by Sarah Blake
“Did you see the article in there about shoes?” Harry Lowell threw himself into the empty chair beside Ogden.
“I didn’t,” Ogden answered, lowering the Times and repressing a sigh. They had known each other since boarding school and gone on to Harvard together. “Hello, Lowell.”
“Eighty million pairs produced nowadays, where there were twenty million before 1913. Peasants are not walking on straw, Milton.”
Caught up in the heady enthusiasms of the decade, Harry Lowell had published pamphlet after pamphlet praising the great Communist experiment: A feudal nation transformed under Stalin! Peasants eating! Children clothed! A great society! Good-looking in that loose, unfocused way that catches the eye in passing but doesn’t hold, the kind of man Ogden had grown up with and now steered clear of. A man of prodigious—and empty, Ogden felt—talk.
“The frontier for a better world,” Harry continued, “must stake itself in the necessary undoing of the moneymaking classes.”
On the polished mahogany wall behind Harry’s head, the trophies of the club’s members hung—Teddy Roosevelt’s buffalo casting a shadow over the massive fireplace.
“The undoing?” Ogden returned mildly. “Look where you are sitting, Lowell.”
Harry didn’t turn around. He had played defensive end on the Groton football team, and as far as Ogden was concerned, Lowell had always had the sweating passions of a stevedore, incapable of nuance or complexity. The high-storied windows looked placidly out over the teeming city.
“When we are cast out”—Lowell refused to be diverted—“it ought to come as no surprise.”
“I don’t intend to be cast out,” Ogden retorted, “by anyone. And especially not by an idea. I’ll put my bid on the work of good men. Every time. Men who know what they are about, men who can see better than the rest and know how to act on it.”
“Ha.” Harry was dry. “Nobility, thy name is Milton.”
“As usual,” Ogden said, looking at him, “you’ve gotten it completely wrong.”
“Have I?”
Ogden leaned back in his chair and didn’t answer.
“Listen,” Harry drawled. “I’ve had wind of something you may be interested in.”
“What’s that?”
“One of the islands up by us is for sale. Crockett’s Island. I thought you might like to come up and see it,” Harry said. “Bring Kitty. You can come stay with us on the Point, afterward.”
“Well, thank you, Harry.” Ogden was thoughtful. “Thank you very much, indeed.”
“Old man Crockett wants fifteen hundred for the house, the barn, and four hundred acres, and—”
“And?”
“Well, Lindbergh is also interested in the place. Though from what I’ve gathered”—he paused—“Lindy is hung up in Europe through the end of the summer.”
Ogden whistled.
“I thought you might like to come take a look-see first.” Harry grinned. “Get the jump on him.”
Ogden gave a long, slow smile at the man sitting across from him. Nothing would give him greater satisfaction than to pull the rug out from under Lindbergh. Watching Lindy with growing alarm as he had been lately, it was clear to Ogden that bravery notwithstanding, Charles Lindbergh was a team player only until he was handed the ball. And then he simply had to run with it. The sort of man who could not hand it off, as he ought to, the sort of man who would risk the game to score a point. The wrong sort. Lindbergh was undoing all of Ogden’s own careful work to keep the pot from boiling over, over there.
“Lindbergh ought to know better,” Ogden said. “What the hell does he think he’s doing other than lighting a match under the burner in Berlin?”
“Agreed,” Harry answered, looking at Ogden curiously.
One of the club waiters appeared. Did they want a drink?
They shook their heads.
“Along those lines,” Harry said, “Father tells me Walser’s sending his manuscript collection over here to exhibit at Harvard.”
For a brief time that first summer in 1920, Harry and Ogden had both found themselves guests of the Walser household on Linienstrasse, Harry doing business for his own father. Ogden had half forgotten the connection. He nodded. “I’d heard that. It’s generous of him.”
Harry shook his head. “Nazi showmanship. An expression of the power of the Reich.”
“He doesn’t need to share it with the world.”
Harry snorted. “Herr Walser is not concerned with the world. He is a man of property, first and foremost. I’ll bet he is sending it over here to keep it safe.”
“He’s a businessman,” said Ogden carefully.
“Meaning?”
“Business has its own politics.”
Harry snorted. “That’s the state of affairs in a nutshell, isn’t it?”
“He’s a good man,” Ogden said evenly, looking at Harry. “He’s built a great company.”
“Good returns, Milton?” Harry tented his fingers and sank further into the chair.
“Very,” Ogden answered.
“And his workers?” Harry pushed.
“His workers have bread and steady jobs. Walser is one of the ones we can count on.”
“To keep Germany out of the hands of the Communists.”
“To keep Germany stable.” Ogden didn’t hide his impatience.
“Germany is the most stable nation on the globe,” Harry observed dryly. “That’s what beatings in the streets and arrests will buy you. Order.”
“Walser’s a good man,” Ogden repeated.
“And a Nazi,” Harry observed crisply.
“He is in the Nazi Party. I draw the distinction.”
“Semantics, Milton.” Harry shook his head impatiently. “Now is the time to pull out all capital and show the Nazis—”
“Show them what, Harry?” Ogden faced him. “If we divest now, we risk setting off the tinderbox.”
“Yes”—Harry was heated—“and then Hitler will fall.”
Ogden shook his head. “Hitler will fall, and German capital will survive the Nazis.”
“So you won’t pull out?” Harry pushed. “You stay in, Milton, and you’re one of them. Can’t you see—”
“Of course I see,” Ogden broke in calmly. “But I am my own man, and more to the point, it’s not the right thing to do. The world does not want another Panic. We can’t afford it.”
“The world?” Harry rose to his feet. “You are speaking for the world now, Milton?”
Ogden looked back at him. “We see it differently, Harry. But we want the same things.”
Harry stared down.
“We see it differently,” Ogden said again.
Harry put on his hat. “So long, Milton.”
“Harry.” Ogden nodded.
He watched the other man make his way slowly from the immense sleepy room and out the door.
As a child, his father had taken him up the Erie Canal to see that great feat of ingenuity and engineering, and the lifting and lowering of the locks, the approach of the lock keeper, who turned the waters off and then on again, the running alongside the narrow barge as the waters filled and filled, and then with the wheel’s turn, the great crashing release of current had thrilled Ogden and stuck with him all through his childhood, into his twenties, when he grew to understand the water in the lock was the central principle he could live by. He liked to think of himself as the lock keeper—a steady man who believed in the water’s flow, who understood the value of keeping sluices open. This credo, more than any other, was handed down from Milton to Milton through the years. Miltons were men of character and capital. The world—he addressed Harry Lowell in his head—needed more of these, not fewer. Good men and capital invested wisely grew thick and ran strong, sustained by open channels and in the hands of those who knew what to do with them.
He stood and headed for the door.
A slight crowd had gathered on the sidewalk across the street as Ogden walked slowly down the broad stairs of th
e club and onto the pavement outside. And as he approached, he saw a man at its center standing on a milk crate, shouting. Heavyset, hoarse, his arms sunburned up to the elbow, his face weary, the man shouted out what appeared to be the same single question. “For what, at last, would you give up your life?” Men and women streamed around him, though it didn’t matter. Standing his ground, the man hurled that question like a ball into the mitt of the world. He did not care that it was not returned. He threw it over and over, insistent.
“For what, at last, would you give up your life?”
Ogden Milton slowed. The question seemed to have been hauled up out of the heat and into the air for his attention.
“For Europe?” the man cried.
Ogden stopped and searched the faces around him, listening intently as if there were something hidden beneath the words. The man beside Ogden was nodding his head, his arms crossed upon his chest, his hands jammed in his armpits, rocking back and forth on his heels.
People could not stand so much uncertainty, Ogden thought, watching the speaker start to weaken in the heat. It led to leaps of passion. Idylls. Impossible dreams that a system could save you, that the great cataclysm they were in could be solved by shifting governments. Quixotic. The man was quite likely another Communist.
And there floated Harry Lowell, a balloon of conscience. Ogden stepped back out of the crowd and continued walking, leaving the shouting man and the watchful faces behind. Harry had always been a mischief-maker, the boy at school who liked to set fires to see who’d put them out.
Yet Harry’s anger back there in the club had called to mind Elsa’s white face turned to him on that blanket in Berlin last year. Ogden straightened his shoulders.
They were wrong. That was all there was to it. He came to a stop at the corner.
The light changed, and as Ogden crossed, a woman hurried out of the awninged portico ahead of him, her heels tapping away on the pavement, calling Kitty to mind.
He stopped.
Possessed of a long, straight nose and a strong chin set atop a slender neck, when she had first turned her head upon that neck to look at him, he could not look away. “Arresting,” his mother had pronounced Kitty. And that was that. And Kitty had gone from the tall girl with a smile like a breeze in summer to the elegant, upright woman who could still make him catch his breath as she waved at him in a crowd.
Despite the last year, despite the resolute expression with which she now turned to him every morning when he left her at the breakfast table and the distant, abstracted face every evening when he returned, pushing open the door into their apartment, she remained for him his moon. The center of every room. All that was good, and right, glowed eternal in her. Cool, undiminished, his wife possessed an idea of order unchanged by the heat of fashion or enthusiasms, or passions engendered by a momentary ideal. Slim and determined, she could draw anyone out, make anyone feel right at ease—be they a child, a Midwesterner, or a Sikh. This last he had heard her boast, with the snap in her brown eyes that was hers alone, and as he knew for a fact she’d never laid eyes on a Sikh, it had delighted him to no end.
She had not had that snap in her eyes for months.
People had remarked upon how resilient, how resourceful, what a model the Miltons had been in the face of their sorrow. And on the surface they were right. It seemed Kitty had picked herself right up and thrown herself back into their life. She sent out invitations, filled the apartment with flowers, and turned, gracious and smiling, to her guests with that long, cool gaze that somehow warmed and welcomed and promised nothing but a good evening ahead.
He had watched her at the other end of their table, guiding her dinner partner toward some confidence, the slight smile that was only hers aimed at the man beside her. He had listened to her turn a conversation back away from dangerous shoals, he had smiled as she had smiled at some idiocy or a joke, and he had almost been convinced of her return. But he had come upon her too often sitting still, lost to the world, intent on returning to that day and going over it once more. She had grown opaque, tending her grief like a nun in a cell, the white walls a solace, the white walls her face.
Some things are better off left unsaid, his mother counseled. So he’d let Kitty be.
But despite himself, despite his mother’s words, he was impatient. What could he have done? What could any of them have done? It had been a year. He needed Kitty to return, take up the reins in her hands, climb back onto the box, and set the carriage going. He wanted Kitty back. All of her. He wanted her to look at him again. Only him. Not the empty place beside him where she put their little boy.
He wanted her laughing up at him, into his face, as she had that one brilliant fall afternoon, years ago, turning to him in his great-aunt’s orchard and laughing, saying, I love apples, I could make myself sick eating them all, I wish I could stop at only one apple, I wish—and he had stopped her wish and kissed her. The day had been glorious, golden and russet, and everything lay ahead of them. It was the day that beat in his chest as steady and as unchanging as his heart. An ordinary day, but the day where he knew himself irrevocably bound to her.
A gull lifted from the lamppost on the corner. Lifted and stroked the air, and then wheeled slowly overhead, past him and down Fifth Avenue to the bottom of the city, where the waters led outward to the sea. Ogden turned all the way round to follow it, his throat closing in sorrow. Down and away, he watched the sea bird’s patient, silent glide.
For what, at last, would you give up your life?
He cleared his throat, following the bird’s white body.
For her.
Seven
OUT IN THE HALL the commotion of changing classes bowled up into the arched stone ceiling of the history department. Evie made her way down the white-tiled length, leaning into the oak door of her office with her shoulder as she unlocked it, sliding in and swiftly pulling the door closed. Professor Milton was not in.
The noise shut off abruptly. Inside her office reigned the unruly clutter of a curious mind. Four bookcases groaned, the books ranging side to side, and up and down, a patchwork of color and graphics that extended one entire wall. The massive desk Evie had rescued from the law school renovation next door extended the length of a second wall. Two comfortable chairs made up a conversation corner, sitting seat to seat. On a low bench between them was an electric kettle and three mugs, all of them chipped, all of them made years ago by Seth in middle school. A clothesline stretched from the top of the window frame across the room to the opposite corner. Scraps of paper, a piece of tinsel, several photographs, and a leather glove now hung from the wooden clothespins, the map of Professor Milton’s mind strung up like that, making her more formidable to her students, rather than less.
She tossed her keys on her desk, laid her satchel down, and went to stand beneath the line, staring up at the photograph she had found of Granny K and Pops when she was cleaning out her mother’s apartment.
Handsome, tanned, Kitty and Ogden Milton stood ramrod straight and smiling into the camera on the afternoon in 1936 when they had chartered a yawl, sailed out into Penobscot Bay, and bought Crockett’s Island. The mast of the boat rising behind him, her grandfather’s broadcloth shirt rolled up at the elbows showed the ropy muscles of his forearms and the good thin watch upon his wrist. Her grandmother stood in the curve of his arm, her cardigan buttoned at the neck and draped over her shoulders. She was thirty-one years old. Nothing had touched them. That the skein of old money and power would snag upon the 1970s and unravel would have been inconceivable to these two, Evie thought with the historian’s eye. The white-shoe bankers of Milton Higginson, the investment bank her great-great-grandfather began, had floundered in the free-for-all after limits on commission fees were lifted and finally sold themselves to the hungry and enormous Merrill Lynch. But there in the thirties, the two of them stared down at Evie like hosts at a good party. Like life was a good party. Before old money ran out of its money. When summer was a verb.
The
photograph had nothing to do with anything she was working on, and yet it comforted her. The two up there were so certain, so clear, their life so—unquestioned. It reminded her of her mother, and of summer nights when she was a child, crouched in the bow of the Katherine, her grandfather at the helm bringing them all back from a party at one of the other islands, her mother, her aunt, and all her cousins, and the lights of the Big House shimmering across the water seemed to promise nothing but still water ahead, all her life. Light and water and clear sailing.
And it was exactly this kind of picture that drove her husband, Paul, nuts. Here stood the blue bloods, their faces turned with blind assurance to a leeward breeze, hands resting steady on the tiller, nobility at the helm, no matter that they had sailed us into Vietnam, interned American citizens, and, he’d observe, turned a blind eye to the Jews when they could have done something.
Since the afternoon in the photograph, four generations of her family had eaten round the table on Crockett’s Island, clinked the same glasses, fallen between the same sheets, and heard the foghorn night after night. “The land before time,” Paul called it with the distance he had always put between that life and theirs, two professors living in university housing at the foot of Manhattan with their teenage son. “Can’t you see what that place is?” he’d ask her over the years. “Of course I do,” she’d answer. “It’s laughable, yes, but it’s also beautiful, and full to the brim with—” “Miltons,” he’d finish dryly. “I’m more Jewish up there than in a synagogue.” “We don’t see the same place,” she’d answer. “No,” he’d say, “we don’t. I don’t like sailing, I don’t drink Scotch, and I could care less what the market is doing.” He had gone up to the Island less and less over the years, begging off to do research in summer libraries.
Never mind. Evie folded her arms, addressing Paul in her head. You’ll probably win in the end. There was no way of knowing how long she and her cousins could hold on to it. Before he’d left for Berlin, she and Paul had discussed selling the share she’d inherited and using the money for their life—their real life, as he would say. Though in the past few days it was growing harder to imagine actually selling it, harder to imagine who she’d be without it.