Circle of Three (4 page)

“I’m afraid so,” I said, abashed.
SWEET HOME,
the rug said, with the date, in green and gray yarn over a replica of my house’s façade. “My first and last rug-hooking effort. Months, this took.” And it was only four-feet square. Of all the crafts I’d ever taken up out of curiosity, interest, boredom, desperation, whatever—rug hooking was far and away the most tedious. The one that had made me feel the most ridiculous.

“You’re an artist.”

“No.” I laughed. “A frustrated one, maybe. Stephen used to say I took it out on the house.” But I was so pleased. It was as if Jess had plucked a hair-thin wire running through me and set it vibrating. I am such a fool.

He set his cup down and came around the kitchen table I’d put between us—we’d been talking across the length of the room. “I have a job for you.”

“A what?”

“I could offer you a job.”

I saw myself milking cows in his barn. I’d have laughed, but I felt deflated. Stupid, but I thought he might’ve come for something else. “What job?”

“I’m looking for an artist. To do something. Make something.” He looked me over, head to toe. “You’re perfect.”

I flushed. If he was making fun of me, it was for the first time. “What, you need someone to—to—” I couldn’t think of the name of it, the person who used to advertise mattresses in department stores by sleeping, sleeping in a big bed behind a plate glass window while people on the sidewalk stopped and stared. I saw it once in an old movie.

“You wouldn’t make a lot of money.” I sensed a trick, but the light in his eyes drew me anyway. “But you’d make more than Margaret Sachs is paying you.”

“Who told you about that? Ruth,” I answered myself. “Well, that’s not saying much, believe me. Oh, Jess, I need a
real
job.”

“This is a real job.”

“What is it?”

“It’s kind of a long story. Do you remember Eldon Pletcher?”

“No. Eldon? I remember Landy Pletcher.”

“Eldon’s Landy’s father.”

“Landy—you mean from school?” A boy two years ahead of Jess and me at Clayborne High. A shy, backward boy, I remembered; his father had farmed tobacco.

Jess nodded. “Well,” he said, and rubbed a long index finger across his sideburn, deciding how to proceed. “Do you know about the Arkists?”

“The what?”

“No, you’d moved away by then. I’m surprised your mother never mentioned them, though. They—they’re—”
He scratched his head, smiling down at the floor. Such a man, I thought, with his deep voice and his rough hands, the weathered skin around his eyes. Stephen had lived in his head, but Jess lived in his body. I wasn’t used to a man like him in my house. “Let’s see,” he said. “About twenty years ago—about the time you left—Eldon, Landy’s father, started a religious group called the Arkists. Also known as the Sons of Noah. Small, mostly local. Well, not that small, they had a couple hundred souls in their heyday. You never heard about this?”

“No. When was their heyday?”

“I use the term loosely. Ten years ago? I’m not sure what they believe in besides the great flood, but probably the usual, what you’d expect. From a southern offshoot of Protestantism.”

“They don’t handle snakes?”

“No.”

“Take multiple wives? Speak in tongues?”

“None of that.” He laughed, but he really wanted to reassure me. “They’re good people, not well educated but well meaning. Gentle. They don’t preach that they’re the one true faith.”

“That could be why their heyday’s over. Like the Shakers. No, wait, they died out because they wouldn’t procreate.”

“Right. Anyway…”

“Anyway. What’s the job?”

“When Eldon had his religious conversion, he promised God he’d replicate the ark before he died.”

“Replicate the ark?”

“To save the world from a second devastating flood, figuratively speaking. Not to mention his own immortal soul.”

“Figuratively speaking?”

“In fact, if he breaks his promise, he believes he’ll go straight to hell.”

“He’s telling you this?”

“Landy told me. He’s my neighbor now—he bought the
old Price farm next door about twelve, fifteen years ago. We’re friends. We help each other out.”

“I see.”

“Where was I?”

“Eldon Pletcher’s going to replicate Noah’s Ark. Is he going to sail it?”

I was joking, but Jess said, “Yeah, on the Leap.”

“You’re kidding. What do I do, skipper it?”

“Ha.”

I frowned. He looked so sheepish. “That was a joke,” I said. “Right?”

“Right. Right, you don’t have to skipper it.”

I spread my hands, completely baffled. “Well,
what
?”

“Arks need animals. Figuratively. Eldon thinks God wouldn’t mind if he stocked the ark with representations of His creatures somehow, pictures, models—he’s not too clear on this, to tell you the truth.”

“Who, God?”

“Eldon. But he wants them to look good, you know, he wants realism, and the problem is, there aren’t any artists among what’s left of the Arkists.”

I started to laugh. “And this is where I come in?” Something caught my eye in the window over Jess’s shoulder—the fender of my mother’s Buick in the driveway. “Oh, no.”

“Well, wait, think about it.”

“No, I mean—”

“You could do it. You’re an artist, Carrie, it’s obvious.” He waved his arm around my kitchen. “And I know it sounds crazy, it’s completely absurd, but that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it?” Oh, I could never resist that reckless gleam in Jess’s eye. “I don’t know what he’d pay you. People say he’s got money, but nobody knows for—”

“Jess,” I said in warning.

The back door flew open and Ruth burst in, red-cheeked from the cold. Everything curves up when she smiles, mouth, eyes, cheeks, eyebrows. Oh, light of my life, apple of
my eye. Love for my daughter swamps me at unexpected moments. I flounder in it, flailing for what I can’t hold on to much longer. “Hey, Jess,” she cried, “I saw your truck! Hi!”

“Ruth—I can’t believe it. You
grew
.”

Laughing, they stood in front of each other for an awkward few seconds, before finally exchanging a quick, shy hug. Their gladness surprised me—I wasn’t sure what I thought of it. Half a dozen times since Stephen died, Ruth had asked me to drive out with her to see Jess, see the cows, his dogs and cats, all the fascinating features of a dairy farm. But I put her off because I was too tired, too weird, too something. I wasn’t ready. She’d missed him, it was obvious, and that was my fault. Well, something else to be guilty of.

If Ruth was surprised to see Jess, my mother was floored. She did a double take in her ladies’ luncheon finery, fur jacket over a navy wool suit, fur hat, medium-heeled pumps, navy handbag. Oh, Lord, and here came Birdie behind her, Mama’s lifelong bridge partner and oldest friend; she’d been a sort of half-dotty aunt to me for as long as I could remember. All of a sudden the kitchen was teeming with women.

“Mama, you remember Jess Deeping,” I said in a hostessy voice, thinking,
If she pretends she doesn’t know him, I’ll kill her
. But she said, “Why, of
course
I do,” in her best southern accent, “you came to my son-in-law’s funeral, I
so
appreciated that.” Such an accomplished liar. Before Stephen’s funeral, Mama had been delighted not to lay eyes on Jess Deeping for twenty-five years.

“And Birdie,” I said, “Jess, this is Mrs. Costello, my mother’s good friend.” They said hello, how are you, nice to see you. And then, because the silence was expectant and I was jittery and everybody was staring at me, I blurted out the worst possible thing. “Jess came over to offer me a job.”

“A job?” Birdie’s faded blue eyes snapped with interest. She rubbed her hands together.

“Wow! What job?” Ruth demanded, crowding in.

My mother said nothing. She stared.

Jess looked hounded, disbelieving. The glance he sent
me—
Carrie, what the hell?
—should’ve cowed me, but it didn’t. For some reason it warmed me up. Us against them: just like old times. He closed his eyes for a second. And then with a pained, hopeless smile, he told everybody about Noah’s Ark.

I’
LL BE SEVENTY
years old in the spring. I’ve been sixty-nine for nine months, and hardly enjoyed a minute of it. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a car speeding toward a boulder in the road somebody’s chiseled into a giant 7–0. The scenery might be nice, but all I can see is those numbers, high and hard and coming up fast. I’ve got a one-track mind.

I must be bad off when George notices. “Dana,” he said to me the other night, “is anything bothering you?” Well, that got my attention. That was like a blind man saying, “Did somebody turn the lights on?” I tried to remember what I’d just been doing that could’ve focused George’s attention on me instead of his computer screen. Nothing—telling him to move his big feet so I could vacuum under his desk; fighting on the telephone with Birdie, who doesn’t think I should run for president of the Clayborne Women’s Club; slamming things around in the kitchen for the hell of it, just to make some noise. Calling Carrie twice in an hour with good advice. It must’ve been the accumulation, all four added up, because by themselves those aren’t very remarkable. But imagine George noticing. As I say, it pulled me up.

He was sitting at his desk, working on the book he’s been writing with a colleague for the last year and a half. It’s about
a poet from the 1700s named—well, I forget his name. Alexander Pope called him “Namby Pamby,” so that’s what I’ve been calling him. George is sorry he ever told me that. He swears they’ll be done with the book by next May, which is about the time I’ll be queen of England. When George retired from the college two years ago, I thought our interesting new lives were about to start. We’d travel, maybe learn a foreign language together, take up some sedentary sport. Talk. Well, surprise, so far that hasn’t worked out. He still spends all his time in his study with the door closed, reading, writing, and not talking to me. Carrie called one night about a month ago, teary and upset. “Mama, it’s so quiet in this house. It’s as if
everybody
died, not just Stephen.” I didn’t say it, but I thought, oh, honey, it’s like that all the time at my house.

I pushed some papers to the side and sat down on the corner of George’s desk, next to the computer so he had to look at me. “Is anything bothering me?” Already he looked sorry he’d asked. “My arthritis. My blood pressure medicine. My upcoming senility. Those are off the top of my head.”

“Ha ha,” he said, humoring me. He had his trifocals on top of his bald, freckled head. He’s shrinking; these days when he drives, he needs a pillow to see over the steering wheel. I’m shrinking, too, but not as much as he is. He’s two years younger than me, but he looks older. I hope.

“George,” I said, “wouldn’t you think at our age we’d know something?”

He turned his good ear toward me. “What’s that?”

“When you were young, say when you were Ruth’s age, didn’t you think people as old as us knew something? Knew
something
? I sure did. But don’t you feel like the whole thing’s still the same mystery it was when you were fifteen?”

He just blinked at me. He’s supposed to be the intellectual in the family. I married him partly for his brains, and look where it got me. “What’s the trouble?” he said, but his eyes were drifting. He fidgeted when the screen saver came on, a reminder that time was passing.

What’s the trouble. If I knew, I could fix it. “Oh, I just haven’t felt like myself since the accident, I guess.” That’s what we call Stephen’s death, “the accident.”

George nodded solemnly. “We all miss him.”

I nodded solemnly, too, but that wasn’t it. I’m not sure anyone but Ruth really
misses
Stephen. That sounds terrible, I take it back—Carrie’s a mess, sometimes I think she’s never going to be her old self again. Well, me, then: as fond as I was of my son-in-law, as much as I approved of him for Carrie, I don’t miss him, put it that way. Not that he wasn’t a fine, decent, admirable man, good husband and father, all that. He was always standoffish, though, and now it seems to me he’s just standing off a little farther.

“Do you remember if heart trouble ran in Stephen’s family?” I asked. “Birdie told me I told
her
that’s how his father died, but I stood her down and said that wasn’t it at all. Do you have any such recollection?”

“Well, now, that rings a bell—”

“No, it was something else, it wasn’t heart. Stephen’s attack was a fluke, heart does
not
run in that family.”

“Maybe so.” He shrugged. He doesn’t make associations the same way I do—one of our many differences. Stephen’s death was Stephen’s death; it didn’t make George worry more about his prostate, or think about buying a plot at Hill Haven, or look at his old man’s face in the mirror and ask it where his life’s gone. Supposedly George lives a life of the mind, but it doesn’t always seem to me to be his
own
mind.

He started drumming his fingers on the keyboard space bar. “Guess who was at Carrie’s this afternoon,” I said to keep his attention. “When I got there with Birdie and Ruth.”

“Who?”

“Guess.”

“I really couldn’t say.”

“Come on.”

“Dana—”

“Okay. Jess Deeping.”

He looked blank. Then, “Oh—that fellow, the one who’s on the town council?”

“Yes, but—the one who used to be Carrie’s boyfriend! In high school.” God, men. “You remember, I know you do. You didn’t care for him any more than I did.”

“That boy? Really?” Hard to believe, but he was just now making the connection between childhood friend and Clayborne city councilman. “Well, he turned out all right, I guess. Did you and Carrie have a nice visit?” he asked politely, eyes drifting toward his computer screen.

“Get this, George.” I leaned in closer. He frowned at my hip, which was encroaching on his papers. “Remember the Arkists?”

“The artists?”

“
Arkists.
The religious cult that started up around here years ago, the paper did a story. Those people who called themselves the Arkists? The Sons of Noah?”

“No.”

“Oh, you do, too. The ringleader was that tobacco farmer, Pletcher, something Pletcher. Carrie went to school with the son.”

“
Oh
, yes, yes, very, very vaguely. But it wasn’t a cult, I don’t believe, it was a sect. I thought they’d died out by now.”

“Cult, sect—no, they didn’t die out, and the old man’s still alive. And the son not only owns the farm next door to Jess Deeping, he’s also his very good
friend
.”

“You don’t say.”

“And—follow me, now—this cult is all set to build an ark—an ark, I’m saying
ark
—and Jess Deeping wants Carrie to build the animals!”

“What?”

“A life-size ark! They want to sail it on the river for the glory of God! Can you believe it?”

No.” He joined me in a wonderful laugh, our best in ages, we leaned back and rocked with it. “Why, that makes no sense at all.”

“I know! You should’ve heard Jess Deeping trying to explain it.”

“What did Carrie say?”

“She said no, of course.” But not forcefully enough, if you ask me; she left room for hope, left the door open a crack. “I don’t think so,” she told Jess Deeping, and “I just can’t imagine it. But I’m flattered you thought of me.” Baloney. It wasn’t flattering, it was frightening.

“She does need a job, though,” I told George. “Soon, because she could lose that house.”

“I still say she ought to sell it. Move someplace smaller.”

“I know, but Ruth loves it. No, Carrie needs a good paying job, that’s what she needs. She has to get out of that house, quit making those damn flower arrangements. Lord, they make me shiver, dried-up little things. They look like nests, they look like dead animals. If she’d gotten an education degree twenty years ago, none of this would be happening. She could’ve been teaching art at the middle school right now, maybe even the high school.
George
.”

“Mm?”

“I’ve invited Brian Wright to dinner tomorrow night.”

He looked up at that. “What for? Brian Wright? I thought Carrie and Ruth were coming tomorrow.”

“He’s thinking of hiring an assistant.”

“Brian is? How do you know?”

“He told me—I ran into him at the bank. This’ll be good, wait and see. Brian’s on the rise.”

George sniffed.

“He is, he’s got gumption, he’s making something of himself. Carrie could do a lot worse.”

He looked alarmed.

“In a
boss
, she could do worse in an
employer
. That’s all I’m talking about.”

Suspicion narrowed his eyes for a second. But then he lost interest and turned full face to his computer screen. My time was up.

*   *   *

I served pot roast. I can make smarter, more glamorous meals—the other night I made chicken Monterey for the Becks, and a Peking duck last month for the academic dean and his wife. But Brian Wright is divorced, his wife got the kids, and he lives by himself, and something just told me a nice pot roast would be the thing. Warm and homey.

I thought the evening went well. Brian arrived first, and when Carrie saw him, there was just the tiniest nervous moment, but I don’t think anyone noticed it but me. Well, and her. Thank God she looked all right for a change; she had on slacks and a sweater, perfectly nice, and her hair pulled back in a barrette, even a little makeup, hallelujah. Compared to the last time I saw her, she looked like Grace Kelly. She’s forty-two, but she never looked it until Stephen died. And Ruth, bless her heart, I swear she gets cuter every day. She’s going to be prettier than Carrie, I predict. She needs some poise and some of that nervous energy burned off, but one of these days, look out.

We had drinks in the living room, where it came up that Brian lifts weights. This I didn’t know; he’s fortyish, and I thought he was stocky, a touch overweight, but no, it’s all muscle. Now I can see it—he’s got those sloping shoulders bodybuilders have; his neck’s as big around as my thigh. He made the room smaller, and not just with his physique. He’s so full of energy and enthusiasm, a complete extrovert. He felt like a breath of fresh air on my sad, quiet family. He wears a buzz cut and a neat little goatee, of all things. Now I don’t usually care for facial hair on a man, I think it’s tacky, and no one should be allowed to wear a crew cut after he’s ten. But somehow Brian Wright manages to carry these two fashion mistakes off. Maybe it’s his size? You want to give the benefit of the doubt to somebody that big.

And eat? He gobbled up everything in front of him, and I kept the plates moving. No leftovers from this dinner. I know George doesn’t like him, but he made an effort to talk and be sociable, and that helped smooth over the times Carrie clicked off. It happens all the time, she’ll be pleasant and
attentive one minute, lost in space the next. I’m so worried about her. I want to ask, “Honey, are you on drugs?” and I don’t mean the kind doctors prescribe.

I was the one who finally brought up business. I waited till we finished eating and were having our second cups of coffee, still at the dining room table. “So, Brian,” I said casually, “how are things at the Other School?”

“Great, just great, Mrs. Danziger, this is the best semester we’ve had. We’ve got twelve classes up and running right now, and about six more planned for winter term. We’ll be going to four quarters starting in the spring.”

“Why, that’s wonderful, and in such a short time, too.”

“Just about three years now.” He smiled down, modest but proud, into the bottom of his rice pudding bowl. “I can’t complain about growth, that’s for sure. The whole thing took off like a rocket.”

“Well, the town needed it,” I said.

“It did,” he agreed, winking at me. “It just didn’t know it.”

The Other School is one of those alternative, community-based “free” schools that do well in the big cities but aren’t very common in towns as small as Clayborne. Except for the college, there’s no higher or adult education in our three-county area. Brian saw an opportunity and started the school on a very small scale, practically in his spare time, while he was still working as the registrar at Remington. It grew faster than anybody imagined, and eventually he quit the registrar job to be a full-time entrepreneur. “He’s crazy,” George said, and plenty of people agreed with him, Carrie’s husband included. “It won’t fly and he’ll lose his shirt,” they said, but he didn’t, and now the only question they were asking was why somebody hadn’t thought of it sooner.

“It must keep you terribly busy,” I said. “Tied to the office, no outside life to speak of. Unless, of course, you’ve got good help.”

Carrie set her cup down and looked at me. I thought she’d have figured it out by now, but obviously the plot was just hitting her. She’s not usually so slow.

Brian picked up instantly, such a clever boy—of course it helped that I’d already planted the seed in his mind at the bank. “Interesting you should say that, because as it happens I have been looking for some help. Not formally, I haven’t advertised yet, just been keeping my eyes open.” He looked straight at Carrie. “It’s gotten too much for me. I’ve got a wonderful girl, but she’s more clerical, you know, she follows directions. What I need is somebody who can make decisions, somebody
bright
who can talk to the instructors on their own level. Chris—that’s my secretary—she’s a sweetheart, I’d be lost without her, but now I really need somebody a cut above, you know what I mean.” Above his goatee, his cheeks glowed pink with good health. “May I have a little more coffee?”

Carrie cleared her throat. I, her mother, heard amusement, resignation, skepticism, and curiosity, but I expect Brian just heard her clear her throat. “How interesting,” she said dryly. “Tell us more.”

“Well.” He hitched his body around toward her, crossing one muscle-bound thigh over the other. “I’m looking for someone to take some of the load off, and that means dealing with advertisers, the day-to-day troubleshooting, making up the curriculum brochure—that’s one of the big things, I want completely out from under that, and it’s a big job. Somebody to interface one-on-one with our current instructors, and also help recruit more. I’d like somebody to brainstorm with me over new courses, new angles, trying to keep it fresh and alive. Because you gotta constantly refresh, you can’t get stale in this business or you’re dead. I subscribe to four newspapers, and I probably read eight more on-line, every day, day in and day out.
Got
to stay fresh. Thanks.” He stopped talking to gulp his coffee.