Giancarlo’s response was a smile of such devastating charm that light seemed to leap from his face, and Rose’s irritation melted away and she laughed, reflecting in the moment that laughs had been few and far between recently. Lizzie broke into giggles, too. In a moment they were all three roaring like a sitcom laugh track.
“What’s the joke?”
Rose looked up and saw that Giancarlo’s mother was standing at the edge of their beach blanket, holding a long-neck Schlitz.
“I was being amusing, Mom,” said Giancarlo.
“I bet,” said Marlene. She nodded to Rose. “Hi, I’m Marlene Ciampi. I’m more or less responsible for this creature.” Rose introduced herself and her daughter, who asked, “Did your dog really eat up all the rabbits?”
Marlene gave her son a sharp look. “A rabbit got out and Gog chased it. Gog is not built for chasing rabbits. The rabbit is safe. What other lies did he concoct?”
“He said you flogged him with a dog whip and gave him a scar,” said Lizzie.
“That’s more of a prediction,” said Marlene. “In point of fact, he got those scratches falling on a bale of razor wire he was told more than once not to go near.”
“And I assume his brother isn’t retarded either,” said Rose.
“What!”
“He is,” insisted the boy. “She’s in total denial about it.”
Marlene went after him with an openhanded roundhouse aimed at the red Speedo, which he easily dodged. He danced away, laughing maniacally. “See! Child abuse! That proves it, Mom.”
The children went back to their sand castle, chortling.
“Pull up a beach,” said Rose, and Marlene sat. Rose noticed with a distinct shock that the woman was missing several joints of the small fingers of her left hand. Otherwise, she was remarkably beautiful, in a Mediterranean way. “He must be quite a handful,” Rose said, “with that imagination. Is his brother the same?”
“Completely different in every respect. You can barely get a word out of him. Gianni, as you see, is an artist.” Giancarlo was carving a delicate arch in a thin curtain of sand.
“I don’t see how he gets it to stick together,” said Rose. “It’s marvelous.”
“Oh, yes. Sometimes a little too marvelous for daily use. Zak never picks up a crayon. His thing is war, guns, blowing things up, taking things apart, heavy machinery. That’s why he skipped the beach today. We’re having a backhoe in to rip out and replace a water pipe to the kennels. Watching a backhoe is his idea of paradise.”
“He should meet my husband. They’d have a lot to talk about.”
“Your husband runs a backhoe?”
“A dragline. Or did. He’s with the union now.”
“Really? I’m not sure I know what a dragline is.”
“It’s an excavation machine. The bucket can take a hundred and fifty yards at a bite, three hundred tons or so. The powerhouse is the size of a small office building. They use them in open-pit mining.”
“Presumably not on Long Island, though.”
Rose laughed. “Oh, no. Robbens County, West Virginia. That’s where we’re from. Or that’s where Ralph is from. I’m from next door. The big white house.”
“There’s a story there.”
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed.”
“I want to hear it. Let me get the beer.”
So Marlene dragged her cooler over and they sat under the umbrella and slowly drank and rubbed the icy bottles against neck and forehead, watching the slow, remarkable extension of Giancarlo’s sand palace, and talking. Rose talked, rather, and Marlene listened. She seemed good at it, professional even, and Rose was not surprised to learn that she had been a prosecuting attorney in New York and later a private detective.
Marlene, for her part, after offering the minimum personal data, was content to let the other woman ramble on. Rose Heeney was the sort of woman she had never been much interested in, a type she privately called the Cheerleader. She had been exposed to a number at Smith. They had golden hair and blue eyes and were fair and round of limb. They wore kilts and circle pins and had bright, straight teeth. They strolled in laughing gaggles, dated fraternity boys, and married early—she read their names (invariably triple-barreled) in the alumnae news. And Rose Wickham Heeney was what they became, it seemed. Or not quite. Heeney had not been in the master plan of the Wickhams. They had not envisioned an Irish roughneck dragline operator for their golden girl.
They focused, naturally enough, on the kids. Besides Lizzie, there were two sons, Emmett, twenty, and Daniel, eighteen. The former had gone to Wheeling for a couple of years, then dropped out to work in the pit. Dan was at MIT. Marlene detected regret in her tone, and a pride in the younger that could never be fully expressed lest it hurt the older boy.
“Do you really have a daughter,” Rose asked, “or did he make that up, too?”
“No, Lucy’s real enough. She’s in Boston, too, as a matter of fact, at BC, a freshman.”
“Oh, good,” Rose said, smiling. “And I assume she doesn’t speak forty-eight languages and can put her shoes on right.”
“I don’t know about the shoes, but she does speak something like that many.”
“You’re kidding me!”
“No, actually not. She’s some kind of language prodigy. Scientists come in from all over the world to study her, and good luck to them. I have not been blessed with normal children. Although, Zak seems normal enough, except for being Gianni’s twin. I think he makes a practice of it. So how did you and . . . ?”
“Ralph, but everyone calls him Red.”
Marlene glanced at the blaze of copper on Lizzie’s head. “I should have guessed. How did you and Red hook up?”
“Oh, you know, my social conscience. After I got out of Vassar I messed around in New York for a year, working for a magazine, which folded, and I guess I was supposed to get a job at another magazine and wait around to get married. I mean that’s what Mom did, right? That or be a modern woman and go to professional school like you. But I didn’t want to go to professional school, and I wasn’t exactly sure I wanted to be a modern woman. The guys I was dating . . . I mean, they were all right, but you know . . .”
“Bland.”
“Bland, or totally focused on the greasy pole, or . . . I dated a sculptor with a loft in SoHo for a while, but honestly, all those people . . . I couldn’t take them seriously, the black clothes and that attitude and the constant backbiting about everyone’s work. And so I applied to VISTA.”
“After the sculptor broke your heart.”
Rose laughed longer than necessary and drank some beer. “Yeah, you got me pegged. The Foreign Legion of the white girls. They sent me to Haw Hollow, West Virginia, to help run a craft cooperative. It mainly involved bookkeeping and writing grant applications and arranging child care so the women could quilt and weave. Well, you can imagine it was quite a shock. You don’t think people live like that in America anymore. I mean white people.”
“Poor.”
“Is not the word. The whole county is kept alive by miners’ pensions. They won’t take any help from the government, you know. Extremely proud, living in these little hamlets up in the hills—hollers is what they call them. The water’s all rotten from the acid drainage. Half the county looks like moonscape from the strip and pit mines. They’re supposed to rehab the land, but a lot of them don’t—the coal companies. And they won’t just leave and go to the cities for work. They want to stay by their home places.” Rose sighed. “And so there I was, a little middle-class girl doing her social obligation, and one night I drove down to McCullensburg—that’s the local metropolis, population twelve thousand, a Mickey D, three gas stations, and a Bi-Lo—for a meeting of all the various do-good types, and after all the social workers had droned on for a while, this guy steps up to the mike, and he gives this incredible, incredible speech, all about the hard lives of the people, and how bad they’d been treated by the mine companies and the government, and how they deserved dign
ity. He said the mountain people were the best people in America, how they were the only ones still living the original vision of America. I mean, it was a stem-winder, and you could see he really believed it.”
“It sounds like a Pete Seeger concert.”
“Oh, right, I was the same way—nobody’s more cynical than an idealist trying to deal with twenty kids and a busted toilet. I guess you had to be there. We gave him a standing ovation. We were in the Methodist church hall and they had coffee afterward and I went up to him and told him how much I liked his speech, and he said something like, talk’s cheap, and I said, no, he inspired me, and he gave me this look, I can’t explain it, but no one had ever looked at me that way before. Penetrating, like he could peer into the bottom of my gas tank and see it was more or less empty. And he pointed to all the various social-work and church-lady and government types in the room and said, you think I inspired these people? Yeah, to applaud for a minute or two. And then they’re going to go back to doing what they’ve always been doing, taking a middle-class paycheck for helping the poor and downtrodden. They’re not going to change. They’re not going to put their bodies on the line for something.”
Rose paused and took a gulping swallow of beer. Marlene saw that she was flushed, but whether from the beer or the sun or the rush of memory, it was impossible to tell.
“He wasn’t just posing either, like a lot of lefties were back then, like college lefties, who you just knew were going to cut off their hair in a few years and go to work for some company, or keep it long and get tenure. He was the real deal. And it was Robbens County, too.” She looked at Marlene and saw the incomprehension she expected.
“No, you never heard of it. Neither had I before I got there. They used to call it Red Robbens. The unions against the owners, like it was all through the coal country back around the turn of the century, but in Robbens it was different, and worse. The labor stuff was just overlaid on top of a kind of low-level tribal war that’d been going on there for a hundred years. Some families sided with the owners, some were union, so the violence was particularly bad. For a while there were whole hollers up there with no males over twelve in them. All the men were dead or in prison. They sent in the National Guard for a while, but it didn’t stop the killing. The soldiers were afraid to go up into the hills, and there weren’t any decent roads to get them up there, either. The area didn’t really settle down until the war and the government made sure that the coal kept flowing and made the companies settle with the union. Then they started pit mining and the whole thing collapsed.” Rose stopped and laughed nervously. “Oh, God, I’m being a bore, aren’t I? You don’t want to hear about the industrial history of Robbens County, West Virginia.”
Marlene laughed, too. “Since you asked . . . but I take it there was an attraction. I mean that night.”
“Oh, God, yes. I wanted to throw my body into the cause.”
“So to speak.”
Rose chuckled. “Right, that, too. It’s such a cliché, I know—well-brought-up girl from Long Island meets working stiff. But the work—he made it seem real, not just theory but real, about really helping suffering people find their dignity. Anyway, that’s the story. After my VISTA hitch was over I moved into his place. A trailer. My parents went nuts, of course, but they had to stand for it, given the times, and the fact that in three months I was pregnant with Emmett. At least he’s white, as my father charmingly said, more than once.” Rose fell silent and looked out past the kids, to the Sound.
“So, is it almost heaven?”
Marlene asked lightly. “West Virginia? Formerly. The parts that aren’t scarred, they’re really lovely—blue hills rising out of the mist, the woods full of flowers in the spring. But the damage is awful—whole mountains reduced to slag. Majestic is less than responsible in reclamation, and they have, let’s say, a good deal of influence with the legislature.” In response to Marlene’s inquiring look Rose added, “Majestic Coal Company. They’re practically the only employer, so as you can imagine, there’s not much environmental consciousness, except for the Robbens Environmental Coalition. Which is me, and a bunch of high school students and the Presbyterian minister. And”—here Rose waved her hands and rolled her eyes—“and, McCullensburg is a little sparse culturally. On the other hand, there’s not much money. Union officials are not the best paid, if they’re honest, and Red’s as honest as they come. I got a little inheritance when I turned thirty, and we bought a crumbling farmhouse and fixed it up. Talk about stories . . . if you ever want to be truly bored, I’ll tell you about the bats, and the hornets in the well house.”
“It sounds like a good, if unexpected, life.”
“Oh, sure, it was . . . is, I mean.”
She’s going to tell me now, Marlene thought, with a certain sinking of the heart. The guy’s having an affair, the oldest boy’s on drugs, something. Marlene’s husband said that Marlene could take a stroll down Grand Street and before she’d gone two blocks, forty-three women in trouble would have leaped from doors and windows into her path. She knew the signs, anyway, a pinched look, the eyes drifting, the speech a little too positive. This one was on a tight rein, kept it in mostly, would probably come to regret this impromptu, overly casual intimacy with a stranger.
But at that moment, the kids came running up with demands to be fed, and consulting Marlene’s watch, the women realized what irresponsible sluts they had been, for it was past six, and Lizzie, although slathered with enough sunscreen to render harmless a smallish nuclear device, had developed a burn around the edges of her suit. So they packed up, pulled on shorts and tops, and walked through the dunes to the sandy blacktop road. A red, late-model Dodge pickup was parked on the shoulder.
“We walk from here. We’re just down the road,” Rose said, pointing.
“Get in,” said Marlene. “We’ll drop you off.”
Rose objected that it wasn’t necessary, but Giancarlo had already let the tailgate fall and was helping Lizzie up into the truck bed.
“Let’s go for pizza, Mom,” he said.
“Another time,” said Marlene.
“That means yes,” he said to Lizzie, and started to chant, “Pizza pizza pizza,” jumping up and down and making the truck rock on its springs.
“I can’t imagine what’s got into him,” said Marlene to Rose with feigned innocence. “He’s usually so well-behaved.” To her son she said, “What about Zak? He’s probably starving, too. And we’re all too covered in sand to sit in a restaurant. I want to take a shower and I’m sure Mrs. Heeney does, too.” Marlene was demonstrating motherly reasonableness to the civilized Rose Heeney. Had she been alone and had Giancarlo pulled a stunt like this, she would have leaped into the truck bed and tossed him out on his butt, which Giancarlo, being his mother’s son, knew very well, and which was the reason he felt free to be as brazen as a pot now.
“We can pick him up,” the boy protested. “And we can go to the Harbor Bar and sit at the outside tables. Puleeeze, Mom?”
“Oh, the dear old Harbor Bar!” said Rose. “Oh, let’s! As long as you promise to pour me home and not get dangerous drunk yourself and protect my daughter’s virtue and mine and leave 15 percent and floss after meals. Puleeeze?”
So they got into the truck and Marlene drove down the peculiarly named Second Avenue, which is what the beach road is called in that part of the North Fork, and turned at the sign that read Wingfield Farm in incised letters touched with flaking gold. It was the same sign Rose recalled, except the picture of the Holstein had been replaced by a laminated photo of a black mastiff, and where it had said Registered Holsteins, it now said:
AKC Registered Neapolitan Mastiffs
Guard Dogs Trained in the Kohler Method
They drove past it down a rutted, grass-grown path, through a thick stand of low pines, and into a large yard, shaded by a huge, dark persimmon tree and a row of ragged lilacs. At the head of the yard was a large clapboard house with a brick-colored tin roof and a screened porch. Its
white paint was peeling and gray with age. A rambling rose with new flowers grew untidily up one side of the house and onto the roof. Just visible behind the house was the top of a barn, from which came the sound of mad barking. Rose cried, “Oh, it looks just the same! We used to come here for fresh butter and eggs. I haven’t been here in years.”
Marlene got out and went to the front door. The mastiff Gog was there; he whined and greeted her in the manner of his kind by shoving his wet nose into her crotch and drooling on her foot. She let him slip by her and shouted into the house for her son. Silence. She went through the house into the kitchen, once again reminding herself that she absolutely had to get rid of that flowered linoleum and the pink paint job, and went out the back to the barn. The dogs in their kennels set up a racket, and she calmed them and greeted them by name—Malo, Jeb, Gringo, all young dogs in training, and Magog, the brood bitch. Magog was lying on her side, looking dazed as five newborns tugged at her teats. “How are you baby?” Marlene asked tenderly, and allowed the animal to lick her hand. “I know just how you feel.”
Behind the barn, she saw that the yellow backhoe was still there, although deserted, together with the flatbed truck it had come on. She inspected the trench that ran from the concrete pump house halfway to the barn and saw, with dismay, that the project had been stopped by an enormous boulder squatting in its depths like a petrified rhino. She shouted out for Zak and made a perfunctory check of the other buildings—a long, swaybacked, decayed chicken coop and a dusty greenhouse—and was not surprised to find them empty of all but the lower forms of life.
Back at the truck, she saw that Gog was on his hind legs at the passenger-side window, trying to get at Rose, who had rolled up the window; her face was nearly obscured by the dog slime on the glass. Marlene called him off and dropped the truck’s tailgate. The dog leaped in, amid shrieks from Lizzie and giggles from the boy.
“That dog!” said Rose. She looked a little pale.
“He’s perfectly harmless,” said Marlene. “Mastiffs produce more saliva than any other living creature, and being naturally generous animals, they like to share it with us drool-deprived organisms.”
Absolute Rage Page 2
