Strong Motion (55 page)
“God,” said John Winthrop, “hath hereby cleared our title to this place.”
Felt hats and fur clothing being the fashion in the Old World, the Indians who survived the epidemics were able to trade beaver skins for things like copper kettles and iron fishhooks that made their lives easier. Before long, though, they had plenty of kettles and fishhooks, and so they began to beat the kettles into jewelry. And when copper jewelry became so common that it lost its cachet, the Englishmen conquered the Pequots of Connecticut and exacted a tribute of wampum—polished beads made out of whelk and quahog shells—and flooded the fur market with this currency. Wampum being scarce and portable and ornamental, like gold, there was at first no limit to the prestige an Indian could gam by its accumulation. But with fewer and fewer Indians in circulation and more and more wampum, inflation inevitably set in. Soon enough every last beaver in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island was exterminated, and the least consequential Indian wore necklaces of wampum formerly fit for chiefs, and the English traders were paid in pounds sterling for the furs they shipped overseas. Every market has its winners and losers; sadly for the Indians, the sterling turned out to be a better investment than the wampum. And in the course of attaching abstract sterling prices to abstract parcels of real estate, the smartest of the Englishmen learned to live off the land with even less labor than the king-like Indians had: by buying low and selling high.
“A major question about the seventeenth century,” Bob said, “is whether the economy was subsistence-oriented, or whether there was already a capitalist mentality, and if there was capitalism, then how sophisticated was it. Real-estate speculation is a good indicator of sophistication, and there was some intriguing material there in Ipswich. Your mother was less than keen on my staying in Jack’s house, but I thought it was just her paranoia. I was still a young bastard. Even now I have no objection to drinking single-malt scotch at a corporate officer’s expense. They’re not magicians, you know—that scotch doesn’t flow from stone. Politically, of course, Jack and I were about as opposed as two people could have been—”
“This was—?”
“November ’69. I was on sabbatical. Sweeting-Aldren was shipping twenty million bucks a month worth of defoliants straight to Vietnam, also spot sales of napalm. As a direct result of which, its general counsel and senior vice president had been able to buy a million bucks’ worth of Revolutionary Era history on Argilla Road. Every morning for a week I walked up the road into Ipswich, a town granted its charter in 1630 by an imperialist-expansionist English crown, a town whose most valuable commodity by far is its own history, a town that prides itself on having been an early center of freedom of conscience and the Tax Revolution of the eighties, that is, the 1680s. While back here my students were freely expressing their consciences in protesting a war of imperialism in Southeast Asia, for which effrontery I don’t believe they enjoyed universal popular support in Ipswich, certainly not on Argilla Road. And not in the Salem courthouse either. Every day for another five days I went there and read the records of a thousand deeds. Deeds: What a word! The fact that the mighty deeds of our forefathers are recorded as the purchase of such and such triangular piece of pasture for three yearling oxen, and the sale of said piece of pasture nine months later for twelve pounds, six shillings. Such were their heroic deeds.”
“But Krasner. She was living with him?”
“No no no. If she’d moved in, it would have been the end of her. It would have made her family.”
“What was she like?”
Bob poured scotch into his tumbler. He tilted the bottle again and poured a smaller splash, and then a very small splash, as if honoring some precise limit. He took a deep breath and turned his head and gazed at the screen door, like a plaintiff recalling his assailant.
“Loud, vulgar, beautiful,” he said. “She had a big Slavic mouth, and a Slavic tilt to her eyes, long auburn hair, maybe a trace of a Slavic accent—at least she liked to drop her definite articles. She was perfect for his purposes. She had bad enough taste and bad enough manners that she’d stretch out on his lap and hang from his neck, just so there was no mistaking their relationship. Then she’d snap her fingers in his face so I could see that she had spirit. Like a half-broken horse or some other cliché that makes men of a certain bent go wild. She had one of those cello voices that make you sure the woman’s entire body is capable of tremendous resonance, under the right circumstances. A cello body too, not skinny—a body to die for. She was the kind of woman who could smoke a cigar with a smile on her face. An object whose pleasure it was to be an object. But even so, there was something strange going on between them, something particularly unloving, that I saw with my very own eyes. She’d sit at the table and stare at him and say, So when are you going to make me vice president? And he’d say, Whenever you want, and she’d say: Tomorrow. He’d shrug and say, Sure, tomorrow, but she’d keep right on staring at him, with her cigar-smoking smile, about fifty teeth showing in two curving rows, and say, Tomorrow? Good! Tomorrow you make me vice president. You’re going to do it tomorrow first thing. You said you would, right? Or are you a liar? I hope you’re not a
liar
. Bob, you heard him. He says he’s making me vice president tomorrow.”
“But she was a chemist?”
Bob held his tumbler to the light. He seemed oblivious to Louis’s presence. “Every couple of years I get a student like her. You’re almost certain they don’t understand the material, but they’re so full of confidence, and animal energy, and this idea that history is a jungle that they’re wily enough and seductive enough and important enough to survive in, that they really do survive. A dubious article on petroleum is just the kind of work that Anna would have somehow gotten published. The work may be bad, but there’s a vitality in the author that makes it hard to turn it down.”
From the darkness outside the screen door came tearing sounds, accompanied by the faint growling of a cat intent on business. A small animal was being dismembered.
♦
By the late eighteenth century, a person traveling the 240 miles from Boston to New York passed through no more than twenty miles of wooded country. Visitors from Europe commented on how scarce and stunted the trees in America were. They thought the soil must be sterile. They marveled at how the Americans wasted wood for the sake of short-term profit or convenience. At sawmills only the tallest and most perfectly formed trees were milled into lumber; all the less perfect trees had been torched or left to rot. Families built large, poorly insulated houses of wood or of wood-fired brick (the kind of houses, Bob said, that even now charmed visitors to Ipswich) and from October through April they kept fires roaring in every room.
As soon as a white American acquired land from the Indians, he tried to profit from it quickly, cutting the trees for timber or burning them for ashes if local ash demand was great enough. Otherwise he could save labor by simply killing the trees and letting decay bring them down. Crops planted on formerly forested land grew well for a few years, but without trees to capture nutrients, and with a farmer’s endeavors confined within immutable property lines, the soil soon became useless. It was a myth, Bob said, that the Indians had fertilized exhausted land with fish. The way to make a garden last ten thousand years is to rotate crops from field to field. It was the white Americans who sowed alewives with their seeds, and whose fields stank so much that travelers would vomit by the roadside.
Barred from roaming freely, cattle grazed the land more closely than wild animals had. They trampled the soil, squeezing the air out, diminishing water retention. Cape Cod had had no sand dunes when the Europeans came. The dunes developed after cows killed the native grasses and the topsoil blew away.
Lowlands, kept dry for millennia by trees that evaporated rain from their leaves, turned into bogs as soon as they were cleared; mosquitoes, malaria, and thorns moved in. On higher ground, without the shade of trees, a blanket of snow melted quickly and the ground froze deeper, retaining less water when the spring rains came. Flooding became common. Unchecked by tree roots and fallen leaves, the rain stripped the land of nutrients. Raging streams dumped topsoil into bays and harbors. Spawning fish ran into dams and mud-choked water. But in summer and fall, without forests to regulate the flow of water, all the streams became dry gullies, and the naked land baked in the sun.
So it happened that the country whose abundance had sustained the Indians and astonished the Europeans had in less than 150 years become a land of evil-smelling swamps, of howling winds, of failing farms and treeless vistas, of hot summers and bitterly cold winters, of eroded plains and choked harbors. A time-lapse movie of New England would have shown the wealth of the land melting away, the forests shriveling up, the bare soil spreading, the whole fabric of life rotting and unraveling, and you might have concluded that all that wealth had simply vanished—had gone up in smoke or out in sewage or across the sea in ships.
If you’d looked very closely, though, you would have seen that the wealth had merely been transformed and concentrated. All the beavers that had ever drawn breath in Franklin County, Massachusetts, had been transmuted into one solid-silver tea service in a parlor on Myrtle Street in Boston. The towering white pines from ten thousand square miles of Commonwealth had together built one block of brick town houses on Beacon Hill, with high windows and a fleet of carriages, chandeliers from Paris and settees upholstered in Chinese silk, all of it occupying less than an acre. A plot of land that had once supported five Indians in comfort was condensed into a gold ring on the finger of Isaiah Dennis, the great-uncle of Melanie Holland’s grandfather.
And when New England had been fully drained—when its original abundance had shrunk into a handful of neighborhoods so compact that a god could have hidden them from sight with his fingertips—then the poor English farmers who had become poor American farmers flocked to the cities and became poor workers in the foundries and cotton mills that the holders of concentrated wealth were building to increase their income. Now a time-lapse movie would have shown an exfoliation of red brick, the damming of new streams, the disemboweling of the barren land for the clay and iron ore within it, the blackening of the air, the confluence of freighters from Charleston carrying cotton, the spread of worker housing, the spread of iron, the tides of excrement and urine, the slaughter of the last wild birds that anyone would dream of eating, the smoke of trains bringing meat from Chicago to feed the workers, the weeding over of farmland, the final death of barns and farmhouses at the hands of the newly opened Middle West, but most of all: a general increase in wealth. Melanie’s great-grandfather Samuel Dennis and his industrialist and banker accomplices had learned to burn not just the trees of their own age but the trees of the Carboniferous as well, now available as coal. They’d learned to exploit the wealth not only of their own home soil but of the cottonland of Mississippi and the cornland of Illinois. “Because after all,” Bob said, “any wealth gained by a person beyond what he can produce by his own labor
must
have come at the expense of nature or at the expense of another person. Look around. Look at our house, our car, our bank accounts, our clothes, our eating habits, our appliances. Could the physical labor of one family and its immediate ancestors and their one billionth of the country’s renewable resources have produced all this? It takes a long time to build a house from nothing; it takes a lot of calories to transport yourself from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Even if you’re not rich, you’re living in the red. Indebted to Malaysian textile workers and Korean circuit assemblers and Haitian sugarcane cutters who live six to a room. Indebted to a bank, indebted to the earth from which you’ve withdrawn oil and coal and natural gas that no one can ever put back. Indebted to the hundred square yards of landfill that will bear the burden of your own personal waste for ten thousand years. Indebted to the air and water, indebted by proxy to Japanese and German bond investors. Indebted to the great-grandchildren who’ll be paying for your conveniences when you’re dead: who’ll be living six to a room, contemplating their skin cancers, and knowing, like you don’t, how long it takes to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh when you’re living in the black.”
♦
Melanie’s grandfather, Samuel Dennis III, had a Marlborough Street town house, a summer house east of Ipswich, a Dusenberg Roadster and some garden-variety debts, and he was skippering a family of six daughters, only one of them married, when a devil of the period moved him to install a stock ticker in his office on Liberty Square.
For decades the office had been little more than a place to smoke cigars and write checks to the nephews and nieces whose trusts Dennis executed. It was the terminus of various income streams rising in the mill towns north of Boston—streams that by 1920 were showing a propensity to silt up and run dry—and was the depot of old, old dollars: dollars with beaver blood on them (and mink blood and cod blood), dollars that smelled of black pepper and Jamaican rum, piney dollars from clear-cut Dennis landholdings, rusty war dollars, dollars damp and sour with the sweat of female loom operators, odd dollars of obscure provenance which at some point had decided to come along for the ride, all the dollars encrusted with long-compounded interest and no dollar, no matter how musty, any less a dollar than all the rest. Certainly a democratic nation’s stock market made no distinction between old wealth and new.
Family oral history had it, Bob said, that Dennis was very slow to realize when his speculations ruined him. For several weeks, one winter in the late twenties, he came home to Marlborough Street wearing expressions of deeper and deeper puzzlement. And then one night he died.
His body had hardly reached room temperature when his family discovered they were broke. There were even liens, or so they later maintained, on the china and linens. Daughters and widow alike faced the prospect of becoming the wards of moralizing aunts and uncles, and yet (or so they later maintained) it wasn’t themselves they felt sorry for, it was their house on Marlborough Street and their house in Ipswich. Who could ever groom and pamper those houses as the Dennises had done?