The Promise of Light

by Paul Watkins

  Thurkettle tried to smile again, jaw muscles straining from the effort. “Mr. Maxwell is inviting you over for lunch.”

  “Why couldn’t he come here and invite me himself?” I looked over Thurkettle’s shoulder at the Ford in the driveway.

  “Mr. Maxwell is practicing his fly-fishing cast on the lawn, sir. He did not wish to be disturbed.”

  “I swear to God, Thurkettle. I don’t know how you put up with it.”

  Thurkettle’s smile flickered on and off, as if he was hooked up to some faulty electric current. “Well, sir.” He sounded as if he might have more to say. But that was all of it.

  I walked out and stood with him on the doorstep. I looked down at the top of his head. He was going a little bald on top, and combed his hair forward to hide it, while the rest of his hair had all been combed toward the back. “For once, you’re not going to call me ‘sir.’ You’re going to come in and have a drink of Dunhams. Powerful stuff. Come in for a drink.” I set my hand on his shoulder and guided him inside. I wanted someone to talk with. It didn’t matter who, but I felt as if someone was playing tricks on me. Of all the people to send here to my door. If I’d had a thousand people to choose from, stone deaf, blind, and dumb, Thurkettle would have been last on the list.

  His neck hunched down as he stepped into the house. He held his hat against his chest. “I was sorry to hear about your father, sir.”

  “How did you hear about that?” Suddenly I didn’t want a drink. The taste of old whiskey had come back into my mouth, its fire long since out. The bitterness it left behind was even a little like soot.

  “It was in the paper, sir.” Thurkettle fanned his eyes across the living room, at the bare mission-oak furniture that my father had preferred.

  “I haven’t seen a paper in a while, Thurkettle.” I didn’t want to go to Belmar. That was the name of the Maxwell’s summer house. It was a place so big, it had a name that people mentioned as if of course you had to know what they were talking about. And so big, that BELMAR was blocked in iron letters on the gate that cut off their driveway from the rest of the world.

  “Mr. Maxwell has expressed some urgency, sir. He asked me to drive you both ways.” Thurkettle looked suddenly hopeful, as if giving me a ride would make the difference.

  “It might do me some good to get out of the house.” I wished he would sit down and talk with me. I wished to hell he would not keep calling me “sir” all the damn time.

  “Oh, indeed, sir.” He gripped his hat so tightly that the blood had drained out of his fingers.

  “When does he want to see me?”

  “Now.”

  “Important?”

  “Always.” Thurkettle fitted his hat on his head. He knew I’d given in.

  * * *

  Monahan wrapped chains around the axle of the Ford to keep it steady on deck. When the ferry pulled out into the bay, waves broke against its flat end bow and sprayed across the car’s windshield.

  I sat next to Thurkettle, gripping my lower lip as I always did when I was thinking hard. “Was there anything in the paper about a blood test?”

  “No, sir. It was an obituary.”

  “I asked you not to keep calling me ‘sir.’”

  “No, sir. Excuse me. No.”

  * * *

  The first time I ever saw the Maxwell’s house was on my tenth birthday, long before I’d ever met them. As a birthday present, my parents took me on a bus tour of the Newport mansions. A man with a bullhorn stood next to the driver, calling out the names of the mansions as we passed them. The bus was a double-decker and had no roof. That was why I had wanted to go on the tour. I didn’t care where we went as long as I got to sit up top with the wind in my face.

  Their house stood on a hill, overlooking the sea. Its driveway ran in a semicircle, through the black iron gate that looked as if it had been forged from old javelins.

  Two white marble pillars held up the roof on either side of the doorway. The doors were open. Now, as Thurkettle and I drove up, I could see straight through the house and out across the water. The hall seemed to be lined with mirrors, but it was only the afternoon sunlight, reflected off the rows of family portraits.

  The people in the paintings all had the same surprised look, as if they’d been slapped in the face. The frames were crusted with gold-leaf grapes and cherubs holding out fat baby fingers.

  I hoped Clarissa wouldn’t be there. She was Harley’s sister. I could not have stood getting the air kissed in front of my face again. Least of all from Clarissa. I fell in love with her the year before. I fell so hard and fast that last August, I dropped down on my knees and asked her to marry me. I hadn’t even introduced her to my father. He barely knew she existed.

  My life had been going perfectly until then.

  I remembered it all very clearly. I was not the sort of person to get down on my knees. But there I was. And there she was, standing with the sun behind her back. I couldn’t really see her in the glare. All I could make out was her silhouette, and the molten gold which seemed to pour from her hands and her face and down the smooth line of her shoulders.

  “Marry me,” I said. “Marry me.” I had only meant to say it once. But a nervousness appeared that I did not expect. It scrabbled up my ribs and showered goosebumps down my back. So I said it again. “Marry me.”

  Something came unhinged inside. The energy I’d stored away so carefully, stacked like vials of gelignite, came tumbling and breaking down the white path of my bones.

  I could no longer help myself. “Please marry me,” I said. “I want to marry you. Oh God, I want to marry you.”

  Then she sighed and the molten gold shuddered around her.

  My voice trailed away into mumbling.

  I don’t remember exactly what she told me. The words came with tears and hands jerked open to explain and maybe one of these words was friendship, but with the vials of gelignite still bursting one after the other, I couldn’t be sure. I know they were words meant for comfort, but they bounced off my head like marbles off a corrugated iron roof.

  Mrs. Maxwell called for me the next day. She started off kindly enough, telling me about the differences between our two families. Catholic and Protestant. Then her patience slipped between the cracks of neatly folded hands. “What did you think you were doing, Benjamin? Was it a joke?” She didn’t wait for a reply. She knew what she was going to say, made sure of every word before she came to find me. It had been gathering inside her like clouds. “How, for example, did you think you would support her? I mean, in the manner that she is used to. How did you imagine that we would take the news?”

  I knew I didn’t have enough money. Their garage was bigger than my house. But I hadn’t been thinking that way. I lived next to Harley for five years at school and the differences had not mattered between us. But between Clarissa and me, they were everything.

  The hard part about going to the Maxwell’s now was that I would always be the person who had proposed to Clarissa. And if Clarissa and I had been friends before, we would be less than that now. People would see to it that we were never alone together again. It would ring along the vines of gossip and never grow dull in the telling.

  In the beginning, even after my talk with Mrs. Maxwell, I was still in love with Clarissa. It made no difference that she did not love me. I knew I would make any kind of fool out of myself just to see her again. There was no silence in my head. My skull had become like an orchestra pit, with instruments all playing out of tune. Over and over, I saw myself drop to my knees and heard myself beg her to marry me. Each time, I felt a groan rise out of me, trying to stop the memory. I had to prevent myself from climbing on the next train to New Canaan, reaching her house and not caring what trouble it caused because at least I would be near her.

  It was as if she stopped being real. She splintered in my memory. When I thought back on the time, I only recalled shimmers of laughter, glimpses at her eyes and hands and feet.

  * * *

  No
w that same angry restlessness had broken open inside me again. I felt the vertigo dizziness of my sanity slipping away. But this time it was worse, and it had nothing to do with Clarissa. Last year, even at the worst acid tide of worry in my guts, I could say to myself and believe it, that I would someday get over this.

  Not now. It seemed to me that if I did not find out the truth, Melville’s voice would dog me for all time. I thought I’d caught a glimpse of the way my life would unfold, and I took comfort in the smooth unbroken path. It had all dissolved overnight. Chaos gibbered at me from the dark corners of my mind. The longer I waited, the louder it became.

  It was a waste of time going to see Harley. What I should have been doing was selling the house and buying a ticket to Ireland. War or no war, someone would be there to tell me the truth.

  We stopped on the blinding white stones of the driveway at Belmar.

  Thurkettle stayed with the car. He took off his linen jacket and set it carefully on the front seat. Then he opened the car’s hood and looked inside. Red-and-white striped braces stretched tight across his shoulders.

  I could see he was resting. He knew that no one would bother him while he inspected the car. He stood very still, eyes closed, face bowed slightly forward.

  * * *

  Mrs. Maxwell called me into the study. She stood by the window, looking out at Harley and several others who sat at tables on the terrace. Her breath condensed on the glass. She was barefoot and blue veins coiled around her calves.

  She turned when I walked into the room. “Benjamin!”

  She spoke with such surprise in her voice that I thought there had been some mistake. They hadn’t invited me after all. I pointed out toward the Ford. “Mr. Thurkettle”—I cleared my throat—“drove me all the way here.” I let my hand drop. “Nice to see you.”

  “Nice to see you, too.” She looked too young to be Harley’s mother. She traveled to Italy every year, to a place called Montecatini-Terme, and lay in baths filled with black mud to stop her skin from wrinkling. “Did Thurkettle regale you with jokes and stories?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Thurkettle?”

  She laughed and her teeth flashed white for a second. “I didn’t think so. I once offered him fifty dollars to tell me a good joke. He looked as if he was going to have a heart attack. He went all red.” She touched the tips of her fingers to her cheeks and puffed them up. Then quickly her right hand slipped back into the pocket of her dress.

  Her right hand was mangled. She had once gone with her husband to the factory where Mr. Maxwell made guns called Krags for troops in the Spanish-American War. Journalists came, too. Mr. Maxwell picked a gun off the assembly line and handed it to his wife. They walked outside to test fire it. Maxwell thought the journalists would be impressed. The gun was loaded and Mrs. Maxwell aimed it at a bank of sand where the test-fired guns were aimed. The gun exploded in her face. It took the thumb and part of her index finger off her right hand.

  Harley told me this. He said that the journalists were all paid not to write about what had happened. They were paid and then they were threatened.

  The flash burns healed on Mrs. Maxwell’s face. But there was nothing to be done about her hand. Now all of her dresses had pockets. Harley said they were lined with rabbit fur. Sometimes her shattered hand found its way out of the pocket, when she wasn’t thinking. It waved or pointed or tried to pick something up. Then shock would appear on her face, maybe the same shock as when the gun’s jammed breech had burst, and the hand slipped quickly away.

  “I wanted to talk with you, Benjamin.” She walked onto a Persian carpet in the middle of the room. “Come here and take off your shoes.”

  “My shoes?” I thought about the black mud on her skin. I kept seeing Clarissa in her eyes and her mouth and her forehead.

  “Come and walk on the carpet in your bare feet. This is how Mr. Maxwell bought his carpets. Not from the way they looked, but from the way they felt under his feet.”

  I kicked off my shoes, rolled my socks into a ball, and walked out next to her. The carpet seemed to shift, bristly against my toes. A waste of time, I wanted to say. Let me be on my way now, so I can sleep without needing Dunhams to cremate my insides and so I can get the hell back on the rails.

  Laughter reached through the closed windows. Harley got out of his chair, picked it up and threw it across the lawn. The chair rolled out of sight. The others applauded, three women and two men. They all stood and threw their chairs away. Harley stuffed a cigarette in his mouth. A woman held out a match. Harley bowed forward to the flame, cheeks tensed as he pulled in the smoke.

  Mrs. Maxwell bounced slightly on the balls of her heels. “I wanted to say how sorry I was to hear about your father.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Clarissa sends her best wishes. She has gone out for the day.”

  I nodded. Clarissa. I couldn’t say the name anymore. It was like gnawing on steel wool.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Harley. He has always thought of you as a good friend and his closest confidant.” Mrs. Maxwell was all out of focus. She was Clarissa for a second, until the age returned to her face.

  I had been watching the pattern of the carpet, eyes following lines the way a squirrel runs from branch to branch in a tree. I tried to imagine Harley’s father tiptoeing barefoot across the design.

  “Harley, as you know, is heir to a rather large sum of money.” She raised her eyebrows and the slapped expression of surprise appeared on her face, as if it was news to her, too. “What I am looking for, I should say we are looking for, is someone to handle Harley’s accounts. Now I understand that you are soon to be employed at a bank.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “It was in the obituary.” Mrs. Maxwell walked to a red velvet couch and sat down. She sank so far into it that her knees almost banged against her chin. “We would like you to come and work for us. I believe we could do a little better for you than the bank.”

  I imagined myself in a little room next to Thurkettle’s, writing out checks on all of Harley’s accounts. I thought of following him into New York City nightclubs, my pockets heavy with change for tipping waiters and busboys and hat-check men. I thought about having to be kind to Harley all the time, even when he was drunk and being an idiot. I glanced at Mrs. Maxwell, and it seemed to me she looked a little desperate, as if a battalion of people had already passed through here this morning, all of them receiving the same job offer and all of them refusing.

  Harley and the others had moved to a different table. Now they were playing cards. Only the women were sitting. The men stood behind them, heads tucked in close to their necks, whispering advice and throwing bright red and blue chips out onto a pile.

  “I do hope you will consider it, Benjamin. You see, as much as anything, we are anxious to find someone who might help Harley control his expenditures.” She smiled and Clarissa flickered again across her features. It was a witch’s smile. It could make you do anything, even spend your life helping Harley spend his money.

  Something clacked against the window. It was Harley, tapping the glass with a poker chip and trying to see into the dark room. “Benjamin? Is that you? Is my mother holding you prisoner?” He pretended to blow a bugle and ran out of sight.

  “I am so sorry about your father,” she whispered to me across the bristly red tundra of carpet.

  Then the two huge doors swung open and Harley marched into the room. “I am liberating you, Benjamin. From the bonds,” he looked around. A poker chip slipped from one hand to the other, a hardened drop of blood between his palms. “Jesus, Mother, do you ever turn the lights on in here?”

  Mrs. Maxwell didn’t answer. Her toes curled and uncurled on the carpet.

  * * *

  I walked with Harley down the lawn. We each dragged a chair.

  The poker players fell silent when I walked past. The smiles froze on their faces.

  “Was she giving you a lecture?” Harley set down his chair and sl
umped into it.

  “No.” I watched a sailboat coming in to moor at the Maxwell’s dock. A man in a blue captain’s cap was pulling down the sails. He misjudged his approach to the dock and his bow thumped into the pilings.

  “Yes she was, you liar.” Harley grinned and rummaged in his pockets for a cigarette. “She was trying to get you to work for her and stop me spending all the family’s money. It’s my fault. I made the mistake of calling you frugal at dinner a few nights ago.”

  “I didn’t know I was frugal.” I sat down in my chair. Two women and the sailboat captain climbed out onto the dock.

  The unlit cigarette wagged in Harley’s mouth. “Well, I suppose anyone looks frugal next to me.” He began patting his pockets for a match. “I hear your dad passed on. That’s very bad news. My dad died almost twenty years ago. He was an old man.”

  The sailor was walking up the lawn. He wore white trousers with a blue blazer and had a gold anchor stitched to his cap. The two women had been swimming and wore towels wrapped around them.

  They stopped when they reached where Harley and I were sitting.

  The captain kept his hands balled in the pockets of his blue sports coat. “We were thinking of sailing over to Narragansett. I hear they’re racing horses on the beach.” Then he looked at me and nodded.

  Harley swung his arm across my shoulder. “This is Benjamin Sheridan. He and I were at school together. He’s eligible!”

  I looked down at my feet. “Oh, Jesus.”

  One of the women laughed as if she had gone mad. Then she turned red and shut up. She bent down to me and kissed the air in front of my face. “I’ve heard Clarissa talk about you. Isn’t Sheridan a local name? Is your father the fire chief over on Jamestown?” Her face was starry with freckles.

  “No. I think that must be someone else.”