Good Faith (21 page)

“I heard that. But I also hear Bobby pushing Gordon to build a sewage plant last night after dinner, saying you were all for it and the other guy too. Marcus.”

“We’ve barely talked about it.”

“It’s a shitty idea.” He sniffed, and some of his too long, too lank hair fell onto his forehead. There was a moist quality about him that put me off.

“Maybe, but—”

“That whole end of the county should be kept as is. That end of the county doesn’t need to be developed. Doesn’t make sense.”

“We don’t know yet if it makes sense—”

“There’s nothing out there! You want to put something out there that wouldn’t naturally come there, that will have a lot of negative environmental impacts. I wouldn’t even support a golf course. You know what kind of pesticide and fertilizer runoff you get with a golf course? And then four hundred lawns on top of that? Lawns disgust me.”

“They do?”

He looked actually angry. I had never seen anyone angry about lawns before. “Yes .  .  .0A0;    they .  .  .do.”

“Oh.”

“Now, Joe, we’ve known each other for a long time, right?”

Had we? I said, “Right.”

“Why would you go out on a limb for something like this? I don’t understand it. I’ve never seen you as a slash-and-burn developer type. I mean, you recycle. You sell old houses and then find contractors for people to help fix them up. I actually think that’s an admirable thing, a type of conservatorship. I’ve often thought you do good work. Don’t undo in a couple of years what you’ve spent almost twenty years building.”

“Well, I—”

He put his hand on my shoulder. He said, “Sorry to lose my temper there for a moment.”

“That’s okay, I—”

“We’ll talk again.” He nodded and then trotted down the steps. I         followed more slowly, watching as he went to his car, opened the door, and got in. I have to admit, I was offended. All the way to the office, my thoughts ran along Who-does-he-think-he-is? lines. It was his manner that annoyed me, I told myself, just that hint of self-righteousness, that idea that he had exonerated me of slash-and-burn! It went on and on, even though I knew perfectly well that he had a right to his opinion and I was sleeping with his wife to boot.

Back at the office, I called Marcus and told him he had some time; Gordon was going to think about recouping some of his investment by selling off the interior of the buildings and the house. Marcus said, “That’s what you talked him into?” He sounded nonplussed.

“It was a spur-of-the-moment argument. He got happy, though.”

There was a long silence. Then Marcus said, “Well, I see your point. I do see your point. I definitely want him happy.”

CHAPTER

14

T
HE SLOANS CLOSED
on their new house a couple of weeks before Christmas, and the folks they were displacing, the Meyerses, closed on their new townhouse half an hour later. It was a profitable morning for me, because still another buyer, this one a single woman who was a new dean at Portsmouth Junior College, was closing on a nice house in Farmington, not far from where my parents lived. That neighborhood, though modest, had held its value, and Dr. Montague paid $80,000 for a house that friends of my parents had bought in 1936 for $6,000. It was a successful morning all around: happy buyers, happy sellers.

Thus it was with some surprise that I received a phone call several days later from Carla King, a Realtor with a big firm in Portsmouth. She said, “Joe, isn’t this guy George Sloan your client?”

“He was. We closed Friday. They looked for—”

“You know that house Swallow Properties had listed?”

“The Hollywood place?”

“Yeah. Well, it’s our listing now. I’ve had it for about a month.”

“Good luck, it’s rotten from top to—”

“He’s still got a key. I don’t want to have to change the locks; they’re old and they’re all brass and everything.”

“Have you spoken to him?”

“Four times. He keeps putting me off. It gives me the creeps.”

“I’ll speak to him.”

“I wish you would. He seems very strange to me.”

“He does? I always think of George Sloan as Mr. Normal.”

“Oh, no. No, no, no.”

“Well, I’ll call him. Do you have any nibbles on that place?”

“Maybe for a restaurant. There’s a couple of guys down from New York. A chef and an investor. A
destination eatery
they keep calling it.”

“They’re going to need plenty of money to fix that roof.”

“Oh, they’ve got two of the most profitable restaurants in the city, and a TV show. Money is no problem.”

George Sloan’s secretary answered and put me through to George. He answered in his office-supplies-distributor voice, very deep and a little hard. I identified myself. His voice softened and rose slightly. I said, “Mr. Sloan. Glad I got through to you. How’s the move coming?”

“A week from Monday. I guess we’ll be moved in by Christmas.”

“You got a good deal on that house. I’m sure you’ll like it.”

“The kids are excited.”

“I don’t know if you remember that hillside house, the one with the upside-down roof?”

I waited for acknowledgment. It came.

“Well, they need the key back. The Realtor said you can just slip it in an envelope and mail it over.”

“Yeah.”

“Soon, though, or they’re going to have to change the locks.”

He didn’t say anything.

“That place is going to be a bear if they have to change the locks. Very inconvenient.”

Nothing.

“Here again, I’d have to say the former Realtor did you a favor by letting you go over there on your own, that’s really not allowed, and probably she let you do that because she didn’t think she was going to find a buyer, but now they’ve got some restaurant people down from New York who are interested, very interested, so it’s important that you return the key
ASAP
.”

“Yeah,” said Mr. Sloan. Carla was right. A little creepy. Not tremendously creepy, as if he were entirely unlike himself, but a little creepy, as if the George Sloan I knew weren’t all the George Sloan there was. “Yeah,” he said, more loudly and firmly. “Yeah, I’ll have my secretary send it over today.”

Apparently, on Monday, the day of the move, George Sloan was not around to lend a hand, nor did he turn up on Tuesday, which was the day Carla King realized that the key had never gotten back to her, though it was over a week since my reassuring call, and on Wednesday, she called Mrs. Sloan. In the meantime, Mrs. Sloan had called the county sheriff’s office. Everyone put two and two together, and on Wednesday afternoon, Carla, the sheriff, and Mrs. Sloan found Mr. Sloan camped out in the old house. He had a cot, a kerosene lamp, a little stove, and some other supplies. On Thursday, it was in the paper, which is where I found out about it. The article was titled,
LOCAL MAN SQUATS IN HISTORIC HOME
and read, in part:

There aren’t many neighbors, but if there were, they might have reported ghosts, or at least odd doings in the old Horner House, which overlooks the Jamaican Valley from its perch on the side of Glass Mountain, west of Cookborough. George Sloan, of 456 Meadows Drive, Monhegan, has apparently been staying in the house from time to time for the last three or four months. He was found there Wednesday afternoon by his wife, Torey Hayward Sloan; the Realtor who lists the house for a local real estate firm; and Sheriff Andrew Slater. He had been missing from his own home since Monday.

The Horner House, also formerly known as the Glenwood Estate, was owned by silent screen movie star Marydelle Horner McCue, and was built in 1924. In its day, it was famous for the parties given there by Miss Horner, as she preferred to be called, and her New York friends. Marydelle Horner, known in her movie days as Della, the Darling of the Polo Set, specialized in movies about runaway rich girls and Palm Beach scandals, though she was actually born and educated in Denver, Colorado, the fourth daughter of the owner of a dry-goods store, before moving to Atlantic City in 1919, at age sixteen, in search of celluloid stardom. Her mentor was the famous German director, Mauritz Goffman. Her original name was Hilda Veck. Ms. Horner died in 1954, from the complications of alcoholism. There was some evidence of suicide, but her son, flyer Rolf Horner, forbade an autopsy. There was no evidence of foul play.

The Horner House then was the subject of a disputed—

I skipped down to the bottom of the article. The last paragraph read:

Mr. Sloan had little to say about his reasons for squatting in the house, except that he found the view restful and the situation a pleasant one. According to Ms. King, the Realtor, the Horner estate, which owns the house, will not press charges. She went on to say, “I understand the Sloans contemplated purchasing the house at one point, which I certainly believe, since it is a unique and historical house and very reasonable in price.”

There was no mention of the upside-down roof.

What do you know? I thought.

My problem about Felicity had several aspects, which I had organized in my mind. One was that we had gone too far. The trip to New York had been too much fun and too intimate. If I hadn’t experienced that, I might not now be ruminating obsessively about some way into the future for us both, in a manner that allowed not just sex but conversation, companionship, long hours together. The aspect that sat right next to that first one was that we could go no further now that we had gone too far. You didn’t have to think about it more than a few seconds to understand the whirlwind we would get into—I would get myself into—if Betty got to know, or Gordon, or my parents, or even Marcus—even Crosbie and Bart, for that matter. Imagine a group of friends and family sitting around an outdoor table, eating peacefully. Imagine the umbrella shading them. Imagine the pole of the umbrella going through the circular hole in the table and then into the patio. Imagine a stick of dynamite inside the pole. Imagine them laughing, and then imagine a trusted member of the family lighting the dynamite. I wanted to be that guy I had been in the fall, ready for anything, equally ready for nothing. If I could be that guy again, Felicity and I could go on as before, keeping our perfect balance between frustration and delight. She didn’t call and she didn’t call, and then she did. Bobby was sitting at his desk. The phone had a long tangle of a cord, and I took it into the storeroom and closed the door. Then I sat down on a box and stared at the way the black coil was pressed against the doorjamb. She said, “What are you wearing?”

“A big hard-on.”

She giggled.

“How about you?”

“Jeans. No underwear. No bra.”

“When are you coming over?”

“I don’t know. On holidays everyone is around.”

“Your brother is in the next room. He’s listening outside the storeroom door, for all I know.”

“Then you shouldn’t refer to him as my brother.”

“Do you have any nude pictures of yourself?” This was my solution. I had asked for them before.

She didn’t say anything.

“Just to get me through the winter.”

“If I say yes, you’ll think I’m a wanton hussy, and if I say no—”

“You
are
wanton, Felicity. But—”

“I am with you. Anyway, no. And it’s very sordid and exciting for you to ask. Thank you.”

“I’ll take some. Come over. I’ve got a Polaroid for taking pictures of houses.”

“No, I want to present you with them.” She giggled again; then the receiver went dead, the cord tightened against the doorjamb, and I heard “Shit!” from the office. I stood up and opened the door. Bobby was sitting on the floor. He exclaimed, “What the fuck are you doing with the phone, man? I nearly killed myself!” But it turned out that he just jammed a couple of fingers against the bookcase and bruised his forehead.

On Christmas Eve, 1982, I was almost forty-one years old. I could not see anything wrong with my life. I felt good: old enough but not too old and better than I had felt at thirty, still married then and, it seemed in retrospect, inured to keeping my head down and trying not to cause, or at least get into, trouble. In the past ten years my parents had given up on me, which was more or less a good thing. Though I didn’t share their beliefs and I hadn’t produced grandchildren, I was gainfully employed and we got along amicably. On Christmas Eve I took them a present, a plum pudding of just the sort my father recalled from his youth, wrapped in a cheesecloth soaked in brandy and accompanied by a jar of hard sauce. When I went into the dining room and set it on the table, we stood back for a moment, and then my mother put her arms around my waist and gave me a squeeze. She said, “You are always a thoughtful boy, Joey. Don’t think I ever forget that.”

I returned her squeeze. I knew that my thoughtfulness was not exactly cold comfort compensation for the other things, but maybe cool comfort. I was a disappointment but at least likable, and that was not unimportant to them. How many times had I listened to them deplore the way some of the children of their friends treated their parents—disrespectful, or inattentive, or argumentative. At least I was none of those things.

My father came in from the kitchen with a box of kitchen matches, which he set down on the table. Then he relieved the heavy dark pudding of its brandy-soaked wrappings, my mother lifted it carefully out of its box and placed it in the center of her Royal Doulton cake stand, and my father set it afire. After it was well lighted, and burning with a steady but almost invisible blue flame, he stepped back and took my mother under his arm, and they watched it with happy smiles on their faces. He gave her a little squeeze and kissed her on the forehead when it was all burned down and, supposedly, all the alcohol in the brandy had been dissipated. Then my father lifted his voice and exclaimed, “Thank You, Almighty Father, for this delicious and traditional treat, which reminds us simultaneously of Your bounty, of our son’s kindness, of the abundant year just ending, and of the abundant year yet to come. It reminds us also, O Lord, of our loved ones who taught us of Your love and have gone before us into Your mansion, where they await our coming with the same eagerness that we await seeing them again. Tomorrow we celebrate the birth of Your Son, for whose coming we thank You, Father. Amen.” He spoke without self-consciousness, because giving thanks was something he always did, as normal for him as asking a customer how he could help her or ordering a shipment of laundry soap and toilet paper. We said “Amen” and my mother brought out three leaf-shaped dessert plates. She said, “I didn’t look for a celebration until tomorrow, but one found me anyway.”

“I knew you didn’t have any plans, Mom.”

“Well, there was a service before supper this evening. We went to that, but the congregation is so small these days. When you were a boy, all us ladies were young, and there was more a sense of Let’s-do-it-for-the-children, but now the sense is, The last thing any of us need is another slice of pie.” She laughed.

“Frank should have a membership drive; that’s what I told him,” said my father.

I nodded. My parents’ congregation was part of a sect that was peculiar but, more important, small. All of evangelical America was growing up around them without any effect on their church. The whole sect, around the nation, didn’t number more than a few thousand, and most of the members, worldwide, were in Australia and the South Island of New Zealand. There were missionaries in South Africa, Kenya, India—everywhere in the British Empire—but as the empire shrank so did the sect. When I was a boy, we had missionaries to dinner all the time and success stories abounded: a small church built here, several souls saved there. The church was making headway against ignorance and self-indulgence. But even then, the stories got told, and the jubilation was expressed, and then conversation gave way to laments about what the larger churches could afford to do, especially the Catholic Church, the all-powerful, wealthy, strangling, popish, robot-creating, idolatrous octopus whose control of otherwise beautiful and populous places like Ireland and South America and Mexico would never be broken. The worst thing that could happen would be that our missionaries would soften some souls up for salvation, and then the priests would move in and win them away with the temptations of spectacle and secrecy and conspiracy and the easy alternation of sin and absolution. Not to mention the open promotion of sex and procreation for the express purpose of increasing the number of Catholics, who, of course, were then christened before they knew what hit them, and after that carefully robbed of free will through the rote learning of the catechism. My father hated the sin, though he loved the sinner—he really detested Catholicism the way only Orangemen could do, but he was a very sociable man, who was welcoming and helpful to everyone he met, O’Houlihans and Ferraros and all. He had been the same with me—kindly and loving, on the whole, but quick to use the rod for my own good. I often thought that, but for the accident of a warm and almost jovial temperament, which most consistently expressed itself in affection toward my mother, my father would have made a sincere and effective tyrant.