by Jane Smiley
The Thorpes were out of town, I was told, so we could come over right now, which was fortunate, since Bill Avery wasn’t saying anything and my mind was a blank. I offered him some coffee, which he turned down. He looked around the office, then looked back at me. I said, “Are you ready? Shall we take my car or yours?”
He said, “What is this, about an hour and a half from New York?”
“About that, sir.”
“How come it’s so undeveloped around here?”
“Well, the main line of the railroad went southeast of here in the early part of the century, and the mountains run northwest to southeast. Most people around grew up either here or in Portsmouth. I don’t know if you’ve been to Portsmouth, sir, but some people consider it something of a blight on the landscape. You wouldn’t think of it as a gateway to paradise in the normal course of events.”
“I didn’t go through Portsmouth. I came down through this town—what is it—Roaring Falls.”
“That’s a beautiful town. Shall we go? After we see the farm, I’d be happy to drive you around the area. The valley of the Blue River is wonderfully scenic, and the towns along the Nut River are nice too. And there are some other properties available.”
After we got into my car, he was more talkative. “You grow up around here?”
“Over near Portsmouth.”
“What kind of business have you got here? How many Realtors in this office?”
“Just myself and my associate.”
“Huh. How’d you get a listing like this farm?”
“That was kind of a fluke, Mr. Avery. It’s our understanding that there is some conflict in the family. You’ve heard of the Thorpes, of course.”
“Well, sure. They’re like the Rockefellers in their way.”
“Yes, they are.”
For the twenty minutes it took us to get there, he looked eagerly out the window. When we passed through Deacon he looked at his watch, and then he looked at it again when we got to the farm. I said, “Salt Key Farm is actually closer to Aberdeen, but from my office it takes longer to go that way. My guess is that it’s about thirteen minutes to Aberdeen from the gates of the farm.”
He nodded. I pressed the gate call button, announced myself, and the gates opened before us.
We were there for hours. Bill Avery looked at every building, inside and out, up and down. We drove down every driveway and tractor path. We walked the fence lines and climbed through the fences and took in the views from any number of angles. He picked up handfuls of soil, investigated rock outcroppings, walked along Salt Key Creek for a quarter of a mile. We started at the house and we finished back at the house, and he went through the place as carefully the second time as he did the first. He didn’t say much of anything, since clearly I didn’t know the property in the sort of detail that after almost four hours he did know. Finally, he looked at me as we headed to my car. It was like being questioned by a superior officer in the navy.
“How long would it take to close?”
“Well, the escrow situation is complicated, but the sellers are planning to move on the first of October.”
“Have you had any offers?”
“At this price? No.” Not at any price, actually. “This place is a little out of the price range of anyone around here. The fact that they are selling has been fairly big news.”
“Place been perked?”
“No, but I have fairly detailed soil maps.”
“Any contingencies on the sale?”
“No relatives.”
“No relatives?”
“They don’t want to sell it to anyone they are related to.”
He laughed. “What about development?”
I licked my lips, thinking of Gordon. “I wouldn’t talk about development unless they asked about it.”
“If an offer were made by a developer?”
“Depends on whether that gets into the papers.” This, in fact, was true. Gordon had been worried about things getting into the papers himself. “I have had some interest from the state for some sort of historical site or museum. They like that idea, but the state, of course, would prefer the property to be donated.”
“Five million seems a lot for a farm that’s stuck out in the middle of nowhere, nice as the property is.”
“Well, I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Avery, the five million is for the relatives. My guess is that the sellers settled on a price they knew none of the relatives would be willing to pay. Once the Thorpes have moved to Florida, I’m not sure what the thinking will be. I don’t believe they’ve really come to terms with the idea that something different might happen to the farm. Mr. Thorpe must be in his eighties and his wife is about the same age. Their ability to grasp the various things that might happen to the farm doesn’t strike me as all that great.”
“Gotcha,” said Bill Avery. I took him back to the office by way of Aberdeen and Nut Hollow, through the Blue Valley. That took an extra forty-five minutes. I pointed out a couple of farms that I knew were on the market, but I had to admit they were smaller; one was a hundred and twelve acres and the other was two hundred and sixty acres. He didn’t want to stop. By the time we got to the office, it was past dinnertime. I suggested a place in Portsmouth, we shook hands, and the big Chrysler disappeared down the road.
I went straight to Gordon’s. Betty seemed thrilled to see me. She said, “Oh, Joey, we were just talking about you. Do you know the Websters? They have that wine store in the shopping village? Actually, they have liquor stores all over the place, but I love that wineshop. They both know everything about wine. Anyway”—she looked at me and put her hand on my upper arm—“I want to set you up with their daughter. She is just so pretty and alive! I’m so impressed with her. She’s been living in Europe for five years, Spain, and she’s been talking Spanish so long she even has a Spanish accent, can you believe that? Anyway, she was married to a Spanish young man who was very well off and upper class, but the marriage just didn’t work out. No children—I think that was part of the problem; they’re Catholic over there, you know—and she said that the parents were never in favor of the marriage in the first place. Anyway, she’s had a hard time meeting people, and you know everyone.” She kissed me on the cheek and whispered in my ear, “And you’re a good person to know anyway, if you catch my meaning.”
I was all full of Bill Avery, so this idea didn’t really gain my full attention. I saw Gordon behind her, heading for his office, and who knew who was inside; the driveway was full of cars, not all of them BMWs, so he could be hosting the poker game. “Of course, I would do anything you want, Betty, but you have to find out what this girl would actually like to do so I can plan something. I don’t want to go it alone.”
“She’s very pretty and has so much to talk about, I’m sure you’ll have a good time. She’s just thirty.”
I said, “Anything you say. I have to catch Gordon.”
He was as impressed as I was by the name Bill Avery. “You know,” he said, as he turned on the light, “I saw one of those Avery developments down in Texas, outside of Dallas, when we went down for that football game last fall. The golf course and about a third of the homes were finished, and they were nice, let me tell you, with a lot of brick and extra woodwork, the way they like it in the South—you know, you don’t have one arched door when you can have two—the sort of thing you can do with cheap labor. No basements, of course. And all the financing was out of North Carolina, even though the place was in Texas. You don’t think there’s going to be all that money in North Carolina, but I guess so. Anyway, what did he have to say?”
“Well, we walked around the farm for almost four hours. He was a fast walker, too. I think we looked at everything, but the fact was, he didn’t say much. We went through the house twice, from top to bottom. He knew what he was doing, I’ll say that.”
Gordon stared at me for a moment and then said, “Hold on.” He went out of the room and returned with Marcus Burns. I told him what I had told Go
rdon. He lit up.
“Oh, man! Oh, man! I’m telling you, that place is a gold mine! You know, I’ve got this buddy back on Long Island, he builds furniture. He’s been doing it for a hobby for a long time, supporting himself by building cabinetry in new construction. I mean, we’re talking museum-quality tables and credenzas and things like that, made of all kinds of rare woods—he has this stash of rare woods, some of them forty–fifty years old, that’s worth maybe a million bucks at this point. Anyway, he said to me six months ago when he got a commission for a fourteen-thousand-dollar table, ‘You wait. I can barely afford to build this table for fourteen thousand dollars right now, but in a year, when I build it again for someone else, it’s going to be a forty-thousand-dollar table. And then I’ll bring out the really good woods!’ That’s what this farm is going to be like. We’re shaking in our shoes about two point five million, and this guy Avery is wondering if it’s worth five, but in twenty years it’ll be worth forty, and there’ll be a buyer, too.”
Gordon looked at me.
“You know,” exclaimed Marcus, “my mom was right off the boat from Galway, and she always talked about signs and wonders! Here’s Bill Avery, just driving along, and he drives right into our lives, maybe the biggest developer in the world. You’ve got to call that a wonder, and therefore a sign. You said he didn’t want to look at anything else?”
“Didn’t even want to stop; I don’t think he more than glanced out the window at anything.”
“He’s not thinking the way we do,” said Marcus. “I guarantee you, Salt Key Farm is the only place in this area he can even see.”
“I don’t think we can lose on the Salt Key Farm deal,” said Gordon. “How long’s it been since we did the purchase agreement?”
“It runs out at the end of August,” I said. “You’ve got to come up with a quarter million.”
“I think we need get to Jim Crosbie and nail down the financing this week,” said Marcus. Jim Crosbie was the new president of Portsmouth Savings and Loan. Once again, Marcus Burns had the jump on me. I was impressed.
“This is good. This is good,” said Gordon. His voice was low. It was our secret. Gordon slapped me on the back as we went into the family room. I was happy and excited. That was a good thing, because the dark-haired woman standing by the window overlooking the backyard was Felicity. She was pushing her hair out of her face and laughing. She put her drink to her lips and then lowered it suddenly and turned to look at me. She said, very naturally, “Oh, Joey! You must have sneaked around by the back! I didn’t realize you were here. Hello, Marcus. Is Linda here too?”
Marcus shook his head. “Justin is sick. He’s been sick all day, throwing up. I just came over to see Gordon for a moment. You know what he said? I was giving him some soup, you know, where he was lying on the couch in the family room, and he looked at me and said, ‘Daddy, I am so sick, I don’t know right from wrong.’”
We laughed.
“How are you, Joey?” said Felicity.
“Busy,” I said.
“Are you and Daddy having some secret doings? I saw you sneak through, didn’t I?”
Betty came over, handed me a beer, and pinched my cheek. She said, “Do you know Susan Webster, Felicity? Her parents have the wine store? What is she, about Fernie’s age, or between Fernie and Bobby, maybe a year behind Bobby?”
“A blonde? She went off to France or somewhere years ago.”
“It was Spain. Well, she’s back. I thought Joey would be the perfect person to fix her up with. She’s very sweet. She was with her parents the other night when we saw them at Mercados.”
“Mom, she’s like twenty.”
“Not anymore. She’s thirty. Joey’s what, forty? At his age, thirty is just right.”
Felicity put her arm around me in a sisterly way. She said, “I think Joey’s better off single. Look what happened the last time he tried to get married.”
Betty said, “Oh, Felicity, for goodness’ sake.”
Felicity pinched me hard right above the waistband of my slacks, but I knew I was not supposed to react. I continued to smile. I felt enveloped by the familiarity of her scent. Her dark hair was almost but not quite in my face. I seemed to want to bury my nose and mouth in it, whether or not this was a wise idea. She said, “Well, clearly Joey can’t be trusted to choose on his own, because most second marriages end up with kids, and then—”
“We’ll choose for him,” said Betty. “Actually, you know, Jewish people have female matchmakers. What are they called, yentas? You know why? Because men have no idea what makes a good wife. But women are never fooled by other women.”
“That’s right,” said Felicity. “But that doesn’t mean you and I will necessarily agree on every prospect.”
Betty was giving me sidelong glances. “We’ll take her out to lunch, sweetie, you and I. Okay?” She laughed as she walked away.
Felicity removed her arm and backed away a step. I knew it was necessary. I had a tremendous urge to pull her back, which I dealt with by putting my hands in my pockets. I said, “Max Raymond—you know, he closed on that house on Burley Road?” Max Raymond was the friend of the Davids.
Felicity nodded. “I heard that. I drove past that house the other day.” She was better at this than I was and seemed her natural self.
Marcus Burns, who had moved off, came back. He said, “You had this virus, Joe? Amanda had it last week, and Linda had a touch of it too.”
I shook my head. Felicity said, “Hank was feeling a little under the weather this evening, but I didn’t realize anything was going around.”
She glanced at me, and Marcus Burns glanced at me. I realized I was standing like a post, a little glazed over by awkwardness. Finally, I said, “Bobby told me you sat in on the famous poker game.”
“Oh, yeah.” He grinned. “Twice now. I think the guys think I have some in with the cards, because they’ve run in my direction both times. I don’t think I’m going to be invited back.”
“I heard that,” said Felicity. “I heard they put your picture up and then hung a cross in front of it and drove a silver stake into your heart.”
“You know, when I was in the army, I got into a poker game with some officers and won a lot of their money, so they had to promote me to sergeant to try and win it back, because army regulations said officers couldn’t play with enlisted men.”
“When were you in the army?” I said.
“Right after high school. ’Sixty-five.”
“Vietnam?”
“Yes, but I wasn’t up near the front. I basically was in charge of office supplies in Khe Sanh. My job was to get rid of all the letterhead that listed one guy in command when the next guy came along. You wouldn’t believe how much paper I burned. Every commanding officer had to have a full supply of letterhead. Some of those guys weren’t around for more than a month but they hated it, just hated it, if any orders or whatever went out under the previous guy’s name, because you know in the army, the guy before you is cursed, I mean, even if he didn’t die or anything, even if he just got transferred to a new command, whatever happened to him could happen to you if you weren’t careful, so boxes and boxes of this cursed paper, out it went.”
We fell silent, turning our beers in our hands. Maybe I was the only one who felt awkward, though, because Felicity glanced around in a languorous way and said, “Really, you know, my father and mother are very strange. Sometimes I think this house is like a circle of enchantment, and if I lived outside the circle I would see everything very differently.” She turned to Marcus. “You want to know a secret?”
“Always,” said Marcus.
“Joey is the real son. He’s the elected son. My brother Norton, I don’t think you’ve met him, he’s got a terrible chip on his shoulder. He’s got a list of grievances as long as your arm, starting with birth order and running all the way through the color of the free car he got this Christmas. His was black and he wanted blue. He used to punch my sisters and me in the stomach and
actually try to hurt us. We all agreed he should have been, as my sister Sally used to say, drowned at birth. And Bobby is simply an idiot. He’s a lovable idiot, but an idiot nonetheless. I personally don’t know how someone like Daddy could get together with someone like our mother and produce two out of two bad males.” Her eyes were sparkling, looking for Marcus Burns’s reaction. “Joey, on the other hand, has no faults. He’s smart. He’s kind. He’s careful but not stuffy. He has wonderful manners, and, of course, he’s very good-looking.” She grinned at me.
I said, “Norton has many positive qualities.”
“Thank God he has them two and a half hours away.”
“Do you think she’s kidding?” I asked Marcus.
“I’m not sure.”
“She is.”
“I’m not.” She put her arm around me again and gave me a squeeze. I squeezed her back.
“I’m off,” she said. “Got to get to the grocery store before it closes.” She made a kissing face toward me, crossed the room to the kitchen, and disappeared. Marcus and I stood there for a moment. Then he said, “So. What about Norton?”
“It’s true that Norton wasn’t very nice to the girls when everyone was growing up.”
Marcus continued to look at me.
“He and Gordon don’t seem to get along very well. I wouldn’t say that Norton is a—uh, confidant of Gordon’s. To be honest, he doesn’t come around much.”
He waited.
I said, “In my experience, Norton has a very hard time being patient. I would say that he is a little too ready to correct Gordon.”
“I can’t imagine Gordon would like that.”
“He doesn’t.”
Marcus took a sip of his beer. Finally he said, “Well, I can’t say I’ve gotten along with my dad all that well over the years. Of course, he’s gone now, but I haven’t used him as my model in trying to raise Justin.”