Storm Tide (15 page)

“What do you think about the dike?”

“The dike … Well, the dike is certainly a problem, yes. The dike.” He was a slight man with a high-pitched voice and a tendency to stare into corners. “We should do something about it, yes.”

After ten minutes she realized he was a lost cause. Public meetings would make a fool of him. He meant well, but he couldn’t say what he meant quickly or clearly enough. No go. It would have to be Lyle.

“He won’t do,” she said to Gordon as they sat down to a supper of broiled salmon, boiled potatoes with herbs, bread from the local bakery, spring salad from the garden and pinot grigio. “We need somebody with more … conviction, more energy, more charisma.”

“Johnny has enough charisma to pave the highway as far as the bridge,” Gordon said wryly.

“I never found him charming,” she said, propping her chin on a knuckle. “Are you charmed?”

“Sure I am. He’s the last old-fashioned boss in Massachusetts politics. He’s the real thing.”

“A real crook? A real swindler? A real manipulator? That’s like saying, a real pothole. They come by the dozen.” She wanted to set Gordon off. After nine years of marriage, she was still fascinated by the way he thought. Many of her best moments in any day were spent arguing, discussing with him, listening to him reminisce, analyzing together.

“A true political boss offers as much as he takes, or almost as much, to be more accurate. He gives you a bargain. Support me and I’ll do for you when you need it. Can’t get a mortgage? Bank threatening to foreclose? Can’t meet your payroll this week? Can’t afford an operation for the wife? Need a scholarship for the boy? Just give me leeway to develop all the land I want the way I want to, give me leeway to run the town to my advantage, and your boy will go to a state college, your wife will be off to the county hospital, and your roof will stay over your head. That’s the devil’s bargain—and it is a bargain. The folks who support him aren’t stupid. They want it.”

After supper they strolled in the twilight that was beginning to perceptibly lengthen as May began. Gordon had to pause several times as they climbed the dune, shaken by coughing. That nasty bronchitis from February had never really let go. Warm weather would dry it up. He liked to bake in the sun, and she could rarely get him to use sun screen. She was always trying to take care of Gordon, to feed him nutritiously, which was not difficult; to monitor his health; to get him to cut down on his smoking, since she had reluctantly realized she would never get him to stop. He was convinced he would not be able to work if he didn’t have a cigarette at hand. “My mind is stimulated by nicotine,” he would say blithely. “Caffeine in, nicotine in, words out. That’s how the machine works.”

“I still think you should see Dr. Garvey about that cough. You’ve had it since February. And see why your arm has been bothering you.”

“It doesn’t bother me. Just too much wood chopping. And my cough is just a smoker’s cough. We’re all a little short of breath as we get on. I don’t see it slowing me down.”

They walked along the bay, not touching but aware of each other. The waves hissed in, the pebbles rattling. There was only a horizon of greenish light left at water level. Venus was bright already. She thought that by the time they turned for home, both of them knew that as soon as they entered the house, they would head for their bedroom and make love. People sometimes let her know that they assumed hers was a marriage blanc, since Gordon was so much older, but there was nothing blank about it. They turned to each other now almost as frequently as they had in the early days. Oftener now she was the top, the more aggressive, the more vigorous, but Gordon’s desire had not diminished, nor his skill. Making love was at the center of their marriage.

D
AVID

    The better part of March passed and I’d done nothing about the election. Judith stopped asking if I’d found someone to be treasurer of my campaign, to write absentee voters or nail up signs.

One night Judith put her hands on both sides of my face and stared into my eyes. “I think I finally understand what’s happening with your campaign.”

“That I’m not the person you’re looking for.”

“That you’re afraid to ask for help.”

Tommy Shalhoub was an old friend and the only phone call I could bring myself to make to prove her wrong. He didn’t hesitate when I asked if he’d post election signs along the highway and suggested tearing down my opponents’ signs as well.

I’d known Tommy Shalhoub since grade school, when his family moved to Saltash from a Syrian neighborhood in East Boston. He was an outsider, like me, but with coarse black curly hair and olive-brown skin, often lumped with the Portuguese, the bottom of the local pecking order. They called him the Sand Nigger; I was merely the Jew. While I escaped into baseball, Tommy was happiest alone, prowling the ponds for snakes and frogs, sleeping under a blanket in the woods. Just about the time I signed a contract with the Chicago Cubs, he left high school in the eleventh grade, got caught selling pot, and enlisted in the army in lieu of prosecution.

Tommy was the only guy I knew who talked with nostalgia about the military. Upon his return to Saltash, he worked as a house framer. Whenever the opportunity arose, he searched out construction work in disaster areas. Homestead after Hurricane Andrew. North Dakota after the Red River flood. Cheap motels and road food were perks for Tommy Shalhoub. He watched Weather Channel the way most people read the help wanted ads. He was out of town for months at a time. I had chosen Tommy to call because asking for help was as easy for me as taking a knife to my flesh, and I did not expect to find him at home. I was even more surprised when he sought me out at the nursery.

Tommy arrived accompanied by the pounding bass of the tape deck in his pickup, a noise that carried above the wind and the creaking joists of the greenhouse and the water I was draining out of the artificial pond. Tommy marched across the gravel floor. His presence seemed to
disturb the air, to cause a sudden vibration of molecules like the rumble of a nearing motorcycle. “Dav-eee, what ch’up to?”

“Every time I put goldfish in this damned pond, they disappear. No floating bodies, not even a skeleton. I don’t understand it.”

“I mean in your life. I mean tonight. Let’s have some fun. I got ideas.”

“The last one was Lisa.” She was a bank teller in her early thirties, a former girlfriend of Tommy’s with a cocaine sniffle and hips that could slide into a child’s pair of jeans. I knew she was coming off a bad relationship, and she knew I was on the make. We had sex twice, the way you draw water from an old stone well, trying to get what you need without falling in.

“Yeah, Lisa, Lisa,” Tommy said. “What’s she doin’?”

“Looking very hard for someone to take care of her.”

“Listen t’me, Davey. I gotta ask y’somethin’.” Tommy wore a thin leather jacket over a V-neck tee. Thirty-five degrees outside: no muffler, no hat, a blue crucifix tattooed on the back of his right hand. “You know my girlfriend, Michelle?”

“I met her last year at a baseball game.” Cape Cod league. Tommy had left us alone in the bleachers for an hour. Wouldn’t say where he’d gone.

“I remember that, yeah. You explained all the rules to her. But that was a different Michelle. This one has a friend who just moved back to town.”

“Tommy, I’m not looking to be fixed up.”

He didn’t sound surprised. “If I was seeing a certain lady lawyer, I wouldn’t either.”

Tommy had been married and divorced twice. For all I knew, Judith might have represented Tommy in a court case or fought him on behalf of one of his ex-wives. I wasn’t about to feed him information about Judith’s private life. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then what’s the problem? This girl’s name is Crystal. She used to live in town. She just moved into Michelle’s with her kid. He loves baseball.”

“You’ve got two women on your hands? Is that it?”

“Hey.” He threw up his palms, no contest. “If it doesn’t fit in your busy schedule …” Tommy brushed past me to kneel at the pond. “What the fuck is that?” A black slime-encrusted lump rose from the murky bottom, projecting its head like a snake.

“A turtle?”

“A snapper!” Tommy said as the thing opened and closed its jaws. It had obviously lived on the bottom for months, dining on goldfish. It
scrabbled for purchase, preparing to lunge. Tommy clopped into the pond, sinking to his ankles, and grabbed the thing by the rim of its shell. Flailing its limbs, it pissed like an open drain while Tommy held it at arm’s length, staring into its ancient eyes. I told him sure, he could have it. He strolled out like a boy of twelve enchanted with his latest find.

As Passover approached, Judith asked me to join Gordon and her, his daughter Natasha, and a few friends, for a small seder. I was surprised. “Gordon told me he wasn’t into that stuff,” I told her. He’d been telling me where he grew up: “Jewish Cincinnati,” he’d said. “But I was never into
that stuff
.”

“He’s finding his way back,” Judith said. It was obvious why. I wanted to accept her invitation, but Passover was the one religious ritual we observed in my family, and it was always spent at Holly’s.

Passover was early that year. It fell the day after Gordon’s sixty-ninth birthday, which Judith insisted I come over to celebrate. Judith said she would be cooking for two days, today for his birthday and tomorrow for Passover.

The door was opened by a young woman who looked me up and down with open curiosity. I expected indifference or hostility, but there was something in her glance that spoke of complicity. “You’re David Greene? I’m Natasha Stone.”

She had red-blond hair and Gordon’s eyes in a sharp pointy face. All elbows and knees and attitude, she was grinning like a hungry fox. “Come right in. Judith’s finishing up the asparagus soup.”

The dining room table was not set. “Do you need some help?”

“We’re not eating here.” She lowered her voice. “Daddy’s having a bad day, so Judith set things up in his bedroom.” She read my expression. “Just act like everything’s normal.”

Judith kissed me briefly on the mouth as I came into the kitchen. Then she handed me a tureen of hot soup.

Gordon was sitting up in his queen-sized bed with bookshelves built into the headboards, wearing a plaid nightshirt and looking gaunt. He was even thinner than the last time I had seen him, and there was a bluish cast to his face. His nose seemed to have lengthened. Across his lap, a wooden tray table squatted. Judith had set up card tables on either side of the bed so that Natasha could eat at one and Judith and I could share the other. With the meal, we drank champagne.

If I stepped back from the scene, it was bizarre, Gordon in bed and us at card tables eating roast lamb with garlic potatoes, baby string beans, and for dessert, a strawberry pie; Gordon, his wife, his wife’s
lover and his youngest daughter. Gordon rallied and was bawdy and cheerful, holding forth about everything from why asparagus made urine smell weird, to the history of Passover and the birthday customs of different cultures. Natasha was obviously crazy about her father and close to Judith. She kept taking me in with sideways glances, no flirtation but a powerful curiosity. After we cleared the remains of the meal, Natasha said, “I always take a birthday picture of my dad, just like he always takes one of me. He started it when I was a baby. This time, you both get in it.” So Judith, in her black velvet dress, and I climbed on the bed. Natasha took several shots before she let us get up: Gordon with his arms around both of us, Judith and I lifting our glasses to her behind the lens. I couldn’t remember a livelier dinner party or a better meal, and strangely, it felt natural. I was half sorry to miss Passover with them.

The next night, I was off to Marty and Holly’s. No one in the family would ever say it, but the truth is, Holly married above herself. Ever since she had first brought Marty home, I sensed she was a little ashamed of us. Marty’s father and mother both taught at Harvard Medical School. Their brick colonial on Commonwealth Avenue outside Boston was the kind of home that made my mother sigh. In my parents’ presence, the Doctors Sterling wore the kind of patient smiles you see on politicians touring a public school. At the wedding they stayed long enough for pictures and left before the cake. Since my father’s death, they no longer invited my mother for Thanksgiving dinner, and Marty himself ignored her unless she came to babysit.

My mom was referred to as “a big girl” by those who liked her, a full-figured woman. With long legs and large feet, she was taller than my father by three inches, although soft to his rigid, tight-bodied intensity. She spoke in a rich alto (in fact she conducted the local choir), and this almost manly voice, coupled with her size and a strange birthmark on her forehead, the color and shape of a spilled cup of coffee, had set her apart from others all her life. She was impatient with herself, obviously anticipating criticism before she received it, and an embarrassing flirt. She tended to treat me and Holly (and my father when he was alive) like a painting she could never quite get right. Holly was hardworking and cautious to a fault, but my mom usually found one. Marty wrote a column once, comparing my mother to a Mobil Travel Guide Inspector and his house to a hotel that couldn’t get more than two diamonds. It was very funny and widely reprinted, and Holly and I hated it. Our mom wasn’t easy but we resented her being exposed as a national mother-in-law joke.