by Jane Smiley
“Yes, it is, because after they dug the percolation holes, they got the backhoe back out and dug some more deep holes on some of the other flat ground, and the clay layer came up to eighteen inches below the surface.”
“There’s five hundred and eighty acres of ground out there.”
“But between the wooded sections and the hills and the buildings that we wanted to keep for the clubhouse and the equestrian center and the golf course and all, there isn’t much leeway. I’m telling you, you put that place back on the market at a moderate price and we can get out of this with our shirts. Remember how old Thorpe died on Friday the thirteenth? That was a sign.” I hadn’t noticed, but Gordon would have, and did.
“What did Marcus say?”
“Ah, he’s got some idea. I just tuned him out. I got a feeling about this one, Joe, and it’s not a good one. It’s a run-for-your-life feeling.”
“You know, when I had it on the market before, I hardly even had anyone look at the place.”
“That was the price. I’m telling you, you put it out there at the right price, and someone will show up.”
“Okay.”
I got to the office at nine. The phone rang as I was hanging up my coat.
Marcus said, “Meet me out at the farm at three.”
“I hear it didn’t perk.”
“I never expected it to perk.”
“You didn’t?”
“Nah. I had the engineer go over the soil maps with me weeks ago. There’s clay everywhere out there. According to old records, that was always considered poor farm country. I guess that’s why the Thorpes got it cheap for their horses.”
“Gordon is freaking out.”
“I know. I spent all afternoon Saturday trying to talk to him. Where were you, anyway?”
“He told me to put it on the market.”
“He did?”
I could tell Marcus was genuinely surprised.
“Yeah. He said price it moderately and get rid of it.”
“Can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because the bank would be a little upset if we sold it at half the price they appraised it at.”
I had forgotten about that.
“I mean, we can do it if we have to, but my opinion is, Gordon’s just panicking. I always thought—” As usual, Marcus sounded relaxed and congenial. I remembered him telling me that there are no big deals. He went on. “I’m going to tell you exactly what we’re going to do and how it’s going to work and why it’s going to work. I tried to tell Gordon, but he just wouldn’t hear me, and finally Betty sent me home. She was nice about it, but she meant it.”
“She’s the one you’ve got to convince.”
“No, you’ve got to convince.”
“Why me?”
“Aren’t you the elected son?”
“I’ve heard that.”
“Well, now it’s your turn.”
Salt Key Farm was carefully under wraps. The gate was padlocked. The flowers and vines and shrubbery, in addition to being dormant, of course, were cut back and banked with mulch. The blizzard had passed north, so the landscape still had the comforting brown look of late autumn. The drive had been raked of leaves; everything still exuded care, and that feeling would be an excellent selling point, but when Marcus’s Caddy pulled up behind my Lincoln, I knew in an instant there was going to be no selling. He opened the door smoothly and seemed to roll out of the car and up the steps to where I was standing. He was wearing Timberland boots and jeans, a red wool sweater, and a black goose-down vest. He looked no less perfect than usual, his outfit was just from a different part of the magazine.
“So, listen,” he said, taking my elbow and turning me so that I was looking west from the house. “My first thought was a sand mound, of course. There’s a kind of dip in the elevation just past that line of trees over there, not far from the horse barns, where a sand mound would more or less disappear, but the guy—you know, Bob, the engineer—said no sand mound. It doesn’t perk enough even to support a sand mound.”
“If we divided it into ten-acre parcels, they would qualify as mini farms and—”
“Shit, man! Can you see this place turned into mini farms? Talk about Dogpatch! Nah. We can’t afford mini farms. In the first place, the whole back three hundred acres doesn’t have thirty building sites and we’d have to put in miles of road and telephone poles. We’re in too deep for mini farms, my man. Way too deep!”
“We’re in way too deep for lots of things.”
“You don’t sound like a guy who hasn’t had to come up with a single payment yet. You know who I met? The other night at a party for the investment firm I was working for?”
“Who?”
“Your ex.”
“Sherry?”
“You got more than one? She gave me such a look when I told her I knew you and how.”
“What kind of a look?”
“The look of a woman who let her meal ticket get away.”
“Believe me, it was not without a fight.”
“I’m sure not. She served our table herself, and when the guy next to me pushed his salad aside after she set it down, she pushed it right back in front of him.”
I laughed and we went down the steps.
He said, “She’s right.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. She let a big meal ticket get away.”
“Sure. Well, keep it to yourself.”
“Nah, listen. Did you see that place up the road, right by the intersection?”
“I knew that came on the market.”
“Eighty acres and a couple hundred feet of road frontage or so.”
“It’s a nice farm. But we have a farm.”
“We’re going to put a branch of Portsmouth Savings on a couple of acres in there, along with our permanent offices, a small office building, a gas station, and a gourmet market. I don’t know what else. Housewares are big. You know, pots and pans from France with copper bottoms. Dish towels from Provence. That sort of thing.”
“Very nice, but it’s not zoned commercial. They haven’t zoned anything in this area commercial since the sixties.”
We walked down the driveway, then veered off to the west until we came to a big field. You could still see the pockmarks of the holes they had dug and filled in when they were perking the place. Dry grass, very good dry grass, turfy and thick, whispered beneath our steps. I said, “This is such a beautiful place. It makes you happy to look at it, so I always wonder when I’m walking around somewhere like this why the people who built and owned these places were never happy.”
Marcus looked at me. He said, “They weren’t?”
I looked at him. I thought he was joking, but his gaze was open and surprised. I said, “No, they weren’t. Haven’t you even seen Citizen Kane?” Actually, saying this gave me a chill. I suddenly remembered the way Mrs. Thorpe’s sister advised her to sell this very place. “Mrs. Thorpe said she didn’t have very good memories of living here.”
“They’re happy,” he said. “They just don’t tell the rest of us about it. You know, I knew this kid from my high school. He got a scholarship and went up to Yale. Anyway, he came home Christmas of his freshman year, and we were at a party. We were out smoking in the backyard. I’ll never forget him turning to me and saying, ‘Burns, you just can’t imagine all the stuff they have at that university. You name it, they’ve got it. If the guys from our neighborhood knew what they had, there really would be a revolution.’”
“All right, but it didn’t perk.”
“Nope, doesn’t perk, so no septic, not even with a sand mound. That means there’s more opportunity here than we thought, because we’re going to have to build a sewage plant. Now, you can build a sewage treatment plant for a hundred houses, and the cost is prohibitive, or you can build a sewage treatment plant for four hundred houses, and the cost is still prohibitive, but actually not all that much greater than for a hundred houses. But if you lay some pipe, you can link it up
with your little shopping center and your other development a couple of miles down the road, a more modest development of, say, three-bedroom houses on quarter-acre lots. Two hundred houses there, four hundred houses here, the little shopping center—I think Jim Crosbie is going to go for it in a big way, especially when he realizes that with this deregulation of the S and Ls that Congress just passed, he can get a branch of his savings-and-loan out here before anyone else thinks about it. And they’re going to let S and Ls develop properties now. It looks to me like they’re going to let them do just about anything they want, and maybe you and I don’t think Crosbie’s the man to do it, but he does, so we work with him. I can deal with him. Say, where were you over the weekend?”
“This area still isn’t zoned commercial. No one out here is going to want commercial zoning, either.”
“Where’s the mandated low-income housing in this township?”
I smiled. I said, “Gordon did that once, about fifteen years ago, when he was putting in Lawrence Hills Estates.”
“Did what?”
“Told the zoning commission that he was going to put a trailer park in Lawrence Township, since there wasn’t one—or any other kind of low-income housing either. They changed the one-acre minimum to accommodate his quarter-acre lots at the next meeting of the zoning commission.”
“A savings-and-loan branch and a few tasteful and convenient stores and some office space would brighten the area up, is what I think. And with six hundred houses, there would have to be a school. That’s always a lucrative project.”
“Are you going to call this place Marcusville?”
“Phoenix Park. Look at this.”
We had been walking in an arc from the house. The grounds were not exactly lawn and not exactly pasture but a cultivated, gentle slope punctuated by solitary spreading trees that had been shaped over the years to frame the view of the house. At the bottom of the slope, we entered an open glade that ran along a sizable creek. Marcus grinned. He said, “This flows into the Nut down from Blue Valley. I think we can also get into the water business.”
“You can’t take water from the creek, Marcus. Then you get the whole state into everything.”
“Maybe later. I’ll look into it. Maybe I’ll run into someone with an idea. But the main thing is not to let Gordon get cold feet at this point. You need to talk to him.”
“Why me?”
“He doesn’t quite trust me. He thinks I’m too glib.”
“I don’t know that Gordon listens to me. Mostly over the years I’ve listened to him.”
“Shit, that’s your advantage, man! All these years you’ve listened and learned, and now you’ve got an opinion of your own, something worth hearing, because you normally keep things to yourself, but this you can’t keep quiet on, because you don’t want this opportunity to slip away, right?”
“Well—”
“Shit!” He spun around. “You know what? I always know what’s going on. When Justin was born, the cord was wrapped around his neck. We were in the delivery room, and Linda was breathing and all, and she hadn’t quite gotten to—what do they call it?—the final push, and I was looking at her face, and then I looked down at her belly and I saw him in there with the cord tight around his neck, and I stood up and grabbed the OB by the shoulders and shouted in his face, ‘The cord is choking him!’ Thank God the guy just put her under and opened her up right there, in like two minutes, and sure enough. But I wasn’t surprised. It was as simple as reading a book.”
“But that’s not the same—”
“As what? As knowing what this place is going to look like and be like? As seeing our money turn over and over and over until it’s worth billions?”
“Billions?”
“Billions.”
“More than one billion? Because you know even that Wal-Mart guy down in Arkansas is only worth a couple of billion. And he’s the richest guy in America.”
“It’s all changing! I’m telling you, this time last year I was reading income tax returns. It’s like reading the book of the future, to read income tax returns all day. There’s money everywhere! Money money money! You know what they say at the IRS? Reported income is like cockroaches. For every dollar you see, there are a hundred more in hiding. And it’s looking for a home! Don’t you understand how things work? There’s a lot more money than there are good investments, or even investments at all, even bad investments. I mean, you go to the racetrack and all these guys are placing bets. What does that tell you, first thing?”
“I don’t—”
“It tells you people have too much money, even down-and-outers, even dedicated track bums whose idea of a day’s work is finding a tipster who knows a guy in the barn. Money these days is like water. It can’t stop looking for a place to go. It’s filled up all the places it usually goes, and now it’s lapping at the shore and seeking out other nooks and crannies. I always look at questionable investments, you know, to see how much extra money there is. Pretty soon, the people who have the money don’t care what the return is. They can take a tax loss if the return is negative, and that’s worth something too.”
“But look at interest rates. If there was all that money, interest rates wouldn’t be so high.”
“I don’t agree with that. That’s what they tell you, but it’s not true. My analysis of high interest rates has to do with the shakeout of the banking system. That’s another aspect of too much money. The banking system is being flooded with money and all the investors, especially the institutional investors, like the Soviet Union—”
“The Soviet Union?”
“Sure. You don’t think they aren’t big participants in the worldwide capitalist system, do you?”
“I don’t know, I—”
“Look at that house.”
I looked up the hill at the crisp granite lines of the house, the windows across the front, the shrouds around the shrubbery, the graceful arching branches of the trees.
“It’s so small. As long as you think of it as big or imposing or impressive, you won’t understand what’s going on. You can’t be intimidated by what you see, or you won’t think up anything new. If you’re afraid of something, like a big number or whatever, then your mind sort of locks up and nothing else can get in there. You know that feeling?”
“Well, sure.”
“What I think is that every moment of fear is a lost moment of imagining something new. You said that the state wouldn’t go for the water plan. Okay. Maybe not; we can decide about that later. But If I look at the creek, and think, Oh, it runs all year round and runs pretty good, what does that make me think of, then, that might lead to another idea that the state wouldn’t care about. All over the world except America, you know what they drink?”
“Wine?”
“Wine is good, but no, bottled water.”
“Bottled water? Like seltzer?”
“Some fizzy and some not. It’s a holdover from the spa days, when they thought the minerals in the water would cure things. We find a spring on this property—and we easily could, given the geology of this area—and I’m telling you, we’ve got Blue Valley Mineral Water in greenish bottles shaped like flower vases, and it’s another fortune!”
I said, “You are so full of shit, Marcus.”
The day after Thanksgiving, I found myself over at Gordon’s. The festivities of the day before had sloshed over into breakfast, which had shaded into lunch, and there was quite a crowd, including Felicity, who I knew was there but hadn’t seen. I had seen Hank and greeted him in a friendly way, without an undue sense of unease. Maybe Felicity’s strict refusal to talk about him or about their marriage had had the intended effect. My relationship with him was exactly as it had always been, because I knew exactly what I had always known about him and no more.
Betty was in her element. While I was waiting, subtly, to get Gordon alone, I watched her with her granddaughters. Betty was beautiful, and you didn’t think of her as a grandmother, but she had Leslie’s
four girls, the oldest about twelve and the youngest about five, sitting at the kitchen table drawing ball gowns with colored pencils. She was flipping pancakes. “That’s very elegant, Renee. But do you really like black for a ball? Maybe a masked ball, but a wonderful Christmas ball in a golden palace? I don’t know.”
“How about navy blue?” said the twelve-year-old.
“Navy blue is for conservative little girls who will certainly end up in the Junior League in some secondary town like Hartford, Connecticut. I suggest midnight blue with some sort of silver trim. Peach, is your dress meant to be ankle length, darling?”
One of the middle ones held up her drawing and Betty looked at it, then flipped her pancakes. “Ankle length is very sexy, Peach, but you have to have just the right shoes. It’s so hard to find the right shoes. You have to go to Paris. It’s even hard to find the right shoes for an ankle-length gown in New York.”
“I’ll go to Paris, then,” said Peach.
“Excellent idea,” said Betty. “I’ll go with you.”
Peach smiled, perhaps at the thought of having her grandmother all to herself.
I was tempted to ask for something, just to be a part of the group. My mother, of course, did not have this sort of opportunity, though she would have liked to. When I was her only child, she had made something of being my mother, creating pear salads with faces and teaching me rhymes and games. But I had no children, and so our Thanksgiving the day before had been attended by my father, myself, my mother, and four ladies from the church, ages seventy-two, seventy-three, seventy-four, and eighty-six, who had nowhere else to go. Betty must have sensed me watching her, because she cast me a friendly glance over her shoulder, as if to say, If you would only listen to my advice, you would have everything you want, even the things you haven’t got sense enough to want.
I went into the living room and once again gave Gordon the high sign. Bobby, idly massaging his calf, did not look away from the television, but Norton, who had brought his family to town for the long weekend, scowled at me without, I think, actually realizing it. Then he poked Bobby, who was sitting beside him on the couch, and said, “Move the fuck over.” Bobby moved over. Gordon got up and cocked his head to motion me into the office.