Good Faith (20 page)

“But look at interest rates. If there was all that money, interest rates wouldn’t be so high.”

“I don’t agree with that. That’s what they tell you, but it’s not true. My analysis of high interest rates has to do with the shakeout of the banking system. That’s another aspect of too much money. The banking system is being flooded with money and all the investors, especially the institutional investors, like the Soviet Union—”

“The Soviet Union?”

“Sure. You don’t think they aren’t big participants in the worldwide capitalist system, do you?”

“I don’t know, I—”

“Look at that house.”

I looked up the hill at the crisp granite lines of the house, the windows across the front, the shrouds around the shrubbery, the graceful arching branches of the trees.

“It’s so small. As long as you think of it as big or imposing or impressive, you won’t understand what’s going on. You can’t be intimidated by what you see, or you won’t think up anything new. If you’re afraid of something, like a big number or whatever, then your mind sort of locks up and nothing else can get in there. You know that feeling?”

“Well, sure.”

“What I think is that every moment of fear is a lost moment of imagining something new. You said that the state wouldn’t go for the water plan. Okay. Maybe not; we can decide about that later. But If I look at the creek, and think, Oh, it runs all year round and runs pretty good, what does that make me think of, then, that might lead to another idea that the state wouldn’t care about. All over the world except America, you know what they drink?”

“Wine?”

“Wine is good, but no, bottled water.”

“Bottled water? Like seltzer?”

“Some fizzy and some not. It’s a holdover from the spa days, when they thought the minerals in the water would cure things. We find a spring on this property—and we easily could, given the geology of this area—and I’m telling you, we’ve got Blue Valley Mineral Water in greenish bottles shaped like flower vases, and it’s another fortune!”

I said, “You are so full of shit, Marcus.”

The day after Thanksgiving, I found myself over at Gordon’s. The festivities of the day before had sloshed over into breakfast, which had shaded into lunch, and there was quite a crowd, including Felicity, who I knew was there but hadn’t seen. I had seen Hank and greeted him in a friendly way, without an undue sense of unease. Maybe Felicity’s strict refusal to talk about him or about their marriage had had the intended effect. My relationship with him was exactly as it had always been, because I knew exactly what I had always known about him and no more.

Betty was in her element. While I was waiting, subtly, to get Gordon alone, I watched her with her granddaughters. Betty was beautiful, and you didn’t think of her as a grandmother, but she had Leslie’s four girls, the oldest about twelve and the youngest about five, sitting at the kitchen table drawing ball gowns with colored pencils. She was flipping pancakes. “That’s very elegant, Renee. But do you really like black for a ball? Maybe a masked ball, but a wonderful Christmas ball in a golden palace? I don’t know.”

“How about navy blue?” said the twelve-year-old.

“Navy blue is for conservative little girls who will certainly end up in the Junior League in some secondary town like Hartford, Connecticut. I suggest midnight blue with some sort of silver trim. Peach, is your dress meant to be ankle length, darling?”

One of the middle ones held up her drawing and Betty looked at it, then flipped her pancakes. “Ankle length is very sexy, Peach, but you have to have just the right shoes. It’s so hard to find the right shoes. You have to go to Paris. It’s even hard to find the right shoes for an ankle-length gown in New York.”

“I’ll go to Paris, then,” said Peach.

“Excellent idea,” said Betty. “I’ll go with you.”

Peach smiled, perhaps at the thought of having her grandmother all to herself.

I was tempted to ask for something, just to be a part of the group. My mother, of course, did not have this sort of opportunity, though she would have liked to. When I was her only child, she had made something of being my mother, creating pear salads with faces and teaching me rhymes and games. But I had no children, and so our Thanksgiving the day before had been attended by my father, myself, my mother, and four ladies from the church, ages seventy-two, seventy-three, seventy-four, and eighty-six, who had nowhere else to go. Betty must have sensed me watching her, because she cast me a friendly glance over her shoulder, as if to say, If you would only listen to my advice, you would have everything you want, even the things you haven’t got sense enough to want.

I went into the living room and once again gave Gordon the high sign. Bobby, idly massaging his calf, did not look away from the television, but Norton, who had brought his family to town for the long weekend, scowled at me without, I think, actually realizing it. Then he poked Bobby, who was sitting beside him on the couch, and said, “Move the fuck over.” Bobby moved over. Gordon got up and cocked his head to motion me into the office.

He closed the door behind us softly, with a Middle Eastern touch, I thought, my view of him now colored by Felicity’s revelations. “Ah, Joe,” he said, and strolled over to the window that looked down over the back lawn. The summer furniture was put away and the pond was glazed over with a thin layer of ice. The rope swing hung from the tree and swayed heavily, describing a small circle in the otherwise invisible outdoor breeze. “You put that place on the market?”

“It’s a bad time to put a place like that on the market, Gordon. Somebody gets out there for a look, and pretty soon he’s saying—or she’s saying, which is all the more likely—Where the hell am I? How much is it going to cost to plow the driveway?”

“Probably. Serves me right, anyway, having to do with old man Thorpe. I always said I wasn’t going to be a sucker for the blandishments of the bourgeoisie—”

“You did?”

“Well, not in exactly those words.” He smiled. “I’m telling you, those are the folks you sell to, not the folks you buy from. And it’s hard enough to sell to them. If you do, then you know who they are. But he got me.”

“Gordon, if we aren’t putting it on the market, I think we should go ahead with our plans.”

“Whose plans?”

“Yours, mine, and Marcus’s.”

“I don’t remember having a plan.”

This sounded very bad. I knew Gordon well enough to know that the very best way to get him to flee any situation was to give him the idea that he was being had. And his sense of whether he was up or down was entirely instinctive. He was a good poker player, but he didn’t count cards. I sometimes thought he sniffed the air of the room like a dog and scented some sort of subtle change in his opponents as soon as they looked at a hand. I gazed at him. He was unhappy. The key was to make him happy. He drained his cup of coffee and set the cup down. I said, “Can I get you another cup?”

“Nah.” He looked out the window. “Just don’t try to talk me into anything I know better than.”

I said, “Marcus thinks you don’t trust him.”

“I don’t. I told you that. I never trust a mick.”

“Well, you told me that, but you said that you trusted Marcus because he knows what he’s doing.”

“Did I?”

“Well, you said he knows what people want.”

“That might be true.” He reached into his back pocket, took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, and put his handkerchief away. Then he said, “But the other night he was talking to me, and I looked at him all of a sudden, and I thought, Who is this guy? I met this guy, what, six–eight months ago? And who introduced me to this guy? Bobby!” He blew air out between his lips, not quite spitting, and shook his head. “Between you and me and the wallpaper, Bobby is not such a great reference. And now he’s here in my house in the bosom of my family. How the hell did he get here? I don’t know. Just gave me a fishy feeling. I mean, everyone I know, I’ve known for twenty–thirty years.”

I said, “Okay, let’s leave Marcus out of this. I’ve got an idea. Who’s that guy you know up in the city? Zack somebody.”

“Zack Schwartz?”

“Yeah.”

“What about him?”

“Why don’t you have him come down here and look at the place. Doesn’t he buy building supplies and fixtures for fancy brownstones and apartment buildings?”

“Yeah, among other things.”

“Well, you’ve got a treasure trove of building supplies and fixtures in that place, even just in the barns and the outbuildings. Even just in the windows.You said it yourself months ago. Take the place apart and sell it piece by piece. I bet you could make back most of the purchase price, and then you could decide what to do with the land after.” Actually, I had no idea about the market for things like leaded glass, crystal chandeliers, inlaid flooring, or book-matched paneling, but I happened to know that the market for rare woods was pretty good.

“Marcus is thinking that house is going to be some sort of clubhouse.”

“But we set that aside. It’s not going to be a clubhouse if there’s no club. I’m just saying this. We put the place on the market in the spring, when it’s at its best. Who are we going to sell it to? Say some insurance mogul comes around and he’s got some money to buy it, but when he looks at the gardens and the grounds and then walks through the foyer and the library and the kitchen, he’s going to say to himself, ‘This is more than I can take care of. Where do I hire the servants?’ So let’s say we sell off the fancy stuff at a good price, and then we have the leeway to figure out the best thing to be done with the land.” Even as I was making my way through this murky idea, it was sounding almost plausible. “At least call him up and have him come down and tell you what’s salable and what isn’t.”

Gordon was looking visibly perkier. “The real money is always in things you don’t expect, like doorknobs. You know, once I bought a house in Portsmouth, nineteen-hundreds home or thereabouts, nothing special—I mean, no future on the National Register of Historic Places or anything like that—squeezed between a diner and a         dress shop down on Henry Street. Anyway, it turned out that the doorknobs, of all things, were handmade in Hungary in the seventeen-fifties. Very historical doorknobs, made by some famous sculptor when he was an apprentice somewhere, and how they got to Portsmouth nobody knew, but there they were. I must have gotten twenty-five for them, and that was when you could buy a nice little house for twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars?”

“Yup. A guy came over from Europe and packed them up and took them home.”

“How did you figure out they were valuable?”

“Oh, I just had a feeling.” He shrugged, but the fact was, I had hit pay dirt with that scavenging idea. There was nothing Gordon liked better than getting something for nothing. He stood up from the desk and stretched. He picked up his coffee cup and came around the desk, taking my elbow. He said, “Come on. Let’s go see what everyone is doing.”

When we opened the door of the office, Norton was standing right there. Without blinking or making the slightest small talk, he said to Gordon, “Did you tell him to put it on the market?”

“We talked about it,” said Gordon evenly.

I said, “It’s the wrong time of the year, right now, but—”

Norton scowled. Gordon pushed past him in a practiced way, and I was right behind him, but Norton put his hand on my arm and more or less stepped in front of me. I stopped. He said, “Are you guys out of your minds? Has it occurred to you that this guy is an IRS agent?”

“He
was
an IRS agent. I thought that was one of his attractions, Norton.”

“Yeah, well, how about undercover investigation? How about this unreported commission and this other unreported sale? Who says he’s doing what he says he’s doing? My guess is, he’s been sent out here to—”

I stared at him in disbelief.

“Fine. Fuck. See what I care. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“I won’t.” I started to ease past him.

“And another thing. You do something he doesn’t like, and that whole tax bill? Back bigger than ever.”

“Maybe so.” By this time, all I wanted to do was get away from him. He had that effect on people, always had.

Felicity was in the kitchen, looking rumpled and sleepy. She smiled when she saw me and gave me the expected sisterly kiss. She was wearing checked pajamas and sheepskin slippers. Hank was behind her, leaning into the refrigerator, his back turned to us. He said, “I think I’ll go out and pick up a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs. It looks like your mother is running out.” I thought, So this is it, this is how we go on, and while he was talking and I was thinking this, Felicity was introducing her fingers between the buttons of my shirt and tickling my chest, which was so dangerous and exciting that I stopped thinking entirely. By the time Hank had turned around, Felicity was yawning, her arms stretched over her head. She said, “Oh, honey, bring me back a Coke, would you? They’re out of that too. Are you leaving, Joey?”

I spoke casually. “I’m going back to the office.”

Hank said, “I’ll walk out with you.”

Felicity kissed him on the cheek, as she had just kissed me. She said, “Drive carefully, sweetie.”

He nodded.

Of course, I could not help being hyper-aware of Hank as we ambled toward the front door. His nearness made me edgy. I gauged whether he was taller than I, better looking than I, younger or older than I in less than a second, and not voluntarily. I must have sighed. He said, “Something wrong?”

“What? Oh, no.”

“You were breathing heavily.”

“I was?”

“You were.”

“Hunh,” I said.

We opened the door and went out into the cold, me first, him closing the door behind us. All of a sudden, he said, “Hey.”

My heart jumped, and I felt the back of my neck turn to rock.

He said, “I want to talk to you about something.”

“You do?”

“Yeah.” He turned to face me. “Listen.”

I wondered if he was going to poke me in the nose.

He said, “You guys really going to build four hundred houses on the old Thorpe place?”

I nearly fell down with relief. “I don’t know. Depends on the waste-treatment situation. The place didn’t perk, you may know.”