“CAN I SIT HERE WITH you?” Muriel was asking Thaddeus.
“Please do. Horse just about gave me a heart attack.”
“He’s got a strong voice.” Muriel looked at home in the little chair. She was wearing a spring dress, sleeveless, and her customary sprigs of flowers in her hair. Today’s flowers were tiny and white, and of the utmost delicacy—not unlike Muriel herself. “He’s talking about running for politics, and you can see why.”
“Horse?”
“I don’t like politics,” Muriel said. “It’s all us against them.”
“You look so pretty, Muriel,” Thaddeus said.
“Oh you,” she answered, without much enthusiasm. She carried an antique beaded purse and poked around in it, idly. “I never know what to wear,” she said. “I hardly ever get off the property.”
Thaddeus looked at her uncertainly. There was an element of complaint in her voice he wasn’t used to. He realized he hadn’t gotten to know Muriel, not nearly so well as he had hoped when he’d imagined all of them living at Orkney, sharing their lives.
“Well, I just wanted to say, thanks for being here,” Candy was saying, doing her best to project her voice. Brandon was covering his ears, and making a face, as if his cochlea were being pierced. “We don’t have a count yet, but when we do I’ll let you know how much we collected today. But I’ll tell you one thing . . .” Suddenly, her smile, which moments ago had seemed durable, quivered and crumpled, and the corners of her mouth pointed straight down. She dabbed at the corners of her eyes with the heel of her free hand. “This means really a lot to us. We are so blessed. One thing we know. God will never close a door without opening a window. And you are our window, all of you. And we love you.”
Horse had his arm around Candy, and nuzzled his face against the top of her head. To Horse, she seemed absolutely indistinguishable from the girl he had courted so assiduously in high school, with her blond hair and small, stubborn mouth, broad shoulders and powerful legs, the girl who had endured months of teasing because she had once gotten down on her knees and prayed before a geometry test, the girl who walked the halls of Leyden High nervously touching the oversize cross she always wore, as if she feared she might be set upon by vampires at any moment, the girl whose success at the hundred-yard dash and the standing broad jump brought a bit of glory to their school. Horse had never expected her to go out with him, but he asked her to the senior prom in the same spirit you’d buy a lottery ticket, and to his surprise, she said yes. But the night of the dance, his father was sick and Horse had to fill in for him at the diner. It was a gloomy Saturday night, with Horse behind the counter, and five or six customers, when suddenly Candy walked in, wearing a pretty little dress and her own apron, saying, “I want two dollars an hour.” She got right behind the counter with him, and they decided to keep the diner open late because Candy had put the word out and the Leyden Diner became the after-prom destination. After midnight the place was packed, and Horse and Candy were scrambling eggs and slapping patties onto the griddle and looking the other way when their friends emptied flasks of booze into the milk shakes. They’d been together ever since; all Horse had to do to seal the deal was accept Jesus Christ as his Personal Savior, which was no problem since he basically believed that to be true anyhow.
JENNINGS STOOD NEAR THE FOOD table with Emma in his arms. Her mouth was wide open and he held before it a doughnut hole covered in powdered sugar. He moved it back and forth singing the scary music from Jaws, all the while bringing it closer and closer to her avid little bite. Grace looked on smiling fondly, her customary vigilance about the child’s weight suspended for the moment.
“Oh my God,” said Muriel, “the way she looks at him.”
“Who?” asked Thaddeus.
“Emma. Jennings. The two of them.”
“He better not give her that doughnut hole, though, or Grace will kill him.”
“You think so?” She smiled at him as if he were a perfect idiot.
“She worries about Emma’s weight. She’s like a calorie Nazi.”
“Well, Emma might have Jennings’s metabolism.”
“She should have yours. You’re so thin. Svelte.”
“I’m gaining,” Muriel said. She paused, giving herself an opportunity not to say what came next. “And how would she ever get my metabolism?”
“I don’t know. How would she get his?”
The temperature outside had dropped, he could feel the cold air closing in on the A-frame like a belt being cinched an extra notch.
Muriel closed the clasp on her little beaded purse. Whatever she had been looking for was no longer of interest to her. “You know, Thaddeus.” She took a breath, pressed her lips together.
Candy was going on and on, thanking one person after another.
“I don’t want to seem ungrateful,” Muriel said. “Gratitude is part of my practice. The Buddha said that even being born is a miracle, and our chance of being here is like you drop a tiny hoop into the ocean and then on the other side of the world you put a blind turtle in the water, and that turtle sticks his head through the tiny hoop.” Her hands were tightly clasped and she tapped her thumb knuckle against her chin. “I already wasted a lot of time being angry and feeling like life kind of screwed me, and I never want to go back to that state of mind. I am consciously grateful for the river, the trees, Jennings and the kids, my hands, my health, my mind. And I know I should be grateful for what you did for Hat because that’s our home now, that’s where we live, but, Thaddeus, I’m sorry I just wish, I wish so much, I wish you hadn’t done that. I guess you meant well. I know you did. But God I wish it had never happened. I wish we had never set foot in that place.”
“Jesus, Muriel, what the fuck?”
“Little Henry peels the paint off and eats it and there’s lead in it. Dr. Schiller says Henry’s lead levels are elevated.”
“Oh no.”
“All I want is . . .” She was momentarily overcome. She breathed deeply, shook her head. “I love Jennings, that’s the whole thing. He’s . . . There’s no one in the world like him. He’s so strong and he’s so kind. He’s the one. If you were walking through Naraka, and you had to escape. He’s the one you’d want with you. He’d get you through. You don’t understand. I never knew I could love someone. And for someone to love me? Even a little?” She waved as if to dismiss an absurdity. “But he’s not happy living with Hat. It’s not good. His father is really hard, you know. Really bossy. I just want Jennings to be able to relax and be happy, that’s all I want.”
“Is it the taxes?” Thaddeus wanted to know. “The paint? We can deal with the paint. I know a pediatrician in the city, a really good one. We’ll get Henry in there. We’ll get this all squared away.”
“Guys,” Candy was calling out, “Brandon would like to say something.” The room was silent as Brandon was stood on the seat of a chair.
“Hello, everyone,” Brandon said, barely audible. “Thanks for coming over, and helping me to see again.”
“Yo, Brandon,” a husky female voice called out.
“Gammana,” Brandon said, and began to oscillate, his arms spread out, forming the classic pose of a prophet. The chair threatened to tip until Candy grabbed the back of it. “Bo bo bi eye de de da da shot tock cop pa,” he said. His glossolalia was slurred and swooping, as if all he had to do was open his mouth for the mysterious language to come pouring out.
“What the fuck?” Thaddeus whispered to Muriel.
Brandon continued to chant, it sounded like a mix of pig Latin, Farsi jump-rope rhyme, and infantile babbling. People were either bowing their heads, or raising up their hands as though to touch the Lord, the hem of whose heavenly robe was but inches away. You could feel it in the room, the fervency, the power. It was like waking up to an earthquake or watching a glacier calve. It struck Thaddeus that civilization was, at its core, a lie, a total scam. Creation is violent and insane, and so are we. As he listened to Brandon, what Muriel had been trying to tel
l him about Grace and Jennings circled his thoughts, jabbing at him like devils.
Off to the side, in her aqua-and-pink party dress, Jewel was on her knees, and right next to her was David, in a kind of crouch, as if to compromise between devotion and his innate skepticism. Both of their little heads were bowed. And there were Grace and Jennings. Jennings’s hands were raised to the level of his chest, the palms facing upward, as if he were carting invisible trays. Thaddeus did not know the semaphore signals for varying degrees of piety, but it sure looked as if Jennings was receiving the Spirit. But the final disorientation was Grace, who stood staring at Brandon, her arm raised nearly straight up, as if she knew the answer and wanted to be called on by God.
Not ten feet away was Becka Norton, one of the housecleaners who worked at Orkney, with her husband whose name Thaddeus could never remember and who he called Forlorn Mustache, a likeable fellow who worked at a plant nursery on the other side of the river. While Forlorn gazed neutrally into the middle distance, Becka let forth a torrent of her own secret language, which, with its profusion of vowels, sounded a bit like baby talk. Ba la la la do da da da, benign happy sounds, untroubled, bucolic, so unlike her actual speech, which could be harsh. She swayed back and forth, her eyes shut. Was that who she really was? wondered Thaddeus. Near Becka was an elderly woman in a plum pants suit with her right arm in a sling, her face contorted as if what she was saying in the secret language was extremely wrathful. And over there was Oscar King from Leyden Hardware, the one who was so unjustly fired after he went into a diabetic convulsion at work. His lips were moving at an impossible speed, as if he were trying to count to one thousand in under a minute.
Here it was, Thaddeus thought, the hope and terror beneath the skin of daily life. Free of the bonds of so-called common sense. Free of language. Free from decorum. A kind of communal orgasm. Who knew that this church was a kind of Pentecostal Nero’s Fiddle?
Who were these people? What did they know? Were they finally extraordinary, were they the human bridge between this fallen world and eternity? Compared to this surging cacophony, the encounters that made up his life were meaningless—the fruitless fetid hours with Kubrick, the egotistical drone of countless script conferences, the pass the salt how was your day of married life. Yes, there was madness in this room right now, but Thaddeus envied it, wished himself capable of it, and he felt the shame and sadness of a life not really all that well spent. “God is real!” someone cried, the one phrase of English in a bombardment of unknown languages. Star di ba da dora sttttttat keesh a na peesh ka na la luchay. Some of those who were not speaking in tongues were screaming like girls at a rock concert. The screams were a mixture of celebration and mourning, lovely, lonely, urgent, and with something of a high howling mountain wind in them, too. People here were jumping up and down, and some were falling and others were catching those who fell. Candy lifted Brandon off of the chair, holding him as high as her arms could reach, and the hall erupted in applause, cheers, whistles, and whoops, transforming in an instant from a tabernacle to a sports arena.
“I don’t want you to hate him, that’s all,” Muriel said. “I don’t.”
“Who?” And as Thaddeus asked the question, he saw Jennings and Grace winding their way toward their table. Did she mean Jennings?
Grace and Jennings flounced into their chairs as if they had just run a great distance and their legs could no longer support them. Their faces were red, their lips tight—they looked like misbehaving children doing their utmost not to laugh. Was there any more irritating sight? The privacy of their mirth was galling.
Jennings at least had the good manners to put his arm around his wife. All Grace could manage was to look down at her folded hands and shake her head, little bits of hilarity coming out of her mouth in bursts and gasps.
“What’s with you two?” Thaddeus asked.
The simple question set them off. Jennings had long ago learned to laugh without drawing attention to himself and still expressed his merriment with some discretion—his shoulders shook, and his form of laughter was to force air through his clenched teeth. Grace’s hilarity made her look pained, contorted, like someone in grief, or childbirth. She pounded the table with her fist.
“What the fuck?” said Thaddeus. “I mean, come on. Really.”
“They’re speaking in tongues,” Grace finally managed to say. “For a minute I thought it was Chinese. But it’s even crazier than Chinese. It’s . . . tongues!”
“You two,” Muriel said. She slid her chair to the left to be closer to Jennings, but the scrape of the metal legs against the floor caused them all to turn toward the sound, as if they had heard a human scream.
Emma, holding a doughnut hole in each hand, toddled over and climbed into Jennings’s lap. Grace pried the food away from the little girl, who threw herself against Jennings and cried purposefully. There was her protruding belly, and there, not quite so pronounced, was Jennings’s. Where did that little girl get her build? No one in Thaddeus’s family was heavy, nor in Grace’s. David was skinny, to the point of feeble. So where did that propensity to gain come from? Was that pink belly the telltale heart beating in the walls of the marriage? Thaddeus stopped himself from speculating further. He had no desire to pull at loose threads. Why unravel everything because the mind is a fidgety creature, perverse in its curiosity? No. Sometimes the mask is preferable to the face.
IT HAD NOT BEEN THEIR intention, but Thaddeus and Grace had bought their way into the society of river people, the select population of property owners along the banks of Leyden’s share of the Hudson, all of whom accepted their responsibility to protect the river from those who would cheapen or befoul it. Thaddeus and Grace did their best to live up to the expectations that seemed to have been listed in invisible ink on the deed to Orkney, but their neighbors were as alien to them as the punks and situationalists and conceptual artists they used to find themselves among in New York. When Thaddeus and Grace first moved into Orkney it seemed that everyone for at least thirty miles to the north and south of them was related to someone who had had a hand in the acquisition, design, and furnishing of their property. But one by one the old fortunes were dissipated, lost, stolen, spent down to the last million, squandered, and new sorts of people were snapping up properties that suddenly seemed remarkably reasonable—especially so as New York City real estate values began to rise. Even the houses still occupied by descendants of the original owners had a compromised kind of ownership. Windsor Meadows had been on the brink of being sold to an archdiocese that wanted to turn it into a rest home for retired priests, but at the eleventh hour Nicky Steinhaus married Mai Chen, a woman from Shanghai whose father manufactured the coaxial cables everyone needed to hook up their TV to the cable box. Another of the old river houses was bought by a Yugoslavian fashion designer who had renamed the place Mamuna, after a Slavic demoness. He liked to loan it out to a bewildering assortment of friends and hangers-on—a bluegrass band, a family of French circus performers, models, jewelers, hat makers, investors, cocaine cowboys, and his own Dalmatian brothers, each drunker and rowdier than the next.
Two of the river houses, one built in 1815, the other in 1877, had gone onto the open market when the families that owned them ran out of relatives who could keep them up. Sequana was snapped up by a fellow from California named Pete Marino, who had been the sound engineer on Buddy Klein and the Kleimaniacs in Dusseldorf, and who subsequently produced a string of commercially successful records. Marino had run through three marriages and though his wealth had been cut in half, he was still able to make an all-cash offer on Sequana shortly after Buddy had told him it was for sale. By now, Marino was re-re-re-re-married, this time to a Yugoslavian water polo medalist named Maria who had defected during the ’84 Olympics in L.A. For the price of a bungalow in Laurel Canyon, they got a William Strickland–designed Greek Revival main house, a Stanford White barn, and a pristine view of the water, and a sudden relationship with the mallards, the swans, the Canadian geese, and th
e occasional bald eagle that patrolled it.
To make certain Marino and others could continue to enjoy the majestic views, an ad hoc committee called Greenwatch had been formed to protect Leyden’s natural beauty, primarily defending the river but also resisting development throughout the county. This afternoon’s fund-raiser was specifically about Capstone Cement, which had announced its plans to build a cement plant directly on the Hudson, using the river’s water as an integral part of the process of turning limestone, shale, bauxite, clay, and sand into a thick, moist slurry, to be fed into countless cement trucks that would deliver it to building sites throughout the Northeast. Capstone owned cement factories in thirty-two countries around the world, and sixteen in the U.S., primarily along the Ohio River. A privately held company, its ownership was not easily determined, nor were its finances a matter of public record. Its corporate offices were in Dover, Delaware; Guayaquil, Ecuador; and Hong Kong but they had Albany connections and the savvy to acquire 270 publically owned acres of riverfront property. Some politicians raised mild environmental concerns about the proposed plant, but most of the state officials backed Capstone’s plans with great enthusiasm—not only would New York profit on the land sale, but the plant would be a source of tax revenue and (according to Capstone) at least four hundred jobs would be created.
The plant was to be named Paragon, after a venerable Hudson River steamboat. The state senate had yet to vote on the land sale and the governor was also waiting for a final report from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, though, much to the horror of Greenwatch, the DEP was going to be basing its final ruling on such matters as watershed protection and drinking water safety, and would not be considering the irretrievable aesthetic damage a cement plant would do to the life of Windsor County. There was no one in Albany who seemed to care about the value of an untroubled vista, of the sense of reality and tranquility, and, quite frankly, decency, it gave a person to see the world the way nature had intended it. No one in Albany seemed to care about the violence (there was no other word for it) that would be done to Windsor’s little winding roads that were designed for buggies and even now could barely support the automobile traffic that got worse every year, roads that would be clogged with rattling trucks loaded with revolving sludge. And what about the advent of Leyden’s first rush hours, when four hundred workers, each in his own Chevrolet, drove to and from work each day? What about the parking lot bordered in Cyclone fencing? What about the litter of beer cans gleaming in the moonlight and windblown Mars bars wrappers scuttling like rats across the empty asphalt?
River Under the Road Page 28
