Just as I turned back to my report, something struck one of the windows in my car with astonishing blunt force, like a gunshot. The noise was terrifying. It was startling in itself, but it was also connected to lurking terrors that were already in me—it was as if the noise pulled back a tent flap to reveal frightened faces huddled within.
Two seats behind my row, the window had been smashed and a silent scream of cracks engulfed it. A moment later another window was hit, this time with more of a thud than a crack, and then another was hit, and the window made an almost human sound, an ooof, like someone who has been punched in the stomach. The noise filled the car like smoke. No one knew what to do. We were ambushed from both sides of the track. And from above. Stones rained down on the top of the train and the clang of it entered the car and we were pinned beneath it as if we were being buried alive by sound. I’d once read about a man who heard voices and he said they bombarded him like a fusillade of stones—but here the stones were like voices, wrathful, the cries of a world gone mad.
People scrambled out of their seats and stood in the aisle, looking for someone who might bring a sense of order, someone to look up to, someone who could tell us what to do—a conductor or some other Amtrak employee. Someone I couldn’t see was shouting, “Goddamnit! How many more times does this have to happen?”
Chapter 8
Closing Time
When the lawyer pulled open the top drawer of his Pickwickian desk, the old wood screeched a bit, startling me so much that I half stood up, and knocked my chair back into the three-stack of glassed-in bookcases. We were closing on my purchase of the land in Thaddeus and Grace’s lawyer’s cluttered, low-ceilinged office. My hands were still clammy from the autonomic chaos unleashed by the attack on the train, the adrenaline no longer surging but its side effects present—a fluky heartbeat and inappropriate vigilance.
Fortune Harris reminded me of one of the members of the Ale and Quail Club in The Palm Beach Story, rotund and brimming with absentminded good humor, his cheerfulness resting upon his assumption that everyone thought well of him, and life today would be pleasantly similar to life yesterday. Also present for the closing was an officer from the Leyden Savings Bank, where T&G’s mortgage was held. This fellow, Arthur Holdridge, was decidedly not Ale and Quail material. Skeletal and colorless, he exuded a sour complacency, quiet and judgmental. Holdridge had a secretary with him, an elderly woman with large ears who seemed entirely terrified as we passed the contracts around for inspection and signature, her dark glittering eyes darting back and forth as if lives hung in the balance. The banker and the lawyer both were surprised I hadn’t brought my own lawyer with me, but I knew how to read a simple real estate contract and frankly it didn’t occur to me to come to the closing with a lawyer in tow. The lawyers I knew charged at least five hundred an hour, usually a lot more than that, assuming I could have lured one of them away from New York, where deals floated in the air like dandelion spores. I had a cashier’s check in my jacket for the entire amount and some of my own checks to cover the incidentals.
While Fortune and Holdridge muttered on, I told Thaddeus and Grace about the rain of stones that had hit the train. Thaddeus downplayed it. He thought it was somehow his mission in life to make certain that those around him didn’t overreact. “Yeah, that. I know. It’s so annoying. They tend to stone the trains coming from the city, but the ones going in the other direction they tend to leave alone.”
“Who is they?” I asked.
“Well, there’s the question,” Thaddeus said. “That’s always been the question. Who in the hell is they?”
“The first time my train got hit I completely freaked out,” Grace said. “I just couldn’t understand why anyone would do something so . . . stupidly violent.”
“But who’s doing it?” I asked.
“There are a lot of hometown guys who think their lives were a lot better before people like us started moving up here. It’s a kind of radical nostalgia for the past. Very Pierre Bourdieu.”
“We don’t know who’s doing it,” Grace said. “We’re not sure. It could be quite a few people I can think of. Or it could also be a couple of stoned teenagers. Literally.”
“It’s more than two people,” Thaddeus said. “It’s all up and down the line. But mainly around here—once the train gets to Windsor County, that’s when it usually gets bombarded. Terrorism, right? Hezbollah on the Hudson?” He laughed and pointed at me.
When had he developed the habit of pointing after he made a joke like some cornball comedian whose life depends on getting a laugh? Everything about him seemed torqued an extra turn of the wrench. Pierre Bourdieu? Why would he want to draw attention to himself in this way? I felt some dismay, the way you do when you turn on a Fred Astaire movie on TV and find out it’s been colorized, and the glamour, depth, and crisp chiaroscuro swapped out for a pastel palette that looks like a bowl full of Necco wafers. Here’s something else about us torchbearers. We are possessive of the one we love and we are determined to maintain our hold on the idea of them. Our idea of them is really all we have. When you think about someone more or less constantly, you begin to believe—though you would never say so, not even to yourself—that they belong to you. You are like a jailer forever pacing past the cell, looking in on the prisoner to make sure he’s where he belongs, and is doing what is allowed him. Thaddeus’s life was disordered but there was always something about him that was steady and predictable and I counted on him to be essentially unchanging. But to make a joke and to indulge in a bit of physical business to goose it along? That was a new one. To drop the name of a French theorist? It was beneath him.
We continued to talk as the lawyers instructed us where to sign the documents, where to initial riders, etcetera.
“So what’s happening here?” I asked. “Have I bought land in some sort of hot zone?”
“It all started with a fucking cement plant,” Thaddeus said. “Some people wanted to stop it from being built, because it was going to go right on the river, and they wanted to protect the view, the water, the feel of the place, the fish, the swans, whatever. And other people wanted it to be built because of jobs. And guess what?” He feigned a look of wonder. “The opinions broke down more or less on class divide. The leisure class doesn’t want the plant; the working class does. Shocking, right?”
“And in the meanwhile, we alienated both sides,” Grace said. “It’s so frustrating. We do our best—and we always have, from the day we moved out here. We treat everyone with respect.”
“We’re basically saints,” Thaddeus said. “It’s strange they don’t recognize us as saints.”
“I’m serious,” Grace said. “We don’t treat anyone as if they were ‘less than.’ Our nannies were part of our family. They had the run of the place, and we paid like a real job and if one of them got sick, it was me who brought them soup and drove them to the doctor. When people came to take care of the fields, or to deal with the woods, we served them lunch in the house, not like some who just bring out a bunch of cruddy sandwiches and throw them out on the ground like they’re feeding the animals.”
Holdridge wasn’t going to let that pass without comment. “Really?” he said. He was quickly paging through the contracts, to make certain the signatures and initials were where they belonged. “Throwing sandwiches on the ground? I’ve never heard of such a thing. The people of means have always treated our workers with all due respect.”
“Maybe this is a moot point,” Thaddeus said. He rotated his shoulders, stretched his neck. “We ain’t hiring anyone, baby. Not anymore.”
Chapter 9
George Washington Inn
The contracts were signed, the check was in Thaddeus’s possession, and we stepped out into a day that had turned sultry. We walked across the main street to the George Washington Inn, a kind of miniature White House, with Doric columns, copper roof, and fussy plantings. Over the past two hundred years, notables from General Lafayette to Soupy Sales had spent the night
in one of the inn’s spartan rooms. We made our way through the lobby to a sitting room with pale green furniture and a salmon and white Aubusson carpet, and into the tavern, snug and windowless, and smelling of beer and Pledge.
Thaddeus and Grace had been buoyant when we’d left the signing, but now the rush of money was behind them, and the full force of what they had done and why they had to do it seemed to hit them all at once. Sawing off a piece of their land was like a lifesaving amputation—great to be alive, but, you know, where’s my leg?
Thaddeus took the cashier’s check for $130,000 out of his pocket, gazed at it for a moment, and said, “Aren’t you a handsome devil. And you’ve come home to Daddy.”
“I didn’t realize this was a Daddy thing,” Grace said, taking a seat at the square wooden table. Thaddeus put the check in the side pocket of his suit, turning in his chair and peering into the darkness of the empty tavern, looking for someone to serve us. When he turned toward me, his expression was stricken and his eyes were full of tears.
“I feel awful,” he said. “Orkney’s land has never been broken up before. You’re supposed to keep those properties intact. It’s what you’re supposed to do.” His voice was steady, but now his eyes were overflowing and tears coursed down his cheeks. He seemed not fully aware of them.
“Thaddeus,” Grace said, reaching for him. “It’s all stolen land anyhow, right? Like from the Indians?”
“She’s right,” I said, “And fuck keeping the properties intact. In business people are always buying and selling, back and forth. It’s just how it is.”
He nodded, somewhat brusquely, the way you do when you are acknowledging the fact that someone has spoken but have not really listened to them.
“We said we weren’t going to cry,” Grace softly said.
“Right,” said Thaddeus. “It’s just not . . . Well, you know.”
And I did. I knew. Thaddeus understood that selling the land was a desperate move and when you are desperate things don’t normally get better. We love those stories about dramatic turnarounds—adult fairy tales of people rising like a phoenix from the ashes of failure, of the alcoholic actor who suddenly turns in the performance of a lifetime, the Kentucky Derby won by the horse nobody wanted ridden by a disgraced jockey paroled for that one afternoon, run-down cafés in little towns serving you the best dinner you’ve ever eaten, missing children returning years later—but they’re black swans occurring just an inch north of never. And Thaddeus knew it. From that first call he made to me at six in the morning, I could hear it in his voice. He was being swallowed by the sea and would in all likelihood disappear without a trace. He feared going back to where he had started—the unloved son of two gloomy booksellers, the unknown writer whose ambitions far outstripped his talent. The only thing that he was holding on to was Orkney—and now that little island of deliverance was ten acres smaller.
“You know you can buy those acres back from me whenever it’s feasible,” I said.
He blotted his tears with the heels of his hands. “I’m going to,” he said. “That’s the plan right there. Just as soon as the old gravy train rolls around again.” He mimed digging up and madly clutching a handful of earth. “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.”
“Knock it off, T,” Grace said. “Kip is saving our asses. Let’s just be grateful and leave the jokes out of it.”
Thaddeus reached across the tavern table and clasped my shoulder. “I know, I know,” he said. “I love you, man, you know that. Right? Right?” The last time he had touched me in such a sustained manner was in my old loft on Park Avenue South, at the end of his wedding party. Then, he embraced me, and half lifted me off the floor. I ought to have more thoroughly enjoyed that embrace, but I’d had quite a lot to drink, and had endured watching Thaddeus get married, his legs trembling, his voice cracking, and who knew what else was going on beneath his rented morning coat. As Thaddeus gave me that long goodbye embrace, and breathed several hours’ worth of cucumber sandwiches and cocktails into my face, my main thought was: this is the thanks I get for giving you and your girlfriend a place to be married in, and paying for the food, the drinks, and two waiters? My opinion was that a boozy hug and a couple of mumbled platitudes did not do it. In my opinion what should be forthcoming was a kiss, a goddamned kiss on the lips, a kiss so hard and so meant that I’d feel it like an umbrella opening in the pit of my stomach.
Chapter 10
Another Man’s Child
“Oh, there she is,” Thaddeus said, half rising from his chair.
One of the inn’s waitresses made her way toward us. I ordered a Diet Coke, Grace a Corona, and Thaddeus a martini.
“You make it, okay, Sue?” he said to the waitress. “You’ve got the touch.” She nodded, neither friendly nor unfriendly, just doing her job. She had narrow shoulders, thin brown hair, something of the ascetic in her expression. When she was away from our table, Thaddeus said, “I’ve been trying to get Sue Briggs to like me for two years. I think I’ve got her to the point of not actively hating me. That might be the best I can do.”
“I’m sure you can do better than that,” Grace said. “If you really give it your all.”
“People up here seem rather angry,” I said. “What’s up with that?”
“If you’re nice to people they’ll be nice to you,” Thaddeus said.
“You think so?” Grace said with a married laugh, mirthless and knowing. Then, to me: “Are you staying over?”
“Alas, no,” I said.
“We’re having people for dinner,” she said. “As usual.” She gestured, indicating the empty tavern. “This place should have the human traffic we get.”
“It’s called hospitality,” Thaddeus said.
“Is it? I thought it was called auditioning.”
I actually agreed with her. From the moment they moved to Orkney, Thaddeus had courted the approval of the other riverfront-estate families. “I feel really really dark and Jewish and out of my element around these people,” he had said to me, early on. By these people, he meant the Family Tree crowd, the self-centered, self-satisfied Episcopalians whose mansions were scattered twenty-five miles to the north and south of Orkney, and whose long deceased relatives had raked in sufficient assets to keep several generations’ noses above the waterline. It had been Thaddeus’s project to ingratiate himself to his skeptical neighbors, and some of them were, in the beginning of his ownership of Orkney, reluctant to drink his wines and eat his roasts and celebrate even lesser holidays like Labor Day on his verdant lawns. But Thaddeus persisted and they got used to him, even as one by one the old estates were sold to the winners in a new economy—an actor, the owner of a cable TV network, the founder of a company that trained and dispatched security personnel to airports all over the world. Now, Thaddeus was playing host to a whole new cast of characters.
Our drinks arrived. Thaddeus did one of those I salute the divine within you bows to Sue as she placed his martini before him. The mix was off on my Diet Coke. Grace took a long swallow out of the bottle of Corona and then announced she was leaving.
“How am I supposed to get back home?” Thaddeus asked.
“Kip can take you.”
“Kip? Kip took the train up here. Remember? You don’t remember?”
Ah, he had her there. He seemed to take some dark delight in the possibility she had forgotten my Amtrak adventure. There it was: marriage. The pettiness, the ever metastasizing need to show the other up, to win, like two lunatics in a contest over who can collect, accumulate, and protect the larger ball of aluminum foil.
“Well, either leave with me,” Grace said, “or find another way home. But Emma is alone in the house and that kitchen is filled with uh-uhs.”
“‘Uh-uhs’ are forbidden foods,” Thaddeus said to me. “Grace is trying to make Emma lose weight.”
“What I’m trying to do is save her life,” Grace said. She was standing now. Like Thaddeus, she had dressed formally for the closing, in a dark b
lue skirt and matching jacket, with a white blouse and a strand of pinkish pearls. “Being overweight ruins your life and shortens your life.”
“She’s a kid. There’s too much emphasis, and too much pressure. And you’re always policing her.”
“I wouldn’t have to if we were both on the case.”
“She’s not a case,” Thaddeus said.
Grace sighed, shook her head. “Words,” she said, and that was that. She leaned over me and kissed the top of my head. “Thank you, Christopher Woods,” she said, using my government name. “I hope everyone in the world has at least one friend as good as you.”
Thaddeus followed her with his eyes as she made her way out of the tavern. “I wish she’d lose her looks,” he said.
“Yes, she’s a handsome woman, no doubt about that.”
“I still lust after her. Pounding heart, dry mouth, the works.”
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