“Great to see you!” Peter said. “Forgive Brent. He doesn’t know not to honk around horses.”
After a quick hug, Lucinda said, “Is this it? Is this what you’ve reduced your life to?”
“Looks like it,” Peter said, inspecting the four boxes that formerly held computers. A lamp stuck out of one, a pillow out of another. One was dense with books.
When Peter Tyne had told Carson, his coworker at Plymouth Financial, that he planned to become a novice Buddhist monk at a monastery in Vermont, Carson sputtered a mouthful of coffee onto his microgeometric print tie.
“No way, man! You’ll be back in a week,” Carson said, dabbing at the spill with a thin paper napkin, which only served to push the coffee deeper into the silk. “No sex? And you’ll never be able to give up lattes.” The right corner of Peter’s mouth twisted down, while the left side shot up, the way his father smiled. Lucinda hadn’t inherited that trait.
Warnings on the things Peter would miss were offered as if by obligation over the last three months, although none of his coworkers had done anything that daring in their own lives. Peter noticed that the warnings most often involved the things the advice giver would miss most. As for the sex, he’d been celibate already for five months and twenty days (not that he was counting), since Lorna dumped him for her girlfriend, but there was no way he was going to mention that to Carson.
Peter and Lucinda walked to the farmhouse, each carrying a box. Peter returned for the other two while Lucinda put the water on to re-boil, and, noticing a couple of pieces of mail for Bart on the counter, she stuffed them into a drawer out of sight. When the coffee was ready, she set the mugs on the table while Gabriel circled her ankles, purring like a mic’d tiger. He was originally her sister Rene’s designer cat before she grew tired of him and dumped him in Lucinda’s front hall before moving to California to manage a spa. Gabriel was determined never to be abandoned again.
“Isn’t it going to be hard to give up coffee?” Lucinda asked when they were at the round dining table with their mugs steaming into their faces.
“They’ll give us a drop or two of coffee to shield us from the symptoms of total withdrawal, but I don’t think they do skinny mocha lattes topped with a sprinkle of freshly ground mace.”
Peter had been shedding one thing after another, like a snake given too many layers of skin, while becoming more involved in his Buddhist sangha. He even sublet his center city apartment — the envy of all his coworkers — to Brent as he embarked on a broadcasting career in local TV news.
“What about your cool apartment? Your sax?” Lucinda asked.
“Found a good home for the sax at a music program for kids. I’m still in mourning about the apartment,” he said. “And I’m wondering whether I’ll be the only monk with a 15-year funded 401(k). I’ve made you the beneficiary by the way.”
At this point, he wasn’t ready to liquidate it and donate the money to the monastery, severing the last thread to his former work life. Signing off from his last radio show — Your Money Man — wasn’t easy either, mostly because he loved the call-ins. Not so much the questions as the people, looking for answers that only he could provide. He’d produced and hosted the show on the local public radio station for the last nine years, but he felt he’d reached an end to what he wanted to say to his peers about mutual funds and adjustable rate mortgages and, ironic to think now, that the generously informative answers he gave his audience were in response to the wrong questions.
The veneer on his former life began dissolving two years ago late one Friday afternoon. Heading out on foot from his office in the financial district — and debating in his head between Northern Italian or Thai cuisine for dinner — he heard the ripping screech of pavement pulling off rubber. A teenager smashed his Subaru head on into a parked bus, not twenty feet from him. Peter had tried to reach the boy through the confusion, the horn honking and yelling, people swarming the car, the approaching sirens. Even without all the glass embedded in the boy’s face and arms, Peter could see it was too late. No seatbelt stretched across the boy’s athletic frame. No air bag had inflated.
Peter trudged on afterwards, dazed, through the city streets, and found himself staring into a storefront display of strapless, tea-length wedding dresses, wondering about hustling his way up as an investment advisor as if reviewing someone else’s life. He couldn’t remember why he’d started down this career path, other than some vague wish to be rich and comfy and help others to be rich and comfy. It began a wedge of before and after for him as he tried and failed to make sense of the boy’s random death, so he worked another eighteen months trying to recapture some piece of his own original dream, but it was gone. He had no more clear answers for the people who called in during his radio program or timely wisdom for his investment newsletter readers. After a few more months, he gave notice.
And here he was at his sister’s place with his remaining possessions down to this pile of boxes in her hallway.
“Enough about me,” he teased. “Tori’s got a lot of nerve bringing you a horse in that state.” They could watch the mare in the paddock from where they sat in the dining room.
“I don’t know,” Lucinda said. “I always feel like kicking her butt. Then I usually realize she’s done something brilliant. She’s really is into this rescue thing, and she’s got some kind of sixth sense in matching people to horses, so there she is. My new horse. Timing’s bad though. What with Bart moving out and Frank starting a dictatorship, my plate is overloaded.” She tried to joke. My heart is scalded.
“Maybe the timing was perfect,” said Peter.
Lucinda looked away from her brother, knowing she’d lose it if she met his kind eyes. She rose abruptly and brought a tin of Danish butter cookies to the table.
“Ymmm! Just like mom used to make!” Peter said. They laughed. No one in the Tyne family baked.
“You jest, but you scarf them down just the same,” Lucinda retorted.
“Big project though,” Peter said, sizing up the mare who was repeating her circus horse act for another pull of grass.
“Maybe she’s thinking that about me,” Lucinda said, looking at the mare. Her mare, she thought. She really needs a decent name. “I started back with riding lessons this past year after a long hiatus, and I was never close to as good as Tori. I just want to hack around. Nothing stressful.”
Peter smiled. “I know you, before long you’ll be challenging yourself and the horse to something despite your feigned modesty.”
They sat for a bit in silence.
“We got Dad’s retirement party Thursday,” she said. “Don’t forget.”
“I know, but he’s really only semi-retiring, packing that plant press off to ol’ Mt. Washington.” Peter examined his sister’s profile. “How are things in development? What’s this about a dictatorship?” He reached for another shortbread cookie.
“I’m going to need another cup if we’re starting on that.”
“What is it now?” Peter asked, leaning the ladder-back chair backward so the front legs were almost a foot off the hardwood floor. Just like their dining-room-table discussions when they were teenagers living with their father, Lucinda thought, getting up to make more coffee.
“Well, I met with Frank last week, and he wants to put bogus numbers into my revenue projections and stir up the Strategic Plan. For starters.”
Peter shuddered. “That sounds lethal.”
“No kidding. The frickin’ plan took three years and three, no, four consultants to finish. It’s perfectly fine. Well, not perfect, but certainly sound.”
“Yes, but it’s not his.”
“That’s it exactly! He’s gotta pee on it. Plus I don’t think he’s got the chops to fundraise as the chief executive for a college like ours. But it’s early yet. Perhaps he’ll see how much work it’s actually going to take.”
“Why don’t you think he’s a fundraiser?” Peter asked.
“He mostly wants to talk corporate partnershi
ps and strategic alliances,” Lucinda said. “When I bring up names of people he doesn’t know to help cultivate, suddenly his schedule gets very full. It happened again at our meeting last week when he was changing the revenue projections. Plus, Warren? You remember that Warren guy? He and Frank are getting quite cozy. I’m going to have to talk to Honor about it, or maybe even Cliff Plunkett if I’m feeling particularly reckless.”
“Why Cliff?”
“He brought Warren in last winter, over my head. You can’t deny him his glitzy resume, but he’s not a team player. At least not my team,” Lucinda said, curling and uncurling her fingers around her mug handle. “I brought it up to Honor, and she told me the Executive Committee is trying to keep Frank at least somewhat happy — without changing a century and a half of tradition overnight. But Honor promised that if Warren screwed up, they would overrule any objection Frank might have to kicking his butt out.”
“So you expect trouble from him?”
“He’s already interfering with my marriage,” Lucinda said, looking out the window at the mare. Her ears were pricked in the direction of the road. “Told Bart about Jay.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t just because of Jay that Bart left,” Peter said. “What happened? Really?”
“Oh, Peter, I don’t know! I didn’t stop loving Bart, I just felt so… ” She looked into her mug. “Abandoned almost. Bart was never around, and then when he’d come home he was tired and obsessed with some project he had in the city. Something that was going to lead to a big exhibit at the modern art museum. I tried to talk to him, but not hard enough, I guess. He didn’t think there was anything to talk about. I… I don’t know. There’s no justifying what I did.”
“First time I remember that happening in your charmed life, my perfect sister,” he teased.
She’d started pushing tears off her cheeks and sniffing the ones poised on her lower lids back in. “Ahhh! I’m not going to feel sorry for myself.” She jabbed at her cheeks with a paper napkin. “Isn’t everyone allowed at least one royal screw-up?”
“At least,” Peter said. “I say, give him time.”
“I was going to tell him, but I was waiting for — ”
“You don’t need to justify anything to me. I just know the boy is whupped.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Actually he wanted to crash at my place, but I’m not going to be there, am I?”
“So where did he go? He won’t tell me. For a week or so he’d sneak in every couple days and grab things. Now he’s gone. It’s not how I thought… Hell, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Do you have any feelings for this Jay guy?”
“This ‘Jay guy’ skipped town with his latest acquisition on the pretense of helping her buy a horse in Holland. I didn’t listen when Tori tried to warn me about him. Oh, no. My only feelings for him at this point are worse than negative,” Lucinda said, looking from the mare back to her brother. “Do you know where Bart is now?”
“He’s in the city shunting back and forth among friends, crashing on couches. Eating cold takeout Chinese.”
Pebbles crunched on the driveway. They looked up as Tori pulled her horse trailer to a stop in front of the paddock.
“Oh, no,” Lucinda said. “Not another one.”
Tori lowered the back panel of the trailer to the ground and led out what looked like some kind of large dog, with something in its muzzle. Peter and Lucinda went out to meet her.
“What is that?” Peter exclaimed.
“Meet Nanogirl!” Tori said.
“Are you downsizing? I mean I’ve seen miniature horses before, but she’s half their size,” Lucinda said.
“She’s a dwarf miniature. Just shy of eighteen inches. Practically one of a kind,” said Tori.
“Looks like an ottoman with a mane,” Peter said. “Downright cute though.”
“She’s going to be the new therapy horse at Salt Marsh Stable,” Tori said.
“Comes complete with toy, huh?” Peter said. Nanogirl clenched a seven-inch plastic flying disc in her mouth.
Tori laughed. “She’s always stealing things and parading around with them. She must have put that Frisbee in the trailer last week.”
“Ok, where did you rescue her from?” Lucinda asked.
“She’s Dr. Camille’s. She got her as payment for some overdue bills and doesn’t know what to do with her.”
The gray mare poked her head sideways through the opening above the lowest slat in the paddock fence, working her nostrils to gather information on this new arrival. Nanogirl, in her purple mesh halter and matching lead, pulled her way over to the paddock. She dropped her plastic disc and touched her tiny muzzle against the mare’s oversized one.
“Yes,” said Lucinda. “Therapy horse for a certain rescued racehorse. I should have known.”
“Really, Cinda, I didn’t think that. I just thought you’d like to see her. I’m on my way through to the stable.”
Lucinda watched her mare and the tiny mare. Nanogirl was the color of a fuzzy mouse, like a Shetland pony, and sported a frizzy buff-colored mane, while Lucinda’s mare reminded her of landed gentry fallen on hard times. “Lady Grey” popped into her mind.
“Some of the little ones don’t relate well to regular-size horses, but they look like fast friends,” said Tori smiling. She didn’t unclip the lead because Nanogirl could easily walk under the paddock fence — or practically anywhere else she wanted.
“I hear you’re heading off to the hinterlands, Peter,” Tori said. “We’re going to miss you.”
“It’s not like I’m going off to Nepal or something, guys. It’s only up I-91 a couple hours. Plus I hear they’ll let me out occasionally for good behavior. I’ll expect you as guests,” Peter said, squatting to pat the newcomer. “Bring Nanogirl too. I’m sure we’ll need some comic relief.”
Over the Line
When Lucinda entered Frank Wickes’ office at seven-thirty on the dot, he wasn’t there. Al Baines, the athletic director, ear to smartphone, paced the bookcased wall, and Tara Whitcomb, Vice President of Human Resources, glared at the paperwork propped on her crossed legs while flipping her black croco-embossed pumped foot to some internal rhythm.
Lucinda seated herself by the door and withdrew a folder from her briefcase. With two major gift officers to hire, the new ad, out three days on-line at the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ website, had elicited a flood of resumes over the Internet. She drew out two of the resumes that Aden was especially excited about.
Frank had replaced the former president’s antique oak desk with a slim-profile tempered glass desk in blue-gray and the latest computer configuration in brushed silver. In Ben’s day, the wall sconces and desk lamps cast an antique gilt glow on bookshelves of leather-bound, first edition Melvilles that he could actually be caught reading. Ben had removed the back-to-back books, and in their place Frank had placed framed diplomas, trophies, and photographs of himself shaking hands with mayors and governors and one of his son Sean graduating from Yale.
Taking a chair, Lucinda noticed that the facial expressions of Sarah Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the oil portraits hung over the conference table seemed even more austere in a room appointed partially in glass and steel than in one whose honey-shaded lamplight fell on burgundy and black books and Ben Marshallton himself.
Lucinda couldn’t help thinking again of her former boss. Ben had been a fundraiser’s dream — like a point-and-shoot camera with donors. He always stayed on the messages Lucinda had carefully crafted, while exuding genuine enthusiasm. His love was students and academic excellence, but she especially appreciated his shrewd mastery of the delicate machinations an executive administrator needed to get anything worthwhile done in the unruly maze of trustees, faculty, alumni, students, donors, foundations, and media attention that surrounds a longstanding academic institution.
Frank finally strode into his office at eight-thirty talking on his phone. Placing it on his desk, h
e lowered himself into his chair, swiveling it around from ocean view to face his direct reports, a seeming half acre of tempered glass demarcating the status difference.
“Great. You’re all here. Let’s get started. Shall we? Lucinda, you have those stats on the athletic alums?”
“Right here,” she said, plopping the papers on the glass top. “We figure with those folks, just preliminarily we could do $10 million in Fiscal 14 and then — ”
“We’ll need double that,” Al kicked in.
“I’m aware of the budget, Al. That figure is just the first slice of the pie. We have a plan for the difference,” Lucinda said.
“We’re going to need $26 million for that piece with the revised Strategic Plan,” Frank said, flipping quickly through Lucinda’s report.
Lucinda kept quiet for a minute, trying to prevent her initial reaction from flying out of her mouth like verbal vomit. These folks think you can just turn on a tap and out it flows, $1 million, $2 million, $3 million, why not go for $50 million? Invoice your donors! They’ll buy anything!
Out loud, she said, “Let’s cover the changes for the campaign you wanted to discuss, then we’ll talk money. It’s best not to start ass-backwards. Has the revised Strategic Plan been approved?”
It was an over-the-line remark for her, but she was livid about Frank breezing in an hour late without apology. She sat perfectly straight and talked very slowly. This was the technique Martin Bentley coached her on one night when the four of them — she, Tori, Martin, and Bart — got high on red wine at Granite Point Beach. She’d complained that men seemed to just talk shit in business meetings and get away with it. Martin had laughed. “So true,” he’d said. “Here! Let me give you a few pointers.”
Halt at X: A North of Boston Novel Page 4
