The Almanac Branch

by Bradford Morrow

  Segredo still looked young. He was a finer man in his manners than I’d remembered as a child. The image I had had of that figure crossing the field toward our house, the red and black kerchief around his neck and the black boots denoting the power that I lacked, the fear he must have felt as his eyes were averted from looking up at the house he was about to rob, fear misread by me—that young girl watching him from the window of her sanctuary—as grim determination, all that seemed inappropriate all of a sudden, when I walked into the cottage. He seemed to have grown up emotionally (or else, I had)—it was evident just in the way he placed another log on the fire in the brick hearth in the living room. They were unnervingly at peace with themselves and their environment and, ostensibly, with their fate. Not a single line in my mother’s face spoke of any second thoughts about having left Charles Brush.

  “Would you like some port, Grace?” and when he said it I didn’t get the wry smile at first—of course, I understood the reference later; how had he known about our escapade that night?

  I said yes, and he brought in three glasses and an unopened bottle with a Portuguese imprint on the label, and numbers—a date, and barrel lot—written on a piece of tape around its neck, a good bottle, the kind you drink to new beginnings with. This was clearly something he had savedfor the occasion—which made my heart sink at the prospect of bringing up what it was I’d come over to discuss. They were being forgiving toward me who had more or less abandoned them, and here I was, come to raise questions immaterial to the life they had built for themselves in my absence. We talked for a while about Warne, what had gone awry with my one attempt at marriage, and about what I was doing with myself, which seemed, in the telling, fairly paltry and vapid and wasteful. The second glass of port kept me from excusing myself and running out the door in shame. When Mother poured it, though, I noticed that there was a thin band of dirt under her fingernails and this helped me to refocus, for reasons I am not so proud of, in that I recognized her poverty, and her own imperfection, in the midst of all this goodness. We all suffered, and had suffered. I admired her for not being as fastidious as she once had been, and at the same time felt more on an equal footing with her.

  When I did bring it up, I was clumsy. It might have been the clumsiness that made what I had to ask more palatable to her, much the same way the indication of plain old mortal dirt had made her available to me. If I’d asked with a steady voice, and smooth stream of words, she might not have been able to hear my need for help—her daughter’s need of guidance.

  “That’s still going?” she asked. Not the slightest tone of indignation, or anger, or judgment in her voice. Did she understand what I was saying?

  Now, the wisdom of letting them in on Faw’s single great failure might have been questionable—my father would have disinherited me on the spot, had he known—but I pressed forward, the port in my heart, and the warmth of the room warming me beyond the cautiousness I might have honored otherwise. I told them what I knew, and they were quiet. Mother didn’t show the least surprise at any of my disclosures. Nothing in her eyes displayeddisapproval; she did nothing that suggested the least hostility toward Faw. The phony church, the dedicated account for this program and for that, all the revenues, which must have run into the millions over a span of two decades, that had as yet eluded the scrutiny of an auditor—she didn’t betray so much as a sigh of judgment. Was hers a loaded indifference, willful the same way Faw’s had always been? I could only wonder, then; now I know. Neither she nor Segredo allowed themselves a bit of rejoicing over the clear trouble my father and brother had gotten themselves into. For a moment I found myself considering the possibility that they had been the recipients of hush money, or some such thing worthy of a made-for-TV movie. (I note this with amused shame.) This would at least explain why they seemed so deficient, or so honorable, in their response. But then Segredo spoke up, and my fantasy was dispelled.

  “Grace, I don’t want to interrupt you. Your mother and I are so pleased, I think it’s pretty obvious, to see you, okay? We both talked about you before you got here, and one of the things we wanted most to let you know was that we don’t want to get in your way, but we would like to see you more often. I guess you could have guessed that.” Then he rubbed his hands together, and said, “I’m afraid we already have heard most of this stuff you’re telling us about your father. We didn’t know about Berg. I’m sorry to hear that he’s involved, too. If you want us to try to get in touch with him and talk to him, we’re certainly willing to give it a shot. But as for the Gulf Stream, there’s nothing your mother and I can do about it.”

  “I think there is,” I proposed. That was quite a piece of whimsy, too, because I believed there wasn’t in fact anything he could do about it.

  He looked at my mother, and I knew he’d asked her with the look whether he should tell me something. New surprise; so they did have a piece of information I was missing after all.

  “You want to come out back? It’s been a few years since you were there.” I still couldn’t tell what response my mother had given to that look of his.

  We put on our coats, and went out into the sculpture yard. It was quite an imposing sight. The moonlight guided us through the iron menagerie he had continued to build in the yard. It was beyond my capacity to criticize what he had created; it was also beyond me to like it. Here was a fixed world, Daedalian in its resources, and childish in its freedom. A pair of metal wings glimmered over our heads, and I wondered whether moonlight might have burned the wax in Icarus’s wings just as effectively as had the sun’s rays. Some boys were just destined to fly too high and descend into the hungry sea no matter what precautions they took or refused to take. We carried the bottle of port and our glasses out with us. The camaraderie warmed me to the marrow.

  By October, Berg’s script was more or less completed. Whatever he didn’t have on paper, in black and white, could be improvised right on the set, he told himself, though he need not have worried over such matters given the over-thoroughness with which he’d spelled out scene after scene. Analise had hired a small crew of people she had worked with before, among them a veteran named Meade who was brought in to do the cinematography. Meade had shot over a hundred films—from arcade shorts to feature-length productions—and had the distinction of having worked for legitimates as well as hard core. That he’d footaged some serious art-world movies was the qualification that led Analise to believe that he was their man for the job. Still she was nervous about Berg’s idea of working with a young actress. She had even steeled herself against the possibility, even probability, that her colleague might foul his own nest by going to extremes artistically.

  When she brought up her concerns again, Berg announced that he thought they ought to shoot in Mexico or the Caribbean. “The laws down there about this’re bound to be more slack.”

  “You’re wrong,” Analise said, as she drew her karakul coat around her chest against the autumn chill that settled over the Ramble in Central Park and breeze-broomed crackly leaves around their ankles.

  “Put some cash into the jefe’s palms and you’re all set.”

  “Look,” Meade gesticulated magisterially with hands whose skin was spotted as a wood thrush’s belly—“you go down to Mexico or the islands, wherever, and you go with whatever locals you can find, not one of them is going to be able to act worth a good goddamn, okay? The English—even if we find somebody who can speak it—the English is going to be atrocious. Then, you’re going to have some mother who’s going to take your money for her daughter’s services, and the first time you get her under the lights with the camera rolling and Priapus primed, guess what, all her brothers show up out of nowhere, rough us up, steal our equipment, and get your jefeson our case—I don’t care how many palms you’ve greased up beforehand they know the difference between bread and butter—and then, just like that, farewell my friends. I’ve been in on projects where they’ve tried it. It doesn’t work.”

  “Besides, shooting outside
the country will send the costs through the stratosphere,” asserted Analise, who looked, to Berg, suddenly quite solemn and beautiful in the running light. He found his mind straying a bit. Already, before they had set up the first light on the first set, his vision was being gnawed away at by the real world. There was no way the film was going to turn out as he had hoped it would. All things being equal, the best thing to do would be to work fast, accept the constraints that the world was going to impose upon him—laws, costs, prohibiting mores—and get the picture going at least, get into it. His fingers were cold. Autumn was early this year, wasn’t it?He wondered whether Meade had ever been a lover of hers, of Analise’s. The thought bothered him. It shouldn’t have: he had no right. The wind picked up through the half-shed trees. What was wrong with a young girl’s fantasies being brought into life on the screen? He hoped this desire he was feeling for Analise would lapse back down. Not a convenient moment for internal commentaries that ran cross purpose. It was the fact she was so confident in all her ideas that made her so attractive to him, wasn’t it. It reminded him—very peculiar connection—of Faw.

  Meade was going on, playing the old salt; already Berg was feeling aggravated by him. “—Fiasco is what, if you go ahead in that direction. But look, why don’t we just shoot right here in New York? Easily done, there’s a good talent base to draw off of, you’ve got the film labs right here, inexpensive, you’ve got plenty of contacts for loft spaces. Why make matters more difficult than need be?”

  “Forget the studio,” coming back to focus again. “The outdoor scenes we have to shoot outdoors, and the landscape has to be out in nature. I don’t want anything faked up. I need water, I need an island.”

  “What do you think you’re walking on? you’ve got the most famous island on earth right under your feet.”

  “This isn’t an island.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “What I want is whitecaps, real waves, real gulls, real sand, a whole seascape background type of, because the whole vision of the film is really meant to be pure,” and he brushed the air in front of him with his outstretched hands, and just as he gestured it was as if the answer had been there before him, imminent and needing only to be polished to be seen. “There’s no need to carry on about it,” he extemporized, “you don’t want to film down South it’s fine by me. I know where to do it, and how.” It was the second time he had made that claim.

  Meade started to say something, but Analise intervened. She wanted to go back inside. Berg smiled at her; he wasexcited by his solution. The question was this. It wouldn’t be hard to go out to the island when his father was on the other side of the world, but how was he going to be able to get Djuna Cobbetts away from the farmhouse on Shelter long enough to be able to bring in his equipment and his cast and crew, to do their work? The answer came to him when he was bidding the two of them farewell, as they emerged from the park through a rustic, bark-pole arbor on Central Park West. He would send her on vacation. Nothing so lavish as a trip to St. Barts—Cape Hatteras would do fine. One of the church people could take her around, show her the sights. Webster had better go, too. What kind of fish were they catching this time of year down there? He would have to find out. As for Grace, Berg figured it wouldn’t matter, since she never left the city anymore. For all he knew, she hardly ever left the apartment. Trait she inherited from her mother. So, yes, fine; he would shoot in the privacy of his own home. By doing it this way, there would be the further advantage of not having to put in too much time recreating the scenes that were written to be set there anyway. Verisimilitude to a degree he might not otherwise have hoped for.

  “There was this fleck of a company,” Segredo said, “this little aberrant mayfly of a thing that your father had set up as a way of protecting some of his profits, sheltering them as they say in the business, and I knew about it because your mother told me. Your father used to interest me, I guess that’s how you’d put it.”

  “Interest you?” Erin nudged him.

  “Obsess me. I used to think about him and who he was, how he got to where he was, much more than I ever should have. He seemed to have such a grasp of how you make things happen in life, was how I looked at it, and since that was something I knew that I wasn’t able to do, I felt inferior to him, I suppose. Oh, I told myself that making money wasn’t something that artists should be worrying about. Making art was for artists, making money was for businessmen. You with me?”

  “Sure,” I said. I couldn’t face looking at him. Here he hardly knew me, had every right to see me as a traitor to my mother, having rejected her because of Faw’s unwritten, unspoken, but quite clearly hard-fast rules, and yet here he was speaking of his own weaknesses with such candor that they metamorphosed into strengths even as they were uttered.

  “But still I felt inferior, because I knew what your mother was giving up when she left the farm over there, for Coecles, and though I didn’t have any way to match him out in the world, in a practical way, it did occur to me—I don’t know how to say it—that I might be able to change the way his world worked. Might turn it around on him a bit. Once I realized that, he began to interest me for other reasons I’m not proud to admit to you. I was angry at him for so long because of how he treated your mother, and I wanted to get back at him, you see. Or that was at least my rationale. So I had something on him. I knew about this little festering fleck. Back when Berg was angry with him, Berg would come over and we would sit back here and he and I would have a drink or two, and without letting on that I was quietly collecting and assembling, putting the disparate pieces together—”

  “Like welding.”

  “That sounds right, welding together this weapon that I could use against him if I ever felt like it. Berg didn’t know that he was incriminating his father, but his tongue was pretty loose back then. I did a little research on some of the things he had said, and it became clear very quickly that this designer church and the Trust that was corporately attached to it were shady at least. Berg didn’t realize—and for all I know still doesn’t—that family memberscannot sit on the boards of foundations and churches if they happen to be sole shareholder family members in the very companies whose donations are floating that foundation. It’s called a conflict of interest for a reason. You skim some of your profits and bury them in your own foundation where they can work, untaxed, to your own benefit a second time.”

  “Did Berg tell anybody else about this?” I asked. I was floored by Segredo’s confession, not because I hadn’t come to more or less all this information on my own, but because it seemed to me that if he knew so much about it, who else knew? The most surprising aspect of all of this was that the loop—a loop just like that of the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, sequestered, and going around full circle at just about the same rate as a church’s fiscal year—had not been discovered before now.

  “I told him not to. Whether he listened to me, I can’t say.”

  Here was a difficult question for me to ask: had Segredo ever given in to the temptation to tell anyone? I didn’t have to ask it, though. He answered on his own.

  “Once I knew that your father wasn’t as perfect in his genius as I had thought, the obsession subsided. In the beginning it might have made me feel better to know that I could get him whenever it was convenient, just threaten to drop an anonymous letter to the appropriate party, and down he would come. But then, it became clear to me that this wasn’t a viable way to go, either. It made me into a lowly blackmailer, or some such thing. One night—this was years ago now, Grace—I was out back here, working on something, and it dawned on me what I would do. It was so unbelievably easy.”

  The air was fresh off the inlet, and the tide was heaving in over the stones down along the narrow beach.

  “Nothing. I would do nothing. He was one of us, for all his running over the face of the earth, making his moneyhere and there with all his ornaments and toys and crafts and games, he was just like me. I’ve never given any of it much thought sinc
e.”

  In setting up the project, Berg had taken precautions to protect his father. If the whole thing blew to pieces it would be demonstrable that Charles knew nothing about it; it might as well be a suicide rather than a murder—something along those lines. His sense of filial loyalty, such as it was, made him feel more confident about what he was doing. He knew that the more he could get himself to believe he was undertaking to produce a work of art, that the sacrifices and risks were his and his alone, the more he would be able to convince others to believe in him, too. He wanted to concentrate. He wanted to do something that was entirely his own. The more he could detach himself from his father, and the Sprawl, the better. He was getting too old to fit in that role that Faw had devised for him one summer so long ago. The hostilities, the jealousies, the anger he harbored for the better part of his life could be exorcised, he just knew it, if he were able to make this one pure move.

  In this spirit, when he created the Almanac branch of the Trust he did what he could to bolster its legitimacy. He worked up a logo for the production company—

  which he liked a lot because not only did it incorporate the three initial letters TAB into its design, but it had a cross at its center, which reaffirmed its religious affiliation. Moreover, the thing looked like the windows in the house out at Scrub Farm, side by side double-sashes with the lintel extending beyond the frames along the top. One of the windows, the left, was open. This was a graphic symbol, to his eye, that there was a way out for his father, should anything go wrong. (Funny how as time wore on, he cared less and less whether the project succeeded or failed, so long as it remained his, the fruit of his own thoughts, own labors.)

  Logos, contracts, iconographies. It was just paper protection, but sometimes, he remembered, thinking of that game he used to play with his brother and sister, paper can be stronger than the hardest rock. Whether that was supposed to alleviate some of his feelings of guilt about finessing the till in order to satiate his desire to make A Sinner’s Almanache couldn’t say for sure. It was far too advanced to turn back, anyway. If the financing of the film were ever scrutinized—following money through labyrinths was often the only way the law could ever catch up with skin traders—Berg could take the fall, could tell the truth about the operation, and possibly prevent anyone from bothering to look past the connection of the branch to the stream, to push a little further to see what kinds of tributaries were feeding the stream itself. He got a friend of Analise’s to incorporate the project. Its charter set forth the purpose of the film as a documentation of the many fine accomplishments of the church and its shareholder trust. It stipulated that the large capital equipment purchase Berg had made—all his hardware for the film—and the payments to staff and actors would go toward displaying what wonderful things the Trust was doing with its charitable contributions. “To be shown at fund-raising events,” it explained. The Trust had existed now for some two decades without ever having manufactured any real evidence that it was engaged in carrying out salvage and restoration operations, or that its parishioners both in the Hatteras church and down in the ghost-limb outreach church in the islands were benefitingfrom Trust work. So this would create some fruit for an empty cornucopia. Berg even thought that he, as embodiment of the Almanac branch, could, while funding his serious project, also put a couple of days into filming some nondescript boat yard, maybe find a decrepit wreck somewhere and get the actors to look as if they were going over the skeleton ship with an eye toward putting the old hull and cross braces back together. In other words, actually make something that would protect the Trust while, admittedly yes, exposing the Trust to just a little danger by, well, running these funds out of it, borrowing them interest-free, say several hundred thousand would cover it, surely no more than half a mil. Once A Sinner’s Almanacwas released, the principal would all go straight back into Gulf Stream and no one in the Sprawl would ever know.