Storm Tide (14 page)

“We like your plans, Johnny,” Roger the bald one said. “The timing is good. There hasn’t been a significant development in Saltash in years.”

“About twelve,” he said. “Since the bottom dropped out. And there won’t be another. There’s not a more beautiful spot on Old Cape Cod. You have to see those hills in the light of the moon. The dew turns the color of silver.”

The two boys exchanged a glance. Bernice looked away. He knew he
sounded like a fool. Steve spoke, and the smell of onion was unbearable. “We’re worried about the dike, Johnny. There’s been a lot of talk about opening it. If that happens, your acreage is cut by seventy-five percent and the rest is soggy ground.”

“That talk has been going on for years.”

“But times have changed, Johnny. The town has changed. It’s full of new voters.”

“If the fools vote to open that dike and the river floods the basements and ruins the property values of fifty luxury homes, owned by doctors and lawyers and the kind of people I’m attracting, the town is looking at a lawsuit that can bankrupt it.”

The bald man crossed his legs. “If the homes are built and sold first.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, how can I build them until I have the money?” And what’ll I do without the money? he thought. He had never been a man to take expensive vacations or wear extravagant clothes. He liked a new car. He liked to help his children. The bills for Kevin alone were as much as a man made at the height of his career. He’d never gambled with stocks and bonds. Land was where the money was—and he’d had to sell most of it to keep himself out of prison.

“Johnny, you know how much we want to help.” He knew the smelly little bastard didn’t give a shit about anything but covering his own ass. “But how can we commit to this project when we don’t know the houses will be built and sold first? We can’t afford to be stuck with ninety acres of soggy land.”

Bernice shocked them all by speaking up. “What do we need, Roger?”

“Some guarantee that the dike will still be standing and in place until all the houses go up.”

“And what guarantee could I give you?” Johnny felt hopeless.

“There’s a seat open on the Board of Selectmen this May. As I understand it,” Bernice said, “you have two votes for the dike standing and two committed to tearing it down.”

Johnny looked straight into her eyes. “And if the swing seat voted to keep the dike in place?”

“I think that would go a long way toward convincing this committee. Roger?” she asked, and the bald man nodded. “Steve?”

Steve cleared his throat. “Yes. Well, as I said. We would like to do business with you.”

When Johnny returned from lunch, something lemony, something fresh, lingered in the air around his desk. The new girl’s perfume? The room felt brighter somehow. No, he hadn’t gotten what he wanted. But
Johnny Lynch had never expected a thing without working for it, nor the rules to be stacked in his favor. What he asked was a shot at the prize. He felt heady. He felt a lightness in his step. Public opinion was against him. He’d have to work behind the scenes. But he liked a vigorous campaign. A good fight alerted his senses. No time to mull over the past. There was too much work to do.

J
UDITH

    Five years after Gordon and Judith were married, when she was thirty-two, Gordon retired from Brandeis and wanted to live on Squeer Island year-round. It was a hard move for Judith, for it meant giving up her chance at partnership in her Boston law firm, fought for grimly year after year. On the other hand, it meant she could approach the image that had remained in her mind since France of a more gracious, sensual life, integrated into a landscape. Saltash was beautiful, sloping down toward the busy harbor, the hills crowded with Victorian captain’s houses, older Capes, mostly white, some painted pale blue or green or cobalt or barn red. Town center was a combination of white steepled churches on High Street and the incongruous but handsome redbrick Town Hall built in 1870, to replace a structure destroyed in a hurricane. The aesthetic of the place appealed to her, the famous light, the sea, the dunes, and of course the compound on the island. Here they would change their life. They would spend far more time together than had been available since they married, with her working at least twelve hours a day and often weekends, and Gordon teaching full-time and then flying around to lecture all over the country.

Judith became a partner in a two-person law firm in Saltash, with Austin Bowman, a man older than Gordon. By her fourth year living in Saltash, Gordon and she were fully involved in the effort to defeat the Johnny Lynch machine. Johnny Lynch controlled the entire town government, but they saw a chance to elect at least one selectman who would not be loyal to Johnny: a beginning, anyhow. It would take years to get a majority, they knew. One February morning, when fog lay over the ice in the Bay, her partner Austin called her shack just as she was about to head to town. “This guy Lyle,” he said in his raspy voice. “I don’t think he can cut it. Johnny is running his man hard and spreading rumors Lyle wants to raise property taxes. For our first real contest with Johnny, we need a stronger candidate.”

Austin was close to seventy and on the verge of retirement, or so he said. He had been saying that since she joined his practice. She said, “Lyle makes a decent speech. People seem to trust Lyle.”

“Some do, some don’t.”

“Suppose we get a reporter to interview both candidates about taxes. That will give Lyle a platform to insist he doesn’t want to raise them.”

“But, Judith, we need to raise taxes for a new water system.”

“Austin, even if we win a seat on the board, one selectman out of five can’t push that through.”

Austin cleared his throat. “I want you to talk to someone. He’s thinking of running, and he might be better for us to back. War hero from Vietnam. Lost a foot. Many relatives here.”

She agreed to meet with the putative candidate at four-thirty. That would cut it close to get back over the bridge before high tide. The damned rickety bridge that high tides submerged had seemed amusing and romantic when they were summer people. Now that they lived on the island year-round and she had to make a living on the Cape, it was a nuisance to her—but Gordon had a real attachment to the island and its inhabitants and its customs. She had a cot in her law office so she could sleep over when the tides were not cooperating or when she must appear in court. She respected Gordon’s attachments. The bridge might infuriate her, but the view from the bridge was one of life’s pleasures, the bay full of islands, the great blue herons when the tide was low, the tern acrobats.

Austin did not like her sleeping in the office, considering it unprofessional. When he finally did retire, she was going to move the practice to a better office with a small apartment attached. That would make life easier. By the time she got off the phone, she had twenty minutes to dress and get herself across the bridge to her office to meet a client.

When she ran into the main house, Gordon was at the kitchen table, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, the telephone clamped between his chin and his shoulder. “So the manuscript is late,” he was saying. “The economy won’t go into recession because of it. It’s taking longer than I estimated, yes, but I’m making a more interesting and comprehensive book than if I hurried. I had a couple of bouts of bronchitis this winter, and it slowed me down.” He nodded to her as she passed. Either his agent or his publisher, having fits because his book was not finished by deadline. She was perhaps excessively punctual, someone who did not like to keep anyone waiting, whose life was timed to the minute. Gordon was casual about deadlines whether they were getting to the supper table or showing up to a meeting. To him, time always seemed far more elastic than to her.

Practicing law here was a motley operation, now a drug dealer, now a divorce case, a suit against the town, restraining orders, whatever local life tossed up. She was getting a reputation as a good hard lawyer, the first choice of people in trouble around Saltash. Some of her clients she liked and some she detested, but she gave them all their money’s worth, a well-prepared brief and a good fight in court. She was at her best in
the courtroom. She thought well on her feet. It was nine-tenths being prepared and one-tenth pure competition. She liked to win as much as she ever had. She would never be done proving herself. Now she had ten minutes to drive the rutted sand road and cross the bridge before the tide rose.

Her biggest case at the moment was a woman suing the local pizza parlor. The woman, a vigorous fifty-year-old who liked to keep in shape, had fallen through a rotten plank on their deck. Her spine had been injured and her arm broken in three places. She had lost some control of her right hand and she had recurring numbness. The problem was that the pizza parlor had been carrying minimal insurance. The insurance company was refusing to pay, claiming the woman had been careless. The owner claimed that the suit was putting him out of business, the only pizza available in winter for five miles around.

When Judith went into town, about one person in four glared at her. “You’re the grinch who stole pizza,” the fish man roared at her.

Her first two years in town, she had felt invisible. Now that was all changed. She was visible, all right. She liked her client, Enid Corea, a no-nonsense woman who boarded dogs and had served until her accident as the town dog warden and crossing guard. Mrs. Corea smelled of the kennel, was a cheerful woman whose husband had died on the highway and whose children were grown and departed. She needed the money, and Judith meant to get it for her, even if the suit did close down the only pizza parlor for miles.

Since Gordon’s retirement, they had created a life she wanted. Life by the sea, with a garden, with friends of all sorts, with an extended family. Most lawyers she knew had friends who were lawyers, perhaps a few other professionals or politicians. Through Gordon she had friends who were oystermen, scallopers, carpenters, plumbers, friends who taught history at Brandeis or Milan, friends who taught sociology in Berkeley or Melbourne, former freedom riders and war protesters, radical rabbis and radical priests and nuns, writers and painters and colorful drinkers who no longer did much of anything but tell tales of what they had done before they drank so much. Some of them she liked, some she tolerated, but theirs was a style of entertaining that was open at the same time that their work was jealously protected.

She saw her clients in town. They could call her at the office only, but she checked her messages compulsively. If one of her regular clients called, no matter from where, if they had been busted in West-field or Revere, she got in the car and she went. After all, the time driving was billed at the same rate as her time in court. She made a reasonable living. She would never see the income some friends from law
school made. But she earned about as much as Hannah, on the staff of a senator whose mistress she was. Hannah was still her confidante, as she was Hannah’s. They saw each other perhaps once a year, but talked twice a week, after ten as they always had.

They were both impassioned about the law and totally involved while they were working, but both demanded to have a life besides. Both were involved with men much older than themselves, whom they admired as much as they loved them. The style of Hannah’s life was entirely different from her own, but to Hannah too, how she lived was important. Hannah’s elegance was closer to the Washington notion of the good life; Judith’s had been formed, she was aware, partly by Yirina’s fantasies and partly by her European travels, alone and with Gordon. She wanted a life rooted in a local landscape, rooted in the seasons and natural beauty, however little all that had to do with her profession.

Therefore she put up with the tides, with Gordon’s children: the one she loved, Natasha; the two she got on with (the older sons Dan and Ben, their wives and children); and the two she had trouble with, Larry, her former client, and Sarah. She had trouble with them for different reasons. Sarah was hostile. She was a divorced mother who ran a travel agency, and she considered it an affront that Gordon should have married a woman so close to her in age. Larry tried to mooch, to lean, to leech. He had to be kept within bounds whether he was calling late at night needing money, or whether he was underfoot, feeling sorry for himself. He was an aspiring filmmaker who worked in a video store in New York—if he still had that job. Yet even the offspring who gave her trouble added to her sense of a rich web of connection. It fed a hunger she had always had. She longed for ever more connection into the community.

After the insurance lawyers (an offer finally, too small, but they had begun to waver), she had a meeting with the possible candidate Austin had touted. If they could get even one selectman elected who wasn’t controlled by Johnny Lynch, issues could be raised at the weekly meetings, town government could be rendered more accountable. She was looking this guy over for Gordon and the liberals who often met at their house. If she thought he was for real, she would invite him over and they would interview him as a group, deciding whether to back him. She was the first interrogator. If they did not back him, they would back Lyle.