeffrey had paid for her boobs. I realized that what he said about “closing the loop” and it being “fitting” that the old property be brought together again was a lot of crap. My house was nothing but a teardown as far as he was concerned. Their boat took off with a roar, the inflatable raft following in its wake and the Mossbacher children screaming with pleasure.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon working in the barn and watched with satisfaction as the dumpster filled with the detritus of my father’s past. Every time I tossed an object into the dumpster I got a kick out of thinking how upset he would be. I found a box of drinking glasses decorated with the Sinclair gas company’s green dinosaur logo and smashed them one by one, remembering my father coming home from work and handing one to my mother. “It’s no wonder there are so many poor people. They get some other gas when they could go to Sinclair and get something useful without spending an extra penny.” It was only later that I realized that the glasses had a kind of retro appeal and would have fetched a good price on eBay. The fucking guy was always right. He was always right.

  As I worked I allowed myself to fantasize about what I would do if I could afford to keep the place. With a little work I could turn the barn into a study. I thought about where I would put a desk and some bookshelves to hold that box of books and those notebooks that were up in the attic in Princeton. I could turn those two chapters I had completed into a modest article or two. My dreams that day were also modest: if I could only publish one article I might be able to lay some of the old ghosts to rest. It was really pretty pathetic.

  At six the dumpster was almost half full. I took a quick dip in the lake to rinse off the dust. Still dripping, I came back into the house and took the silver Tiffany martini shaker engraved with my father’s name from the kitchen cabinet. It was a memorial of those happy days when my parents drank together, a gift to him from my mother two years before she filed for divorce. I filled it with ice and poured about half a pint of gin and a tablespoon of vermouth into it. By the time I got down to the dock the shaker was beaded with moisture. I gave it a gentle shake or two, filled my glass, ripped open a bag of chips, and tried to be happy.

  My father sat in that same chair at five o’clock every summer afternoon, staring at the perspiring martini shaker as we waited for my mother. “If your mother doesn’t get here in three minutes, I’m going to start without her.” When she finally appeared, he poured the drinks before she had settled into her chair. They clinked their glasses together and drank. As I sipped my martini I felt how much that first real drink of the day had come to mean to me. It was the golden moment at the beginning of cocktail hour that had allowed my parents’ marriage to last as long as it did.

  I sat on the dock until the sun started to go down. The Mossbachers had put their boat away; all the sailors had gone home. The green mix of firs and deciduous trees on the far shore started to glow in the light of the setting sun. It was as if someone had turned a switch and all the colors were suddenly saturated. My mother called it the cocktail hour miracle. As I sat there, unwittingly on the cusp of a new life, I was struck by how odd it was that I could be so sad in a world that was so beautiful.

  . 7 .

  MANY THOUGHT THAT RHINEBECK had aimed to compete with Camp Wonundra, the Rockefeller place down at the other end of the lake, when he built Birch Lodge. It was fine with him if they thought so. Birch Lodge sat on a small rise on the shore of Upper Saranac Lake. From his veranda Rhinebeck had a good view of the southern end of the lake, and if he turned to the left he had a sweeping view of the eastern shore and the wide expanse of water up to the Narrows, about two miles away. A few small islands dotted the view, and he sometimes thought that if God hadn’t put them there, he would have done it himself. He could see the high mountains in the distance. In the evening the cries of loons echoed across the water.

  Rhinebeck had been working on the place for three years now, ever since he had acquired the Turner, and the last of the workmen had just left. Durant had done a fine job. The place was all “twigged up” in the Adirondack style, but it hadn’t been overdone. The rustic charm of the room appealed to him. He didn’t think the ladies would mind; their comfort, too, could be attended to.

  It was the middle of August. Rhinebeck sat on the veranda and lit a cigar as he waited for the coffee to be brought. He knew he was a different man than he had been. He had made himself into what the world called Cornelius Rhinebeck by keeping his eyes on the facts. Early on he had realized that every enterprise, no matter how complex, could be understood as a series of steps in a finite process. People spoke of the romance of industry, but it was all in the ledger sheets and how people moved about on the factory floor. Money was made by understanding how many steps they took and reducing the number of them. The human heart, he had believed, was also an enterprise devoted to maximizing return. It was a simple matter. If she was not willing, what could be done to make her willing? What were her scruples? How could they be removed?

  But now the water seemed quick and alive as it responded to the color of the sky in a way that it had not before; the light was beautiful in a way it had not been before. Time, and perhaps his Turner, had taken the edge off the egoism and striving of youth.

  He finished his coffee and left the cigar to burn itself out. Lottie and her friend would arrive in a few hours, and he needed to complete his preparations. Rhinebeck had told his wife that he’d intended Birch Lodge “for men only.” He wanted, he said, a place where he could come with his friends and associates and they could go hunting and fishing without worrying about offending the ladies with their language and their cigars. She had been suspicious, he thought, but she knew him well enough to understand that it was not a quarrel worth having. He had appeased her, however, by suggesting that she might want to come up just once after the place was completed, to see it for herself.

  The pride of Birch Lodge, and the reason he had built it, was a room on the second floor of
the main building which Rhinebeck called his Snuggery. It could only be approached from a dark, narrow stairway that led off the main living room. Durant’s gift for decoration seemed to have deserted him when it came to this stairway; the paint had been cunningly applied so as to look like second-rate workmanship of many years ago. At the top of the stairs was a low door, to which only Rhinebeck had the key.

  This door opened into what Durant had described as a cathedral of manly comfort. Light poured in from doors on the balcony and from the clerestory windows that were cleverly set just below the steeply sloping ceiling. It was a large room, but cozy. There were half a dozen places to sit with a book and a glass of wine; some took advantage of views of lake or forest, others faced one of the three fireplaces, in the largest of which a small man could comfortably stand. The stonework around each fireplace showed craftsmanship of the highest order, but it was in the woodwork that Durant’s genius had found its fullest expression. The walls were covered with strips of birch bark, cut and arranged so that pictures of the forest appeared on the wall. Borders and moldings were rioting bands of twisted twigs and branches. Stuffed animals of every description hung on the walls and peeked out from every corner. There was a raccoon walking carefully along one of the beams, a porcupine climbing up a pillar, and a bobcat crouched and about to pounce on a baby rabbit that seemed to be nibbling some grass on a mantelpiece.