by Anne Bernays
We ignored the gorgeous sunset and then, I suppose inevitably, as anniversaries always stir up the unconscious, started talking about what had happened a year ago. “It’s like there’s this big gray shadow over us, the way it was in the City. Even here, where we’re probably safe,” Beth said. It had taken me two days to reach her by phone. By the time I finally got through to her, I was a basket case. She was horribly upset; from her office window she had seen the towers go down.
We ate a meal of leftover vegetables piled on angel hair spaghetti—pretty good, if you ask me. I sometimes think I should change my game and be a chef. We tried to talk about other things and kept returning to Mitch Brenner and his house, as if talking about it would hold it steady. At one point I said, “Most of the time, we don’t get to see anything really awful. We know someone who knew someone who saw a crime being committed, but that’s already one step away. People like us are cushioned. Somehow we manage not to stumble over the corpse on the beach. I know all these people are killed on Route 6, but I’ve never actually seen a car crash.” Raymie said she’d seen one and that it was nothing you’d want to remember. “The driver’s head was sheared off not twenty feet from where I’d stopped my car. You know that place where you’re making a left-hand turn across the opposite lane, to get to Wellfleet Center? Well, this guy was in a convertible and he ran a red light and this other car was making the turn and they crashed head-on. I still see it sometimes when I can’t sleep at night…” Beth, it turned out, had been near enough to get the visual gist of a knife fight between two teenagers in Tribeca. “They took one of the kids to the hospital,” she said. “You know how they say ‘It left me shaking’? Well, it left me shaking—and I didn’t even know them.” I thought of her living in a place where people settled disagreements with knives and it made me tremble for her.
“How come you never told me that before?” I said.
“I guess I forgot,” she said. But I’m certain she meant she didn’t want to have to deal with my anxiety, a faculty that occasionally gets out of hand.
Raymie’s cell phone did an aria. She pulled it out of her purse, unfolded it and answered. She listened briefly, then said, “They took Brenner to Hyannis. Pete says it’s both legs, but they think he’s going to be okay.”
I thought how convenient it was for Raymie to have a direct line to behind-the-scenes at police headquarters. “By the way, Pete’s fairly certain it was Lyle Halliday,” Raymie said. “All the pieces fit.”
“It fits too well,” I said. “It’s too obvious.”
“No such thing as too obvious,” Raymie said. “Haven’t you read Sherlock Holmes?”
“I know,” Beth said brightly. “He hated the trophy house. He couldn’t stomach what it stood for. He was like an activist, an ecoterrorist and a Nazi. To say nothing of his being a whack job.”
“Interesting combination,” Raymie said.
“We don’t know anything yet,” I said, more upset by what had happened than I probably should have been. Violence had stopped in at Truro again for the second time in just over two years. Why should we be exempt? We pride ourselves on leaving our front doors unlocked and being able to stand in the moonlight without fear of being mugged. Excepting the Tinkham murder, nothing dire had occurred here in more than thirty years, not since a nut named Costa went on a killing spree and buried two of his female victims in the local cemetery. It’s not exactly pride—it’s more like complacency.
Finally, around ten o’clock, Raymie left and Beth and I went to bed. Whenever Tom wasn’t here, I swung my legs over to where he should be lying, half-liking the emptiness. After a few rough years we had arrived at our accommodation together. It was a plan that fell short of perfection for both of us, but if we hadn’t decided on a split life, the only other choices would have been for one of us to cave completely or else get a divorce.
When I woke up the next morning, I knew right away, from the brightness of the light inside our bedroom and the way it boldly crossed the floor and hit the glass over a watercolor of Provincetown Harbor, where human dwellings are the size of baby snails—but you can tell exactly what the artist saw and why he wanted you to see it this way—I knew it was one of those crystalline days that happen mostly in April and early fall. When I looked out over the bay, I thought I had only once before, exactly a year ago, seen a sky so coherently blue; the blueness seemed double-strength and there wasn’t a wisp of cloud or haze to blot it. Beth noticed it too. “Just like last year,” she said. “We don’t have skies like this in New York very often. Sometimes I don’t know why I like living there.”
“You can’t eat the sky,” I said. “You can’t hold a conversation with it. You can’t make a living off it.”
Beth wouldn’t let me fix breakfast for her, not even put a slice of bread in the toaster. “You don’t have to treat me like a guest,” she said. “Just do your thing. I’ll be fine.” I asked her what she was going to do all day. She said she was going to get some rays and read a book without a single redeeming social value.
“You’re not fed up with your job, are you?” I said. I couldn’t, myself, imagine writing about lip gloss and acne cream all day without slipping into a self-loathing mode.
“I don’t know what I am,” Beth said, and I got the sense that her uneasiness had everything to do with Andy’s leaving her; she was suffering from prefeminist abandonment syndrome. “Maybe I’ll like go make a shitload of money somewhere,” she said. “I’ve got the credentials.”
I told her that I was going to take Marshall for a beach walk before I started working and that she knew where everything was, didn’t she?
“Mom, please, just go.”
I grabbed a jacket and went down to the beach. Coming abreast of the Brenner house, I saw the yellow tape fluttering slightly in the breeze. The house seemed empty; it’s odd, but you can tell when a house is unoccupied, just as you can sense when you’re being stared at. I started up the wooden staircase and when I reached the top, I spotted a Truro police car on the land side of the house. A barely nubile cop was sitting in the driver’s seat, reading a newspaper. He saw me before I had a chance to leave, unnoticed. He got slowly out of the car and stood looking at me across the top of the Ford Crown Victoria.
“Hi there,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“Nothing, really,” I said. “I live just a little ways down the beach. I was curious about what happened here yesterday.”
“They don’t tell me that much,” he said. “But I do know this creepy guy from off-Cape splashed red paint all over this new house.”
I asked him if they had caught the guy.
“He got away,” the cop said. “Would you like a doughnut?”
I shook my head. “But thanks.”
“I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but you know Corn Hill?”
I nodded.
“Well, a couple of weeks ago it was Wednesday, no Thursday, I know because that’s the day I got early shift and they sent me up to the Corn Hill parking lot to check it out. Somebody put these flyers on some cars left overnight. They said, like BEWARE! DON’T LET THE JEWS TAKE OVER TRURO. Something like that.”
“My God,” I said. “Do they know who did that?”
“Uh-uh.”
I asked him if he knew where Mrs. Brenner was. He didn’t know that either. He was not exactly bursting with information.
Just then a piece of electronic equipment started crackling inside the car. “Gotta get that,” he said, and ducked inside.
I turned to leave. Nice kid.
As I walked back to my house, troubled by what I’d heard, I was sorry I hadn’t accepted the doughnut.
The police were now certain that Raymie’s erstwhile guest was the perpetrator. They were also thinking of charging him with attempted murder. But they had no hard evidence, as he had successfully covered both his previous and current tracks, making an efficient getaway, presumably off the Cape and into the great American landscape beyond. I w
ondered why he had chosen Truro in which to activate his spleen—I know, firsthand, similar monstrosities in easier places to get to and away from, like Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and on the North Shore. Actually, they’re all over the affluence map. Sometimes what the new owner of a perfectly fine house does is tear it down and build another twice or three times as large on the same modest lot. They look as if someone had tried to squeeze a fat woman into a dress two sizes too small for her.
The phone lines from Hyannis to the tip of Provincetown were abuzz. Everyone was talking to everyone else about the vandalism and the anti-Semitism, and don’t think for a minute that an awful lot of people didn’t say the Brenners deserved it for violating the Lower Cape unpretentiousness code, predicting it would happen again, and furthermore they hoped whoever did it would escape punishment permanently—and hopefully go on to rid the landscape of the big-house blight. People felt that strongly.
On Sunday, Justin Sheed, a popular, occasionally retro minister in Wellfleet, arose before his Protestant flock and delivered a sermon on the perils of excess and the almost biblical aphorism “What goes around comes around.” He instructed the congregation to remember Terence’s advice—“moderation in all things”—and advised them to resist the temptation to “acquire mindlessly at the expense of virtue,” stopping just short of saying the owners of the besmirched house deserved what they got. This sermon caused a sensation. All the local papers covered it and the Boston Globe sent a reporter down to sniff out some of the gamier facts. She arrived at my front door—“Hi, I’m Megan Solomon”—at ten in the morning two days after the incident, having called me first to ask if I would see her. “You’re the closest neighbor,” she told me, at which I twitched with pleasure—someone wanted to interview me! I offered her a drink, which she declined. “I’m all set,” she said.
Megan looked younger than Beth, who sat down with us and I think had a hard time letting me answer Megan’s questions. Most of these dealt with what she called “issues” (When had problems become issues? About the same time houses became homes) in Truro and the surrounding area. How did we feel about new people coming in and building houses as big as the Brenners’? Had I ever come across anti-Semitism in Truro? She had pushed the right button, and I took off with opinions that had been shaped and hardened over the past few years. She was writing a lot of what I told her in a notebook while keeping an eye on the small, pricey tape recorder she’d brought with her and which presumably was whirring away, recording my words for the ages. She asked me about the Tinkham murder. “There’s absolutely no connection,” I said, sensing the direction she was pointing: Truro—trouble in paradise. I tried to assure her that crime was almost unknown here—the police have nothing more to do than look out for windows blown open in the winter when the summer folks have gone back to wherever they came from. “You’ll have to admit that two incidents in so short a time indicates something,” Megan said.
“Well yes,” I said. “But that’s just a coincidence.” Her eyebrows shot up.
Beth said, “We don’t lock our doors…”
“Is that so?” Megan said. “Is that going to change, do you think?”
“Absolutely not,” I told her.
“I’ll have that iced tea now,” she said.
Megan stayed for lunch—tuna fish sandwiches and one of my quickie cold soups. It turned out that she and Beth had friends in common, people who they started babbling about. Well, this was going swimmingly and maybe she would soften her attitude toward the very rich.
When Megan Solomon’s piece appeared later that same week, my fears were realized. “The majority of the residents of Truro, a small, isolated rural community—it boasts neither supermarket, gas station, nor community center, not to mention bar and grill—seem to think that, because they are ecologically virtuous, they are immune to the ills that plague modern society, things like greed, corruption and violence. And so they were awoken with a start last week when an ecoterrorist, a man who calls himself Lyle Halliday, a clever and elusive individual, allegedly poured fake blood all over a new house and left a hate message behind.” Solomon’s piece touched on the unsolved murder as well, implying that the Truro police had demonstrated not even minimum competence. She had interviewed a dozen people, all the way from the one member of the Tinkham family willing—and stupid enough—to talk to a reporter, to the owner of the biggest and noisiest gay bar in P’Town, to the owner of the incrowd’s restaurant in Wellfleet, to the owner of the place with the swimming pool, to just regular folks—including me. She got people not only to talk but to blab. She was very good—cheeky behind a reticent exterior.
Solomon’s article didn’t bother me the way it bothered some—Molly, for instance, who wondered how this green kid could come out here and get the whole picture in forty-eight hours. “I’ve lived here for fifteen years and I still know squat about what really goes on.” Even Raymie grumbled. “She was a little hard on us. I mean as far as most communities go, I know we’re not exactly the model of virtue, but we’re hardly the most morally dense either.”
I said I thought Solomon had done what she came here to do. “She had an agenda. On the other hand,” I told her, you couldn’t discount how much satisfaction it gave certain people to dump on trophy houses—or alternatively, “McMonsters.” These folks were venomous. And do you know what was so odd about the situation? That people like Mitch Brenner thought the rest of us were envious of him and his hideous house. I worried there was nothing to compare this to. Then I realized I was wrong—there was: “You know how you said you don’t want to wear anything that has somebody else’s name on it, not even an alligator. But the people who pay big bucks for a Coach bag or a Burberry—they think they’re the cat’s pajamas—not the clothes, but themselves. They think we’re all dying to wear the same crap they are and the only reason we don’t is that we can’t afford to. Personally, I’d rather stick pins in my eyeballs.”
Things sped up. The trail Lyle Halliday left behind grew faint and fainter, like an ink drawing left out in the rain. No bloodhounds, the Truro and Provincetown police did not have the equipment—technical or cerebral—to follow it and Halliday lost himself somewhere in the great landscape of the United States. The Cape Cod Times twitted the authorities for losing him without a fight, day after day, sometimes in a feature, sometimes an editorial, and most awfully, a cartoon showing cops in the Truro dump, kicking pretzel-shaped beach chairs and broken pottery with clumsy boots: “leaving no stone unturned in the Halliday investigation.” The police’s response to the Halliday vandalism was compared and contrasted ad nauseam to the Tinkham murder, not only still unsolved but yellowing with age. It was really an exercise in self-loathing because, after all, we were one of only three or four remaining nearly crime-free areas in the country. What struck me and my friends—Molly, Raymie, the ladies at the Truro Historical Society where I volunteered once a week, and my irregular lunch group—as far more important than the crime rate was the rate at which the McMonsters were being erected.
Beth—whose imagination is even livelier than mine—said she believed a bunch of aliens had landed on Earth and, bringing with them their own construction crews, put these big houses strategically over the sweetest terrain on the East Coast, and when it came time, they would swoop down on us, carry us to their domains and make us their slaves. I asked her when she thought that time would be. She didn’t have any idea. “But doesn’t it seem odd to you that five years ago there weren’t any trophy houses and now there are dozens?”
Not odd at all. Instead of trickling down, money was defying gravity and dripping up into the hands of people who had never had much, if any, before and, I said, “I probably shouldn’t be saying this out loud, but they haven’t the foggiest idea what constitutes good taste.”
Beth said she didn’t know why that was such an awful thing to say.
I sat down and began to draw my version of the perfect trophy house. Vaguely but insincerely Italianate in style, with com
pulsive symmetry, a double-staircase entry, with plant-bearing urns on either side of the entrance. The door was wide enough to drive a Hummer through and the roof sloped not ungracefully. To break the symmetry I added a rectangular tower with a peaked roof. This went up about twenty feet beyond the roof line, more or less like that of the Brenner house. It was very wide and the number of windows suggested that inside were more rooms than even a family of five needed, not to say bathrooms galore. “Would you like me to color it?” I asked.
She nodded and I colored it tan, with a bit of blush pink. Tan all over. “Here,” I said, handing her the picture, “you can have it.”
It seemed to me—although it may have been wishful thinking—that Beth was slowly emerging from the fog of her breakup with Andy. I had caught her that morning with her hand on the telephone. She jumped when she saw me and moved away, so I figured she was trying to call the ex-boyfriend but was ashamed to have me know it. She said, “It’s pretty good, Mom, but not awful enough. How do we know how big it is compared to the next house?”
I asked for it back and lightly sketched in an imaginary Truro beach house. The pairing reminded me of Diane Arbus’ piquant photograph of the circus giant standing next to the circus midget. Beth was pleased with it. “Why don’t you do a book about them?” she said.
I told her I wouldn’t be able to live with the subject for the time it would take to complete it.
“Beth,” I said, “how long are you going to stay here with me? Not that I wouldn’t like it to be forever. I was just wondering about your job…”
“I don’t really know.” She sat in a chair that faced halfway away from me. “I loved it in the beginning. I loved seeing my name on the masthead.”
