Lapham Rising

by Roger Rosenblatt

  “Summerwise,” she says, with just enough of a smile to signal that she realizes she has milked the joke dry and will not try it again. “Then it’s back to St. John’s in Annapolis.”

  “The Great Books curriculum!” I say too enthusiastically. “I thought so! You’re an anachronism.”

  “Just like you.”

  “Yes, but I’ve earned that status. You’re much too young.”

  “Maybe. But it looks better on me.” She shoots me an are-you-smiling? look. “When I was in high school, I had a clear choice of extracurricular activities: be an anachronism—spend time at old movies, listen to jazz, live in the library—or give blow jobs to the doped-up future actuaries of America.”

  I laugh out loud.

  “So I went to classes most of the day and lived at the town library most of the night.” She sees that I am interested. “Sure you don’t want to buy a swimming pool? It’s a great investment. Well,” she continues, “I got fixated on Samuel Johnson.” My gasp is audible. “First I read Boswell. Then I read the great doctor himself: Lives of the Poets. The dictionary. The poems. The best of which is…”

  “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” we say in unison. This is a very strange moment, even in a day filled with strange moments. I find myself, against all odds and inclinations, pleased to be engaged in conversation, even with time running out. And a conversation with whom? A girl barely out of her teens. But she knows The Vanity of Human Wishes. She knows how good it is. And she got there by herself. My wicked nature smells a Southern rat. Did the conniving Polite send over a Lorelei who is pretending to know Dr. Johnson and his works in order to set me up? I decide to test her. In the middle of whatever she is saying, I interrupt. “‘When a man is tired of London…’”

  “‘…he is tired of life,’” she finishes the quotation.

  I trot out my favorite: “‘Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water…’”

  “‘…and when he has reached the ground encumbers him with help?’”

  Hector grumbles, “Brilliant!”

  She frowns. “Either make them difficult or don’t play at all.”

  Sink me, as the Scarlet Pimpernel used to say, I’m floored. She’s the genuine article. “What brought you to Dr. Johnson?” I ask.

  She looks out over the creek. “First it was his devotion to the power of reason: ‘How rare reason guides the stubborn choice.’ But what sealed it was the lovely sweetness of the man. I wish I’d been Boswell. I would have recorded more of the sweetness and fewer of the wisecracks.” She adds, “And he was always right.”

  “You are more than an anachronism, young lady. You show real value.” From the far shore erupts another volley of bangs. Bang bang bang. “Not like that monster over there,” I add.

  “Lapham?”

  “You know him? You’ve seen him?”

  “No. I don’t know anyone who’s seen him. ‘He is one of the many…’”

  I cannot believe she knows this quotation. I complete it: “‘…one of the many who have made themselves public without making themselves known.’” She merely hmmms. Then she turns to me and says earnestly, “I wouldn’t worry about him if I were you. I’d look to thyself.”

  “What do you know about me?” I ask.

  “What I see. What others say. But mainly what I see. A man who has whittled his life to too fine a point. Too brittle. A man who used to do good work when he opened up, when he wasn’t playing it safe. But that was a long time ago. Now he doesn’t write anymore. Now he is reduced to the stupidity of a sage.”

  “‘Towering in the confidence of twenty-one,’” I quote again.

  A sulk flits across the lower half of her face, then gives way to aggression. “An answer for everything,” she says with a note of disgust. But now she softens her gaze. “I don’t want to fight with you. Besides, there’s something morally wrong about quarreling when we’re speaking of a man we both love.” No argument from me. Just when I was adamantly certain that I had condemned the race accurately, justifiably, and universally, an exception to the rule paddles up in a kayak.

  “It’s the selflessness of the poem,” she is saying of The Vanity. That’s what gets to me. It’s what thrills me about all of Dr. Johnson. The certain knowledge of how weak and puny we are, all of us struggling little creatures. And yet beautiful too, for the very fact of our struggling. Because life is so hard, you know?” I do know, but how does she?

  We sit saying nothing for a while. I feel the urge to confide something to her—anything at all—but I resist, because confidences invariably lead to trouble. She looks at her watch. “Well,” she says finally, the tone of her voice rising. “How about it?” From her bathing suit she extracts a contract and a ballpoint pen. As she hands them to me, she grazes the tips of my fingers with her own. Her eyes claim mine. Bang bang bang bang bang. Now I too am awakened from the trance, and my eyes scan the terms of the contract. “Three installments,” she says. Gaah. At least she did not say “easy installments.”

  “Do you remember this from the opening of The Vanity?” I ask her. “‘Wealth heaped on wealth, nor truth nor safety buys, / The dangers gather as the treasures rise.’”

  She nods. “And the import of that?” she asks.

  “A swimming pool is a luxury. I do not want luxury. ‘Life is a progress from want to want,’” I quote again, “‘not from enjoyment to enjoyment.’”

  “That’s just Dr. Johnson being moody,” she says. “Nobody believes that. The trouble with you is that you don’t really understand him at all. You think he was simply a font of wisdom and not a man. Dr. Johnson was poor, dirt-poor. He thought like a poor man, like my father. He thought like Tony Alvarez.”

  “He would not have rowed around the Thames selling swimming pools,” I tell her. “He would have sold dictionaries.”

  She stands and brushes the sand from her bathing suit. “You never know what poor people will do,” she says coldly, and walks toward her kayak, kicking and splashing.

  “Are you coming back?” Why do I ask? Soon there may be no back for her to come to.

  “Are you buying a pool?” She does not expect an answer. I watch her climb in, push off, and slice into the creek, where she disappears part by part into the lowering white fog.

  “She is wrong,” I say aloud. Johnson would never have contaminated his principles for a few pennies. I could go after her. That’s the way it’s done, is it not? I could go after her, catch up, leap from my rowboat into her kayak, make an endearing remark about our being in the same boat, and hold her to me forever—against all propriety, against common sense and logic, against all the forces of the material world, except, of course, swimming pools.

  And then she does turn, violently, to face me. Her expression is a verdict—severe, and dissolving any advantage I might have enjoyed for being so much older and in the right. “You are not an eighteenth-century man, by the way,” she calls to me. “I thought you’d like to know.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “You’re a Romantic,” she says. She might as well have chucked a spear through my body. “You live on an island,” she goes on. “You create your own ideal world. You despise or ignore the real world. You belittle life as it is. And you feel superior to others. What do you suppose that makes you?”

  “Lonely,” I tell her.

  She casts me a look somewhere between pity and reproach, but closer to pity, I think. I am too preoccupied to make certain. I have no need or will to hang on to the image of this girl. I ought to regret that more than I do.

  Fifteen

  At 6:19, it is do or die. Hector follows me to the cord of wood I keep stacked off to the side of the porch. He is half alarmed, half amused.

  “You know,” he says as he watches me hobble, “you are beginning to look very much like a pirate. A buccaneer. And if you don’t mind my saying so, a mighty handsome one at that. Yes. There’s no denying it: that limp, that bandaged e
ar, that scowl—all very swashbuckling, whatever that means, Captain. And I’ll be your colorful pet, if you will allow me. I shall perch upon your shoulder and repeat all the very clever things you say.”

  “Why don’t you try it?”

  Bang bang bang bang bang. The industrious Mexicans do not skip a beat. They do not give up, and neither will I. As they construct to destroy, so will I destroy to construct. Up goes one wall, down comes another. But which wall should get the ax? The one in the parlor, I think. It is the widest in the house and therefore, it stands to reason, must have required the greatest amount of horsehair when it was built. I commend my mind on its ability to render cool analysis in the throes of frenzy.

  Hector backs away. I raise the ax and bring it down. The wall crumbles like stale cake. I strike again and again, hoping that the span contains no supporting beams. And again. And again. In a twinkling the parlor wall is a dusty pile of its former self.

  “Well done!” says Hector.

  Using both hands, I ransack a portion of the plaster. Nothing. Another portion. Still nothing. A third.

  “Here,” says Hector. “Let me help.” He gallops back and forth through the plaster in a mocking imitation of my own frantic behavior, generating a small blizzard into which his whiteness disappears. “No horsehair?” he exclaims. “No horsehair in the wall? What can have happened back in the eighteen twenties? Did the house builders run out of horses? Did the horses go on strike? Or did the horses build the house themselves and not wish to sacrifice their coats? Oh, well. Let’s not accept defeat so easily. There are plenty of walls around here—let’s chop ’em all down. Wait, I know! The horsehair is in the ceiling! They probably used jumpers like Mr. Huey!”

  Suddenly he turns toward the creek. “It’s Dave,” he says. “Come to help us chop down the house. We’re saved! Thank you, Jesus!”

  Dave it is. What now? Whatever it is he wants, it shouldn’t take long. A creature of habit, he will pull up on the outside of the dock without tying the boat, cut the engine, tell me what he has to tell me, and go away. I limp in a jerky lope down to where the dock angles left, the covered Da Vinci at my side.

  “What are you doing, Harry?”

  “Doing?” I must look about as innocent as Hector did when I questioned him about the horsehair.

  “All that banging.”

  “Surely a little banging wouldn’t disturb you.”

  “I didn’t want to say this in front of the men”—he has chosen to ignore my meager attempt to go on the offensive—“but I know you’re up to something.” His tone is a mixture of worry and warning.

  “How do you know?” My question concedes the fact.

  “That ax, for starters.” I didn’t realize I was still holding on to it. “And the stuff you had delivered by those FedEx barges. I don’t know what that junk is, but it looks fishy.” He indicates the tarp. “And look at you. What is that, plaster?” I see what he means. I look like Jacob Marley fresh from the grave.

  “Oh, it’s nothing, just a little project of mine. I’m making a collectible bust of John Dryden. So no one will forget him.”

  “Are you planning to do something stupid?” I tilt my head and try to affect Hector’s expression of offended shock, but again he ignores me. “You’re behaving very strangely, even for you. You don’t write anymore. That hole in your shirt. Those notes to Lapham’s man every day. That toy boat. The statue of your wife. Your ear. And now you’re limping, aren’t you?” If he goes over the complete list, I’ll be here for a week.

  “And you talk to him.” Hector wags happily at his inclusion. Dave breaks into a tolerant smile and cracks, “At least he doesn’t talk back.” Hector rolls over for the first time in his life in what appears to be a laughing fit. “You all right, Harry?” Dave asks.

  “Right as rain.” I point to the threatening sky. If there were a last man on earth to whom I would confess my plot, other than Lapham himself, it would be Dave. He is one of those few who always know and do the right thing, the sort of fellow civilizations depend upon for continuity, and thus, to me, dangerous.

  “You know,” he says, “I’m sorry about all the hammering, and about that air conditioner.” He has changed his tack to sweet reason, the way one does with children and the mad. “But we have to get this job finished on time.”

  I tell him that I understand perfectly, but my graciousness and sudden affability put him on guard. Fortunately, he thinks I am merely upset about the noise.

  “In a couple of weeks we’ll be out of your hair.” I summon a vision of the head of Kathy Polite detached.

  “Perhaps sooner,” I tell him, and immediately wish I could take it back. I try to convey simple optimism: “Don’t bother about me.”

  “How’d things go in Southampton, by the way?” he asks.

  “Smooth as silk.”

  He frowns at my cheer. “You are up to something.”

  “Where’s Jack going to college?” I ask him, desperate to change the subject. Mention a good man’s child, and you’ll get his attention.

  “That’s a sore point. He got into NYU on early admission, but I can’t afford to send him. He’s too good a kid to complain. If I had the money, I’d give it to him.” He shrugs. “But a fact’s a fact.”

  “A fact is a fact” is precisely the reason I like Dave. In his own straight-shooter way, he is my eighteenth-century man: protects his family, does his work, pays his way, lives on the earth like any other animal. Should I take him with me to Chautauqua as a living exhibit of my thesis? I’d suggest it to him just to see his reaction.

  And I like Jack. When he isn’t helping his father or doing valet parking for people like the Bittermans, he works at Westhampton Hardware on Montauk Highway. He has done so since he was twelve, supplementing his father’s income and pulling his own weight, which is one of the reasons he’ll be starting university at twenty-one rather than eighteen. He’s honest and honorable, like his old man, with the same backbone. He once told me that his favorite movie was The Maltese Falcon, and when I asked him why, he said it was because at the end, “Sam Spade does the right thing because he doesn’t want to.” For a kid, he is also a modern oddball insofar as he does not think the world was created with him in mind. Jack will be the first one in Dave’s family to go to college.

  “So where is he headed instead?” I ask.

  “Stony Brook. Which is a perfectly good place. It just doesn’t have a film school.”

  “That’s what Jack wants to do?”

  Dave nods and looks at the water. This is the first time in all the years I have known him that he has seemed downcast, and it is just for an instant. He is not embarrassed that I caught him in the act. He is embarrassed by the act. “It’s no big deal,” he says.

  “Wait here a minute.” I raise my hand, palm outstretched in the time-out signal, limp back up the beach, and head into the house. The Money Room smells like wet leaves; it has been that long since I last set foot in it. I grab some stacks of hundreds—I figure maybe twenty-five thousand dollars, give or take—stuff them into a garbage bag, tie it at the top in a nice gift bow, and return to the dock. I toss Dave the bag. I am a very accurate tosser.

  He gives me a what’s-this? look, unties the bow, sticks his face in the bag, and comes out blinking like Fairy Tale Dora. Then he asks directly, “What’s this?”

  “A bribe. A down payment for your work stoppage on Lapham’s house. Play your cards right, and there’ll be more where that came from. Thanks.”

  “But I haven’t agreed to stop work on Lapham’s house,” he says. “And I don’t take bribes.”

  I am tickled that he ever takes me seriously. “OK, if that’s the way you want it.” I try to sound defeated. “Then use it for Jack, to make up the difference between Stony Brook’s tuition and NYU’s.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  I move away back up the dock so that he won’t be able to lob the bag to me without risking losing it in the creek. He tries to lasso a piling
so as to pull his boat toward me, but I kick the rope back with my one good leg. This is my first moment of fun today, but it is no fun for Dave. “I can’t take this money,” he says, as definite as he should be.

  “It’s not for you, it’s for Jack. Let him know it’s a business transaction, grown-up to grown-up. He’s ready for this.” I ought to be ashamed at how easy it is for me to find the best tactic to use with him, but I’m not. “Tell Jack this is a loan from me to him, man-to-man, and that I expect him to repay me with the profits he makes from his first film, which had better be no higher than the amount of the loan. That way it’ll be guaranteed to be a worthwhile work of art.”

  Dave studies the contents of the bag as though the money might change into coal at any second. “You’re not kidding?” he says. We have known each other long enough, in that type of silent, comradely friendship that men prefer, for him to take no offense. I am counting on that. I nod as a New Englander might in greeting. He actually scratches his head. “I’ll think about it,” he says, and gently places the bag in the hold as though he were setting down a baby bird.

  “You do that,” I tell him.

  “You are nuts.” His face shows a suggestion of relief worth a good twenty-five thousand dollars. For my part, I am even more relieved than he is, since he seems to have forgotten what it was he came over for.

  “Thank you. Jack is very talented. His mother says so.”

  “Got to go,” I say. “Busy, busy.” Then I turn. “Oh, Dave? One more thing. Don’t tell Jack about this till you get home.” I do not wish to talk about money, and I definitely do not want the boy coming over to thank me. Any more visitors this evening, and I’m cooked. I may be cooked anyway: no horsehair, no torsion spring, no Da Vinci, no Chautauqua, no me.

  “Well!” says Hector as we start back to the house.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “What’s the matter with me? You can afford to send Dave’s boy to college, but you won’t send me to business school? Me, your constant companion. Me, who has provided you with affection and interesting conversation and religious instruction, and who has been at your side for over sixty-three years. Sixty-three years! I’ll bet Mr. Lapham gave his Westie whatever he wanted.”