by Jane Smiley
He closed the door behind us softly, with a Middle Eastern touch, I thought, my view of him now colored by Felicity’s revelations. “Ah, Joe,” he said, and strolled over to the window that looked down over the back lawn. The summer furniture was put away and the pond was glazed over with a thin layer of ice. The rope swing hung from the tree and swayed heavily, describing a small circle in the otherwise invisible outdoor breeze. “You put that place on the market?”
“It’s a bad time to put a place like that on the market, Gordon. Somebody gets out there for a look, and pretty soon he’s saying—or she’s saying, which is all the more likely—Where the hell am I? How much is it going to cost to plow the driveway?”
“Probably. Serves me right, anyway, having to do with old man Thorpe. I always said I wasn’t going to be a sucker for the blandishments of the bourgeoisie—”
“You did?”
“Well, not in exactly those words.” He smiled. “I’m telling you, those are the folks you sell to, not the folks you buy from. And it’s hard enough to sell to them. If you do, then you know who they are. But he got me.”
“Gordon, if we aren’t putting it on the market, I think we should go ahead with our plans.”
“Whose plans?”
“Yours, mine, and Marcus’s.”
“I don’t remember having a plan.”
This sounded very bad. I knew Gordon well enough to know that the very best way to get him to flee any situation was to give him the idea that he was being had. And his sense of whether he was up or down was entirely instinctive. He was a good poker player, but he didn’t count cards. I sometimes thought he sniffed the air of the room like a dog and scented some sort of subtle change in his opponents as soon as they looked at a hand. I gazed at him. He was unhappy. The key was to make him happy. He drained his cup of coffee and set the cup down. I said, “Can I get you another cup?”
“Nah.” He looked out the window. “Just don’t try to talk me into anything I know better than.”
I said, “Marcus thinks you don’t trust him.”
“I don’t. I told you that. I never trust a mick.”
“Well, you told me that, but you said that you trusted Marcus because he knows what he’s doing.”
“Did I?”
“Well, you said he knows what people want.”
“That might be true.” He reached into his back pocket, took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, and put his handkerchief away. Then he said, “But the other night he was talking to me, and I looked at him all of a sudden, and I thought, Who is this guy? I met this guy, what, six–eight months ago? And who introduced me to this guy? Bobby!” He blew air out between his lips, not quite spitting, and shook his head. “Between you and me and the wallpaper, Bobby is not such a great reference. And now he’s here in my house in the bosom of my family. How the hell did he get here? I don’t know. Just gave me a fishy feeling. I mean, everyone I know, I’ve known for twenty–thirty years.”
I said, “Okay, let’s leave Marcus out of this. I’ve got an idea. Who’s that guy you know up in the city? Zack somebody.”
“Zack Schwartz?”
“Yeah.”
“What about him?”
“Why don’t you have him come down here and look at the place. Doesn’t he buy building supplies and fixtures for fancy brownstones and apartment buildings?”
“Yeah, among other things.”
“Well, you’ve got a treasure trove of building supplies and fixtures in that place, even just in the barns and the outbuildings. Even just in the windows.You said it yourself months ago. Take the place apart and sell it piece by piece. I bet you could make back most of the purchase price, and then you could decide what to do with the land after.” Actually, I had no idea about the market for things like leaded glass, crystal chandeliers, inlaid flooring, or book-matched paneling, but I happened to know that the market for rare woods was pretty good.
“Marcus is thinking that house is going to be some sort of clubhouse.”
“But we set that aside. It’s not going to be a clubhouse if there’s no club. I’m just saying this. We put the place on the market in the spring, when it’s at its best. Who are we going to sell it to? Say some insurance mogul comes around and he’s got some money to buy it, but when he looks at the gardens and the grounds and then walks through the foyer and the library and the kitchen, he’s going to say to himself, ‘This is more than I can take care of. Where do I hire the servants?’ So let’s say we sell off the fancy stuff at a good price, and then we have the leeway to figure out the best thing to be done with the land.” Even as I was making my way through this murky idea, it was sounding almost plausible. “At least call him up and have him come down and tell you what’s salable and what isn’t.”
Gordon was looking visibly perkier. “The real money is always in things you don’t expect, like doorknobs. You know, once I bought a house in Portsmouth, nineteen-hundreds home or thereabouts, nothing special—I mean, no future on the National Register of Historic Places or anything like that—squeezed between a diner and a dress shop down on Henry Street. Anyway, it turned out that the doorknobs, of all things, were handmade in Hungary in the seventeen-fifties. Very historical doorknobs, made by some famous sculptor when he was an apprentice somewhere, and how they got to Portsmouth nobody knew, but there they were. I must have gotten twenty-five for them, and that was when you could buy a nice little house for twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars?”
“Yup. A guy came over from Europe and packed them up and took them home.”
“How did you figure out they were valuable?”
“Oh, I just had a feeling.” He shrugged, but the fact was, I had hit pay dirt with that scavenging idea. There was nothing Gordon liked better than getting something for nothing. He stood up from the desk and stretched. He picked up his coffee cup and came around the desk, taking my elbow. He said, “Come on. Let’s go see what everyone is doing.”
When we opened the door of the office, Norton was standing right there. Without blinking or making the slightest small talk, he said to Gordon, “Did you tell him to put it on the market?”
“We talked about it,” said Gordon evenly.
I said, “It’s the wrong time of the year, right now, but—”
Norton scowled. Gordon pushed past him in a practiced way, and I was right behind him, but Norton put his hand on my arm and more or less stepped in front of me. I stopped. He said, “Are you guys out of your minds? Has it occurred to you that this guy is an IRS agent?”
“He was an IRS agent. I thought that was one of his attractions, Norton.”
“Yeah, well, how about undercover investigation? How about this unreported commission and this other unreported sale? Who says he’s doing what he says he’s doing? My guess is, he’s been sent out here to—”
I stared at him in disbelief.
“Fine. Fuck. See what I care. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“I won’t.” I started to ease past him.
“And another thing. You do something he doesn’t like, and that whole tax bill? Back bigger than ever.”
“Maybe so.” By this time, all I wanted to do was get away from him. He had that effect on people, always had.
Felicity was in the kitchen, looking rumpled and sleepy. She smiled when she saw me and gave me the expected sisterly kiss. She was wearing checked pajamas and sheepskin slippers. Hank was behind her, leaning into the refrigerator, his back turned to us. He said, “I think I’ll go out and pick up a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs. It looks like your mother is running out.” I thought, So this is it, this is how we go on, and while he was talking and I was thinking this, Felicity was introducing her fingers between the buttons of my shirt and tickling my chest, which was so dangerous and exciting that I stopped thinking entirely. By the time Hank had turned around, Felicity was yawning, her arms stretched over her head. She said, “Oh, honey, bring me back a Coke, would you? They’re
out of that too. Are you leaving, Joey?”
I spoke casually. “I’m going back to the office.”
Hank said, “I’ll walk out with you.”
Felicity kissed him on the cheek, as she had just kissed me. She said, “Drive carefully, sweetie.”
He nodded.
Of course, I could not help being hyper-aware of Hank as we ambled toward the front door. His nearness made me edgy. I gauged whether he was taller than I, better looking than I, younger or older than I in less than a second, and not voluntarily. I must have sighed. He said, “Something wrong?”
“What? Oh, no.”
“You were breathing heavily.”
“I was?”
“You were.”
“Hunh,” I said.
We opened the door and went out into the cold, me first, him closing the door behind us. All of a sudden, he said, “Hey.”
My heart jumped, and I felt the back of my neck turn to rock.
He said, “I want to talk to you about something.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.” He turned to face me. “Listen.”
I wondered if he was going to poke me in the nose.
He said, “You guys really going to build four hundred houses on the old Thorpe place?”
I nearly fell down with relief. “I don’t know. Depends on the waste-treatment situation. The place didn’t perk, you may know.”
“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
THE 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 he
r, 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: