by Justin Scott
Eighty years older than my Georgian, it had fewer straight walls, bigger fireplaces, and smaller windows. Unlike my parents—my father having died, my mother having fled—her parents had taken most of their furniture with them. Some of the rooms appeared empty, or nearly so, and the living room was decorated in a style I’d have to call, “Moved from dorm rooms via condo apartments.” Since she was tooling around town in a brand new Saab convertible, I guessed that the sparseness was due more to a shortage of time than money. What surprised me was her television set, the only object in the dining room. “Your TV’s even older than mine.”
“After staring at a screen all day I’d rather read a book or drink wine. Would you like some red?”
“Love some.”
She poured from a dark jug into sturdy glasses and led me into the birthing room which she had converted into her editing studio. In that small back room near the kitchen, she had three computers with serious monitors on plywood work tables, banks of multi-gigabyte storage on the floor under the tables, and several hundred miles of wire connecting them all. She indicated a stool to sit on and began turning on machines. A zillion green and blue lights began blinking like a runway glide path on a dark night. A pair of square windows appeared side by side on the center monitor. Under them a wide window indicated a multi-layered time line. Lorraine caressed a roller-ball mouse, and Brian Grose jumped out of the right hand window.
“He wanted it to begin like this. It’s so corny, but he wanted it and it’s kind of like he was. Running around all the time, always in motion. I’ll shut up, now…Oh, just so you know, there’s no music. He didn’t want music until the end. Said it would distract from the message…”
Brian walked quickly up his lawn in close up.
“He insisted on this shot. Paid two thousand extra for a steadicam. What the client wants—I’ll shut up now….”
Now the camera pulled back, and we saw him open the ghastly front door of his stucco mansion. The next shot picked him up inside. He was striding along a row of French doors, looking out at his lawn and the Forestry Association trees he had not been allowed to cut down.
“Does he ever speak?”
“Not yet. He said he wanted to create a visual impression of what it was like to be alive at his age at this time.”
“Do all your clients do their own direction?”
“Most. But I don’t listen and they don’t notice.”
“Why’d you make an exception for Brian?”
“Shhh. Watch the film. Talk later.”
I shut up and watched a fit, handsome guy in his forties rush around his house showing off the many rooms from kitchen to billiard rooms, to basement swimming pool, to screening room, to dining room, to den, to drawing room, to living room, to many bedrooms reached by multiple staircases.
I said, “Whoever gets the listing to sell Brian’s house should pay you for a copy of this.”
“Excellent idea.”
He was smiling happily. He had brown hair and no hint of balding. And he had a face that looked warmer than the full-of-himself hotshot I remembered. “The camera loves him,” murmured Lorraine. “He didn’t look half that great in the flesh.”
“Could have been a movie star.”
“Not that jerky way he moves. Handsome, but too jumpy.”
I found myself wondering two things. Why was he alone in that huge house? And why had such a high-energy guy retired? Three things. Why would he stiff a immigrant lawn guy out of fifty bucks? Speaking of whom…I leaned closer to the monitor; deep in the background three little guys were carrying tools and trundling a wheelbarrow across the lawn.
“Is that Charlie Cubrero?”
“The guy they think shot Brian?”
“Is that Charlie pushing the wheelbarrow?”
Lorraine shrugged bonily. “All I know is I had to cut this scene short because the wheelbarrow guy turned around and ran away like we were chasing him.”
“Did Brian call him Charlie?”
“He just called them ‘the Ecuadorians.’ Like they were a unit. Watch the film, talk later.”
The camera had moved elsewhere. A title superimposed said, “Ed Kelman: Brian’s California Business Partner.” A prosperous-looking tanned middle-aged gent in a book-lined law office was saying, “I had the pleasure of working with Brian on a some very big projects; and I have to tell you, he was the ‘go-to guy.’ What Brian Grose said, it was as good as done. There are so many phonies in the development business, but this guy was the real deal.”
The next scene was shot inside the raw lumber colonnade of a new house being framed. I could hear staple guns in the background. The title said, “Horace Pinchot: Architect.” Mr. Pinchot was clutching a roll of blue prints and he said, “I designed Brian’s house in Newbury, Connecticut. Actually, by the time he got done showing me what he wanted, Brian designed the house and I just made sure we left enough bearing walls in place to prevent it falling down.”
“Wait a minute. You started shooting this when he was still building the house? He had already bought the mausoleum?”
“No. That’s not this house.
“But it seems to be.”
“Artistic license. Stop talking.”
The next scene showed his New York lawyer at the helm of a sailboat, smiling that when Brian structured a deal all he had to do was dot the ‘i’-s.”
Then we met his squash partner who said with a studiedly rueful laugh, “Brian plays a Rumsfeld game, if you know what I mean. Slow to clear, but not so slow you can call him on it.” A bland smile learned young at Choate or a properly-laid dinner table, conveyed clearer than words: “The man cheats.”
There were interviews with a chauffeur who drove him to and from New York, and the waiters at a lunch club, and his ski instructor atop a Killington peak. I said, “I’m surprised he didn’t ski the Rockies.”
“He said he liked ice. The challenge.” Ice was plentiful on Northeast slopes. In fact, the surest way to make a seasoned New England skier crash was to cover a slope with actual snow.
A bright-eyed saleswoman at a glass desk addressed the camera: “The Bastian Mausoleum Company serves the rainmakers of our time. We are equipped with compassion, sensitivity, loyalty, intuition, and common sense in order to be successful in obtaining their trust and business.” She uncrossed shapely legs and walked outside to a sturdy truck with a sign on the door that read, “Bastian Mausoleums. We Deliver.”
I asked, “Did Brian really want a mausoleum advertisement in the middle of his death flick? Or was that part of the deal?”
“He loved being called a rainmaker.”
The scene shifted and there was the rainmaker at a garden party. I recognized one of the finest perennial borders in Connecticut, if not the nation, aflame in forty species of day lilies. “I can’t believe the Bells allowed you in with a camera—they even sent Martha Stewart packing.”
“Babs made me hide in the woods.”
“Wait, there I am.” I was squiring Connie on a lily tour. “I didn’t know you were filming.”
“I rented a humongous lens and shot the whole party from the woods,” said Lorraine. “Getting eaten by mosquitoes—you look good, there.”
The elegant drape of my cotton suit last summer was a grim reminder of the pounds and bulges I had gained in one short year. I said, “I remember being surprised that Babs and Al invited Brian.”
“I told Brian to write a huge check to Spay and Neuter.”
“Slick move.” Babs Bell’s efforts to neuter and adopt Connecticut’s feral and abandoned cats were legendary. She was currently on my case to de-ball Tom, who had arrived intact from a horse farm, and while I agreed with her in theory that the world had enough cats, I found myself putting it off on the grounds that Tom may one day be lured home by the ladies of the horse farm. But while it might be possible to buy into a (brief) social connection with the Bells, a family that had been doing well since the inven
tion of the telephone, by supporting Babs’ passion, I suspected that it was more that the Bells would have done anything to help their friends the Renners’ daughter.
Lorraine’s camera panned the party, which was set on an emerald lawn in front of white porches and sunrooms. The mostly older crowd were dressed for a summer event, the ladies in white cotton dresses, the gentlemen in the pastel colors that well-off retirees get talked into. The focus closed in on Brian Grose who was gesticulating at a group of men who listened with polite expressions. They looked relieved when Gerard Botsford approached in his trademark seersucker, bow tie and straw hat. Grace Botsford glided into the frame and handed Gerard a tall glass.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” asked Lorraine.
“Grace?” I had never noticed, before. Staid, even matronly, she had always dressed older than her years, and while old-fashioned could have an allure, her old-fashioned seemed more like a barrier than an invitation to admire.
“Do you see how she stands? Do you see how still?”
She did stand tall and straight. And now that Lorraine pointed it out I could see a powerful stillness about her that captured attention. She seemed to dismiss the motion of the video camera and the other people, especially Brian’s gesticulations, as if they were superfluous.
The scene faded to the green of the Bells’ lawn, and suddenly we were on Main Street watching Brian walk briskly up the steps of Town Hall to greet a puzzled-looking Gerard Botsford, who was standing beside a marble column in a business suit. I found myself leaning forward. It was a strange moment, both men in the picture now dead.
They shook hands. Gerard gazed toward the camera, then looked away, hurriedly, as if remembering he had been told not to look at it. But he recovered with aplomb, gazing down at Brian Grose as if he were a new species of wildlife. This went on for a few moments with no sound except for cars passing along Main Street and birds singing. The pillars of Town Hall went fuzzy and re-materialized as the bronze gates that Aunt Connie had contributed to the Village Cemetery back in the ‘50s.
Brian Grose walked briskly into ground and opened the gate. Just inside was Grace Botsford. A superimposed title filled the screen:
Grace Botsford, Treasurer of the Village Cemetery Association,
and
Newbury’s Official Town Historian
Grace greeted Brian with a handshake and said in her dry Yankee tones, “Afternoon, Brian. Ready for your history lesson?”
Grose said he was.
“In the beginning,” said Grace, “Newbury’s churches were built in the middle of the road.”
“In the middle of the road?”
“The proprietors listed in the original charter were entitled to share in the ‘common land’, and they had no intention of giving up any of it for ‘churchyards.’ So the selectmen voted to approve the expense to buy some ground for burying the dead, which would be open to all “admitted inhabitants.”
“As opposed to un-admitted inhabitants?” Brian interrupted with a broad smirk for the camera.
Grace was not to be derailed. “As opposed to undesirables,” she answered with a singleness of purpose. “Those not welcome to live in the town were not welcome in our burying ground.”
They commenced a slow walk through the cemetery, trailed closely by the camera, while Grace gave him a capsule history, illustrated by who was buried beneath each headstone. It was a sort of private version of the “Newbury Notables” tour, just for him.
Describing the McKay Mausoleum, she pointed out the Greek Cross on the roof and displayed an understated sense of humor that went right over Brian’s head. “Of course in those days, no Newburian was Greek, or had ever met a Greek, but the builder had seen a tomb like it for sale at the Chicago World’s Fair.
“The word ‘cemetery’ is a 19th Century euphemism, Brian. The ‘resting place.’ The old word goes back to the Roman catacombs, of course, but by the 19th Century, people were looking for a new word to imply less death than sleep. Our older forebears said “burying ground.” Mortality was brief then, death offered the possibility of eternal salvation. You’ll notice that the old headstones are facing east. So when the Christ rose with the sun at dawn He would reach for your hand and pull you erect.”
“So if they made a mistake and buried you facing west,” Brian said to the camera, “you would end up for all Eternity on your head.”
Grace gave that a thin smile and said, “Cotton Mather suggested stopping by the burying ground to contemplate your mortality. We are here are only briefly and our bodies will soon be dust. But attitudes toward death keep changing, as you will see here when you read the inscriptions. Around the middle of the 19th Century people preferred to think that the dead were only sleeping. These days, we regard death as a terrible mistake: if only we had worked harder or smarter we would have prevailed.”
“I didn’t know Grace was a philosopher.”
“Brian wanted me to edit out that last line about the mistake. If he hadn’t made the mistake of getting killed I would have had to. Now it stays.”
The camera followed them up the slope from the old section to the new area where lay Brian’s plot.
“Before McTomb,” I said.
“Grace would never have appeared in the film afterwards. I shot all this before they delivered the mausoleum.” (It had arrived last March on two flatbed trucks equipped with cranes.)
“Did Grace know it was coming?”
“I don’t think so. She was thinking it was something smaller. All I know is when they brought it, and I was shooting them unloading the pieces, Grace got really mad. For a while, she blamed me. Then she realized it wasn’t my fault—shhh. It’s almost over.”
The camera lingered on Brian’s grassy plot. And then it shifted to Brian who looked right into as if he was talking to Grace and said, “You look at where you’ll be buried and you ask yourself, what is the secret to life? Here in this beautiful cemetery it comes up simple for me. The first thing you must do is stay independent, stay private, be master of your own destiny. Second thing, you have to hire good people. Third thing, you must always strive for perfection. Fourth is you never should be satisfied. Fifth is don’t plan too far ahead. Sixth is have a sense of urgency. Seven is work like hell. And eight is be lucky. The secret to life is the secret to success.”
“I’ve heard that somewhere,” I said.
“Yeah, I thought I did, too,” said Lorraine. “But it’s just one of those things that sound so smart and clear you figure you’ve heard it before. He then went on and on about dealing with success and all, and a whole bit about dealing with adversity, but I cut it to this and it stands out better.”
“It seems so familiar.”
“Shhh.” Now the camera swept the burying ground and then slowly tilted up a big elm and traced the branches to where the tree’s crown anchored the sky. Music, at last. Up came Bach, the same Bach that had thundered the afternoon he was killed.
When it was over I asked Lorraine, “Was he a little lonely, maybe?”
“Lonely? I don’t think so.”
“No family?”
“He decided he didn’t want family in it. That’s why I had to fill it out with the driver and waiters at that club.”
“No girlfriends? Wives? Brothers, sisters, kids? Nobody out in California.”
“Just his business partner.”
“But not his New York partners?”
“He never mentioned them.”
It sounded to me like a deeply lonely life, and I wondered if he had always been that way, or slipped away from people when he retired so young. “What was his thing with death?”
Lorraine answered indirectly. “Before weddings, when I was still trying to make it out on the Coast, I did some 60th birthdays. Rich people who worked twenty-four/seven to make their pile suddenly shift obsessions. Suddenly, with time on their hands, they discover a world beyond the dwarf life they made it in. I did one film about
a guy who bought a basketball team. I did another about a guy who got totally wrapped up in solar power. And one who bankrupted himself racing sailboats. Brian seems to have developed a passion for death.”
“His own.”
“So what do you think of the film?”
“I think you made a lot out of very little.”
“I guess that’s a compliment?” She looked away, as if afraid to be disappointed.
“I mean, what do you say about a lonely life?…I mean, you can have a ‘rich’ life—he was obviously a talented man with many interests, but so alone. Living a life where the only people you know work for you?” It felt uncomfortably close to my own situation. Certainly, I had a close circle in Newbury, friends I had known all my life. But at the end of the day they went their way and I went home alone.
“Would you please tell me if you liked it or not?”
“Definitely. I liked all the different settings. Great looking. What do they call it, ‘production values?’ I can’t believe you did all of that for ten thousand dollars.”
“It started at ten. It was nearer to sixty when I started editing. He spent a ton on my travel. And the steadicams. The whole cemetery walk was steadicam, too. That took days.”
“I liked that. And I loved the stuff you got Grace to say.”
“Grace was wonderful. She sat for an audio interview, after, so I could get clean sound for the cemetery scene.”
“Any more death films lined up?”
“Could be. The mausoleum company says they’re going to recommend me to their clients. What they’ve seen so far they think is great.”
I thanked her for the show and asked her if she would like to come to dinner Friday night. She said she would, and I walked home feeling kind of lucky.
I turned on the eleven o’clock news to see if the fugitive alien from hell needed a lawyer, yet. He did not, and I lay awake awhile wondering what it felt like to be on the lam in a foreign land. Lonely, of course. Scary, too. But what were the odds of getting captured if you looked similar to twelve million penniless immigrants, few cops spoke your language, and citizens never looked you in the face?
