Lapham Rising

by Roger Rosenblatt

  But he always turns back with a parting shot. “Two earth-shattering projects in a single day! My goodness! You’re a multitasker, that’s what you are!”

  He is opposed to both undertakings, the Da Vinci and the lecture. The lecture, on the meaning of the twentieth century, is to be presented at the Chautauqua Institution tomorrow morning, twenty-six hours from now. I’ve just begun working on it. I’m glad I didn’t put it off till the last minute.

  “We’re devoting a week to the twentieth century,” said the chief Chautauquan in his phone call some ten months ago. He had the voice of the nonprofit CEO—liquid clarity trembling with hope, which at any other time I would have dashed at once. I keep a mental portfolio of rare diseases from which I suffer whenever I am threatened with a social experience, and I was about to share with Mr. Chautauqua the melancholy news of my scurvy. But his call arrived on the very day that Laphamworld received its first Big Bang. I read the coincidence as a sign, and of the two events I forged my mission.

  “An entire week?”

  “Yes, it’s a tall order,” he went on earnestly, evidently assuming that I still dwelt among normal people who said normal things. “But I thought we’d break it down into special subjects: twentieth-century art, politics, science, and so forth.”

  In my former life, I used to give readings from time to time at Chautauqua’s upstate summer utopia, but I would stay only a day and not one second longer. That was as much of institutionalized sublimity as I could bear, of watching the worthy citizens patrol the grounds licking ice cream cones and waving to one another in a smiley somnambulism, as in movies about heaven in which candidates await their ascension. Yet these were, I knew, good, decent, modest, temperate folks. They used words such as supportive but were otherwise admirable.

  “And what do you want me to talk about?” I asked him.

  “The whole thing.”

  “The whole century? Well, I hope you’ve allotted me a good fifteen minutes.”

  “We thought a novelist, a creative thinker like yourself, might find an unusual approach.”

  Respectability is a curse, take it from me. I have found that a good reputation is much more difficult to shake than a bad one. People do not forgive respectability. Despite the fact that I stopped writing long ago, and despite my, shall we say, distinctive behavior, I continue even now to receive invitations to speak or read from my books.

  “Of course, you’re welcome to bring Mrs. March.”

  “I would, but she’s getting a bit heavy to carry around.”

  Give us the meaning of the twentieth century, will you do that? called the Chautauquans from their lacy red-and-blue porches stuffed with gladiolas, and their leafy glade and their true blue lake and their bell tower out of Vertigo and their hotel out of The Shining, and their largest outdoor pipe organ in the world, and their poorly concealed caches of booze forbidden by the original founding Methodists. Will you do that for us? No problem, I said.

  The twentieth century! One hundred years of progress! Edison becomes Freud becomes Einstein becomes Lapham. Yeats becomes Picasso becomes Stravinsky becomes Lapham. Silas Lapham becomes Lapham, too—the difference between William Dean Howells’s arriviste protagonist (who also built a big house, in Boston) and the newer version across the creek being that in early America, money alone could not buy social position, while today who cares?

  Well, that’s my lecture, Chautauquans. You’ve been a wonderful audience. I’m here till Doomsday.

  “Have you laid out your Lapham theory yet?” Hector asks from a hole he has just dug in the damp sand for typically purposeless amusement. He trains his little black eyes on me as I write. “About how Lapham represents all that’s wrong with modern civilization? That’s my favorite part.”

  “Keep digging, Mr. Tail.” I sometimes call him that to remind him of his place in the animal hierarchy. “You haven’t hit six feet yet.”

  “You’re such a cliché,” he says. “A recluse on an island, railing against his times.”

  “I’m a cliché? And what do you call a talking dog?”

  He extends himself in the Westie stretch—rump raised, front lowered, and with an expression of ludicrous complacency. “You know what you need? You need a little religion in your life. Why don’t you come to church with me sometime?”

  “I’m too tall to get in the door.”

  “If only you could see it, my wonderful megachurch. Three thousand terriers, all clapping and howling and standing on their hind legs together—I tell you, it’s a miracle, that’s what it is.” I drum my fingers on the arm of the rocker and wait for his ecstasy to wane. “I’ll pray for you,” he says.

  “You do that.”

  Across the creek, the Mexicans have added the screech of an electric saw to the symphony of their hammering. One of them is singing, “Yi yi yi yi, in China they eat it with chili”—for my benefit, I am certain. Hector’s ears snap up at the “music,” and he decides to compete with it, also for my benefit. He has a terrible singing voice, all sharps, and loud: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…”

  “Do you mind!”

  “Oh, so you’re the only one who can sing around here?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  He turns his back on me and kicks sand in my direction.

  I confess, there have been times in the past few days when I have thought of not going through with either the lecture or the Da Vinci. So much to risk, so much to lose. Retreating to the suburbs of thought, I figured, why bother, and began to listen to the blandishments of a coward’s conscience. But this morning my resolve is unbending. Somewhere beneath the noise and the smoke and the blight and the barbaric squalor lies a world worth excavating—a world worth fighting for. One must try, don’t you agree? One must make the effort.

  “I just love the Hamptons.” Hector heaves an ingenue’s sigh to ensure I’ll notice. He fears that my plot will jeopardize our ability to keep living out here, and he is right. Now he is beside me on the porch, his muzzle raised toward the sky, his eyes closed in a demiswoon.

  “And why is that, Mr. Tail?”

  “‘Why is that?’ Only you would ask such a question. The ocean, the beaches, the history, the light! God’s bounty everywhere.”

  “And the traffic?”

  “That doesn’t bother me.”

  “And the fakery? The empty chatter? The gossip? The ostentation? The excess?”

  He has mentioned history not because he knows any, ancient or modern, but because he thinks it will appeal to my backward-leaning disposition. It does not. My assessment of people in every century, with the glorious exception of the moderate, modest, enlightened, levelheaded yet courageous eighteenth, is equally unfavorable. All eras, I am certain, have produced the same proportion of goofs, dunces, and malefactors—87 to 91 percent—no matter whether they were adding a fourth floor to their summer palace or a fourth outhouse to their dingy saltbox. Only the Indians, who constituted the Hamptons’ history until the Dutch and English civilized them to death, showed signs of having any sense or wit. In what was clearly a blast of clairvoyance, they named the settlement around Bridgehampton Saggabonac, which means “the place of nut grounds.”

  Yet he is right about the beauty of the area. If it were possible to subtract people like the Laphams from the Hamptons, this would be quite a pleasant place. Those ducks, for example, that whet out in arrowhead formations over the Atlantic, and the glib gulls, and the oaten dunes flecked with tufts of sea grass grading into gold, and the ocean herself that gushes in response to approaching rain, and the beach that contorts to the shapes of angels on tombstones, awls, hunchbacks, lovers lying thigh to thigh, and the flotsam from a mackerel schooner that still bears the stench of the catch…

  The red sky has paled to a Wedgwood blue, but it is fooling no one. There will be a storm this evening, bet on it. It will be a lollapalooza. We islanders can always tell. We can tell because they said so on morning TV. Between the news bulletins trumpeting the
latest medical discovery (drinking water causes urination) and the latest political analysis (the candidate who gets the most votes is likely to win), the preternaturally hepped-up weather people promised a doozy. A summer storm over Lapham’s monstrosity, arriving at the moment for which I have been planning for months. A night on Bald Mountain. The prospect pleases me.

  And where is Lapham himself at this hour? I wonder. Guffawing over the telephone at the tepid joke of some yes-man in his employ, about the parrot who walks into a bar? Reveling in a tidbit of flattery deployed by the oily butler? Spooning his granola into an oversize bowl glazed in Florence expressly for him? Flossing? Gaah. Composing an aphm? Smiling at the new day like a rancid pancake? And why am I thinking about him? That is the crime, you see. I am thinking about Lapham. Not a year ago, at this time of morning, I would have been thinking about Dr. Johnson or of Ida Lupino in High Sierra, or of chomping on lobster rolls in Ipswich, Massachusetts, or my first girlfriend, Claire—whose breasts grew so large that she bowed like a Japanese businessman as she walked, but who was nonetheless very sweet and very smart—or of nothing at all. And now?

  I lay down my legal pad.

  “All done?” Hector asks, knowing that I am not. I do not answer him. “Shouldn’t you be getting the Da Vinci ready?” He thinks if he can shuttle me between the two tasks, I will fail to complete either one.

  But I was about to set aside the lecture anyway, since it is the easier of the two projects and if necessary I can wing it, and since it will work only if the Da Vinci also works. First things first.

  “Harry!” Dave calls to me over the bullhorn. “We’re going to have a big blow in a little while. It’ll sound like dynamite, but it’s OK. I just thought I should prepare you.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “On the brighter side, it’s nearly Kathy Time. Jack tells me it’s his favorite time of day.” The boy smiles shyly at his father’s ribbing. “We’ll be taking a break.”

  As will I. Everyone takes a break at Kathy Time.

  In the meantime, though, I return to the dock. I carry the forward crosspiece and the spindle heads over to the tarp and crawl under. So far, I have done most of the work at night, out of earshot and away from the prying eyes of Dave and his crew. Because of the narrow space between the Da Vinci and the edge of the dock where it becomes the L, I have had to be careful, maneuvering on all fours and holding the flashlight in my mouth. It has not been easy.

  But now I am nearly there. I fit the mortises and test the ropes and the frame. I slip the point of the hook into the eye of the bolt. The trigger requires a knot, a bowline, which I forget for a moment how to tie. What’s that ditty about where to make the loops? “The rabbit comes out of the hole,” I recite aloud. “Goes round the tree and runs back down the hole again.”

  “What rabbit?” asks Hector, looking as ferocious as a corn muffin.

  I tie the bowline. I tug at the burlap pouch. The ball of pinewood is progressing nicely, though because it is the size of a medicine ball, I had to squeeze it down into the tub. All that remains is to fit the rollers to the plates and attach the skein winch and the winch spanner.

  “Don’t forget the horsehair,” says Hector. Not that I would. I leave the dock, and head back up the lawn. He follows, sniffing as if he were searching for drugs in a suitcase.

  For some reason, he has taken a particular interest in the fact that I have opted to include genuine horsehair in the Da Vinci’s construction. I simply wanted to be authentic. The original plans drawn up by Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey in 1903, for which I sent away and have followed to the letter except as to scale, specified the use of horsehair for the torsion spring. So I phoned the people who run the Bridgehampton Classic horse show to ask if they had any horsehair to spare. They hung up on me. Then I phoned the stables in the neighboring town of Quiogue and asked, “Next time you take your horses to the barber, may I have the clippings?” They sent over a basketful without comment.

  Carefully I extract the horsehair from the large Mason jar in which I have been storing it, atop the one small hill on Noman.

  “Can I help?” says Hector. I would ask “How?” but that would prolong the conversation.

  Grasping one end of the sheaf of hair in each hand, I rotate my fists in opposite circles and slowly twist it, as the diagram indicated. It rolls easily, then springs back to its original state. I twist it again. I do this twice a day to maintain its bounce and torque.

  Why do I keep it in a jar on a hill? Because that is what Wallace Stevens wrote about doing in “Anecdote of a Jar.” He set down his jar on a hill in Tennessee, and Noman is shaped like Tennessee, and just as Stevens’s jar brought order to the “slovenly wilderness” of its surroundings, so my jar of horsehair, too, when put to proper use, will effect the imposition of order on my immediate surroundings, and indeed beyond, the same kind of order that the eighteenth century could have brought to the slovenly wilderness of the twentieth, had it not had the misfortune to precede it. I trust that is clear.

  “Señor March!” cries José from the other side of the creek. “You look like a conquistador on that heel!”

  “If I were a conquistador, guess where you’d be?”

  “Where all the conquistadors are now.” He laughs. “What are you doing?”

  I interpose my body between him and the jar, though he’s probably too far away too see it anyway. “Searching for serenity,” I tell him. “Trying to be where Lapham is not.”

  He swings his arm in a slow arc, as if presenting the universe to eighth graders at the planetarium. “But Señor Lapham is everywhere!” Bang bang bang bang bang.

  Would that he were speaking figuratively. Every time I take my eyes off the construction site, it seems to double its size, as though it were an endlessly enlarging mythical animal—one of those terrible Greek freak creations born of the forced copulation of a god with an animal, the god of cathedral ceilings or of mansard roofs with a toucan or a buffalo—producing a vague composite with indefinite haunches and misty tentacles; head of owl; horn of gnu; torso of panther; gills, claws, trunks; the tail of a langur; the feet of a fruit bat; a hundred legs splayed in a hundred different directions, the body parts continually ejected and becoming independent structures, outbuildings, each individually terrible yet bearing a ghastly resemblance to the mother animal. When the house is completed, will it expand of its own accord? In the middle of the night, will I be awakened by the bubble-bursts of skin, the popping of limbs and of eyes from their sockets, the elongation of a telescopic wing, and the screeching, the agonized screeching, of growing pains?

  Hector eyes me as though I were a squirrel eyeing him. “And by the way,” he says, “just where do your two little projects leave me?” No matter how holy he may sound, he is driven solely by self-interest.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take you to Chautauqua. You won’t be abandoned.”

  “And what if I don’t want to go to Chautauqua?”

  “Well, I can leave you here to deal with the police. You can explain what I did. They’ll doubtless arrest you as an accomplice.”

  “Not me,” he says. “I won’t say a word. I’ll just look cute and bewildered. ‘Oh, where is my master? Why did he desert me?’ Poor little doggie.” He goes through his curriculum of head tilts, including the Adorable; the What’s-Going-On?; the You-Must-Be-Kidding; the Quizzical (representing genuine confusion); and his choice of the moment, the Forlorn.

  “That’s why you’re coming with me,” I tell him. “I don’t want to leave any witnesses. Besides, you’ll enjoy hearing me lecture.”

  “What a treat. And you know how I love treats.”

  “Of course, if you want to stay behind and learn how to fill your own water bowl and buy dog food for yourself…”

  “Bite me,” he says.

  I’ve tried.

  Three

  Ten A.M.: Kathy Time. Time for Kathy Polite to take off her clothes. She spells her surname Polite but pronounces it “pole-EET,” to ad
d that continental je ne sais quoi to her uniquely successful real estate operation. Whenever I talk with her, which is as infrequently as possible, I make a point of pretending not to know how she pronounces her name, and I replace it with that adjective of courtesy that mocks her existence.

  “That’s Pole-EET, as you perfectly well know, you old coot.” She always speaks to me coquettishly, as though she had just returned from Savannah to her favorite old uncle’s plantation, and is capable of reducing me to blushes and stumbles with the droop of an eyelid.

  “Ah’m so sorry! I was just being polite.”

  “Ah don’t know why Ah waste one word on you!” She puckers her lips like a grouper. “Ah’ll never sell you anything, you old skinflint.”

  “That is SKINE-flint,” I correct her. “And Ah would gladly purchase one of your delightful Taras, Miss Pole-EET, but the cotton crop has been so po’ this year, we’ve had to eat the slaves.”

  That I would never buy so much as a lean-to from Kathy has had no impact, I hardly need to report, on her booming real estate business. Alongside the hundreds of “gems,” “steps to the ocean,” “priced to sell,” and “just bring your toothbrush” houses for which she shills on both overladen jaws of Long Island, she also represents what grotesqueries are still for sale around Lapham’s. She did not sell that particular magnificence, of course: Lapham had his own broker (a roommate from St. Mark’s) and his own personal architect, an in-law of Albert Speer’s, whose firm has been in the family for generations, and which had erected the dank mossy manses in Newport and Saratoga, as well as several more recent, bright mausoleums in Florida and Wyoming, near the Snake River—where, it is said, the whitefish committed a Jim Jones mass suicide in response.

  But, as Lapham rises, Kathy is not far behind. Mainly she sells spec houses to Lapham wannabes, of whom there seems to be an endless parade. Thus, though without a contract, and herself but dimly aware of it, she is Lapham’s silent partner in the destruction of the universe. She once told me that she was—and I quote—“very grateful to Mr. Lapham for setting the proper standard of architectural elegance in the area. As yet, Ah have not made his acquaintance. But on the day that Ah am so fortunate, Ah shall shake his hand warmly and tell him, ‘It is people like you, suhr, who make the Hamptons the Hamptons.’”