Affliction

by Russell Banks

  By this morning, the other four families in the Lake Aga-way Residents Association, as it was called, had learned of the death of their weekend neighbor Evan Twombley in a tragic hunting accident yesterday in Lawford, New Hampshire. One of them had a satellite dish and had heard it mentioned last night on the eleven o’clock news on Channel 4, and it was in both the Boston papers, sold at Golden’s store, this morning. Well. A shame.

  Perhaps Twombley’s daughter and son-in-law would want to sell the place, which would be the preferred course of action, needless to say. If his daughter alone inherited it (a strong likelihood, thank heavens), no one would especially mind or object, so long as she did not turn around and put the deed in both her and her husband’s names. The daughter was certainly not Jewish, and the children therefore could not be, since everyone knew that to be Jewish you needed a Jewish mother.

  It was still possible, of course, that the Jew Mel Gordon would jointly inherit the property. If that happened, one could only hope that on reading the deed, the fellow would come to the restrictive clause at the end and would decide to say nothing about it, would go right ahead and simply sign the deed and let it go at that, quite as if he were not Jewish or black. Damn. If this Gordon fellow had been black, none of this would have happened, would it? Anyhow, his agreeing to the restrictive clause in the deed might turn out to be somewhat embarrassing for the Association, mightn’t it? After all, you did not have to come right out and say it, and no one would be rude or crude enough to ask him, but everyone in the Association and everyone in town as well thought Mel Gordon was Jewish, which meant, of course, that he was Jewish. People are not wrong about these things. On the other hand, it was not clear that he was not Jewish, either, especially if he himself was unwilling to say so one way or the other. It didn’t really matter, though, did it? Times change, don’t they? This is surely not the sort of problem our parents had to face.

  Wade pulled into the neatly plowed driveway and followed it down to the three-bay garage and parked. He got out of his car slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, and strolled around to the wide porch that faces the lake. The house is a large two-story wood-frame house covered with cedar shakes, built three years ago to look a hundred years old, as if indeed it were inherited.

  LaRiviere had scoffed at the idea of spending so much to make a place look old. “If you’re going to spend a quarter of a million bucks on a summer place, it ought to look like something brand spanking new, for Christ’s sake.”

  But Wade liked the way it looked, and he believed that if he had the money, he would want his summer place to resemble this one, a house where several generations of smart successful kindhearted people had come to relax and be together with their children and parents and grown brothers and sisters, a place with a wide porch facing the lake, lots of old-fashioned wicker rockers on the porch where you sat in the twilight and told stories of favorite summers past, old silvery cedar shingles, two chimneys made of local stone, a steep-pitched roof with wide overhangs that slid the snow off the house to the ground before it either accumulated so much weight that it broke through or got held up by ice at the gutters and started lifting roof shingles and doing water damage when spring came.

  He knocked on the glass pane of the storm door with what he felt was authority, and the inner door was opened at once.

  A blond boy about eight years old with a large tousled head and thin stalklike neck pushed the aluminum-and-glass storm door open about six inches and with great seriousness examined Wade. The boy wore flannel pajamas with action pictures of Spider-Man printed on them. In one hand he held a bowl of pastel-colored cereal and milk that was slopping onto the floor; with the other he held on to the door.

  “Your daddy home?” Wade asked.

  The boy studied Wade’s face and said nothing.

  “Is your daddy here, son? I got to talk with your daddy.”

  As if dismissing him, the boy turned away and let go of the storm door, and the breeze off the lake shoved it closed in Wade’s face. He could see into the living room, for the child had left the inner door wide open. Wade watched him trot to a television set in the far corner, where he plopped down on the carpeted floor and resumed watching cartoons and began to spoon the pastel-colored cereal into his mouth.

  The living room was huge, open to the eaves, with a head-high stone fireplace at either end. A staircase led up to a deck, where several closed doors indicated bedrooms. Downstairs, there was a grand piano in a bay window, which instantly impressed Wade: he had never seen a grand piano inside a house before. When he thought about it, he realized that he had never seen a grand piano anywhere. Not in person.

  He knocked on the glass again, but the boy continued to eat cereal and stare at cartoons as if Wade were not there. Finally, Wade drew the door open and stepped inside and closed the inner door behind him. “C’mon, son,” he said. “Go and get your daddy for me.”

  “Sh-h-h!” the boy said, without looking at him. Then Wade saw that there was a second, smaller boy lying flat on the floor a few feet beyond him, his head propped up on tiny fists. He was blonder than his brother and wore underpants and a tee shirt and seemed to be shivering from the cold. He peeked over his brother’s shoulder and scowled at Wade and said, “Sh-h-h, will ya?”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Wade murmured, and he started to leave, when he heard a woman’s voice above and behind him.

  “Who are you?” It was a light tentative voice, the opposite of the boys’ voices and the snarls emitted by the bare-chested muscular characters on the television screen; Wade turned and looked up and saw a thin silvery-blond woman standing just beyond the balustrade of the deck above him; he felt for a second that he was in a play, like Romeo and Juliet, and the next line was his and he did not know what it was.

  He felt his face redden, and he took off his watch cap and held it in front of his crotch with both hands. The woman’s face was long and bony but very delicate-looking, as if the bones underneath were fragile and her pale skin exceedingly thin. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and her shoulder-length blond hair was uncombed. She wore no makeup but was wrapped in a dark-green velour robe that made her face and thin hands and wrists seem to be covered with white powder. Wade had seen her numerous times before, of course, but she had always been tanned, wearing jeans and fancy sweaters, and in winter she wore ski togs. Usually he had observed her at a distance, in town or at the post office. When Twombley was building the house and Wade was out here drilling the wells, she had come up from Massachusetts twice with her husband and sons, but they had strolled through the half-constructed buildings and down by the lake without stopping to speak to him. This was the first time he had seen her up close, and it seemed to him that he was seeing her under disarmingly intimate circumstances.

  He stammered, “I was … I’m Wade Whitehouse. I was wondering, is your husband here? I was wondering that.”

  “He’s asleep. We were up very late,” she said, as if she wished that she, too, were asleep.

  “Well, yes, I’m … I want to say that I’m real sorry about your father, Mrs. Twombley.”

  “Gordon,” she corrected him. “Thank you.”

  “Gordon. Sorry. Mrs. Gordon. Jesus, I’m sorry about that. Mrs. Gordon, right.”

  She gripped the rail as if for balance and said, “Do you think you could come back later on, when he’ll be up?”

  “Well, yeah, I suppose so. Sure. I mean, I don’t want to intrude, you know, at a time like this and all. I just had a little business to settle with Mr. Gordon. I’m the local police officer, and there was something I wanted to speak with him about.”

  “Something concerning my father?” She took several steps along the deck toward the stairs.

  “Oh, no, nothing about that. Jeez, no. It’s a … it’s a traffic thing,” he said. “No big deal.”

  “Can’t it wait, then?”

  Wade thought, Yes, yes, it can wait, of course it can wait. It could wait until another morning, when she would
be freshly wakened once again and this terrible thing concerning her father would have passed by; he could drive over here and talk with this fair woman at her breakfast table, while her husband and her children drove farther and farther north into the mountains, leaving her behind so that Wade could comfort her, take care of her, provide strength for her to draw upon in her time of affliction and grief, this intelligent beautiful sad needy woman who was unlike all the other women Wade had known and loved, he was sure.

  He backed toward the door, gazing up at her, concentrating so narrowly on her pale form that he did not see the man emerge from a room at the far end of the balcony—Mel Gordon, dark-eyed, unshaven, short black hair pressed to his narrow skull. He was wearing a wool plaid robe, forest green and blue, the Gordon tartan. He crossed his arms over his chest and studied Wade for a second, and as Wade reached behind him for the doorknob, Gordon said, “Whitehouse. Next time, phone ahead.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I said, ’Next time, phone ahead.’ ”

  The older of the two boys cut a look at his father and said, “Daddy, be quiet, will you?”

  Wade smiled and looked down at his feet and shook his head slightly. “Jesus Christ,” he murmured. Then he said, “Mr. Gordon, when I come all the way out to serve somebody a summons, I don’t call ahead for an appointment.”

  Gordon’s face knotted, and he moved quickly past his wife to the stairs. He said, “What the hell are you talking about?” He hurried down the stairs, as if to close a window against a storm, and when he reached the landing at the bottom, a few feet from where Wade stood by the door, he said, "C’mon, Whitehouse, let’s see it, this summons.” He held out his hand and glared at Wade. “Let’s see it.”

  “I got to write it out.” Wade reached into his back pocket and drew out his fat pad of tickets and plucked a Bic ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket.

  “What the hell are you talking about, Whitehouse?”

  “I’m issuing you a ticket, Mr. Gordon. Moving violation.” He pursed his lips and started to write.

  “Moving violation! I just got out of bed, for Christ’s sake, and you’re telling me you’re giving me a goddamn speeding ticket?” He barked a laugh. “Are you nuts? Is that it, White-house? You’re nuts? I think you’re nuts.”

  Wade went on writing. “Yesterday morning, you passed a stopped school bus, which was flashing its lights, and then you passed a traffic officer holding traffic for pedestrians at a crosswalk,” Wade said without looking up. “Looked to me like you was speeding too. That’s a thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone. But I’ll let that one go by this time.”

  Above them, the pale woman in the dark-green velour robe turned and retreated to one of the bedrooms. Wade glanced up and saw her disappear. The two men would duel down here below, and when only one of them remained, he would mount the stairs to her tower, where he would enter her darkened room. She would not know which of the two men in her life was crossing the room toward her.

  Mel Gordon reached out and grabbed Wade’s writing hand, startling him. “Hold on!” Gordon said.

  Wade wrenched his hand free. “Don’t ever put your hands on me, Mr. Gordon,” he said.

  “You’re talking about a goddamned traffic ticket, aren’t you? From yesterday.”

  “Yup.”

  “From when I passed you at the school, where you had decided to hold up traffic for a goddamn half hour while you dreamed of becoming a traffic cop or something.” Gordon had stepped back now and was smiling broadly with amused disbelief. A surly pelt of black chest hairs filled in the V of chest exposed by his robe, and the pelt grew almost to his throat. He is the kind of man who has shaved twice a day since early adolescence and thinks all men do. “You going to advise me of my rights, Officer Whitehouse?”

  “Don’t give me a hard time, Mr. Gordon. Just take the damn ticket and pay the fine by mail, or go to local court next month and fight it, I don’t care. I’m just—”

  “Doing your fucking job. I know. I watch television too.”

  “Yes. Doing my job. Here’s your ticket,” he said, and he tore it off the pad and handed the sheet to Gordon.

  “You are something. You are really something.”

  “Yeah. Well, so are you, Mr. Gordon. Something.” He smiled. “And your kids? They’re rude to strangers,” he added, tossing the boys a hard look, as if they were bugs.

  “Hey!” Gordon said. “You might insult my wife, too, while you’re at it.” He took a step toward Wade. “Why the hell not? After all, you probably know all about her father’s accident. Must be something about that you can make a crack on, if you really give it some thought. Why not, Whitehouse? Why not touch all the bases while you’re here?” He smiled meanly.

  “Yeah, well, I know about her father. I’m sorry about that.”

  Gordon held the ticket out in front of him with one hand and folded it neatly in half and tucked it into Wade’s shirt pocket. He was no longer smiling. “You get the hell out of my house now, asshole. And know this—you are going to be a lucky asshole if I haven’t got you fired before the day is out.” He yanked open the door, turned Wade toward it and said, “I can put your country ass out of work with one phone call, Whitehouse, and I’m just pissed enough to do it now.” He placed a hand against Wade’s stiffened shoulder and moved the man through the doorway to the porch, then slammed the door shut behind him.

  For a few seconds, Wade stood out there on the open porch, facing across the white ice-covered lake toward the black line of trees and hills beyond. He patted his shirt pocket, where the folded ticket seemed to give off heat, and then zipped his jacket against the steady breeze that blew across the lake. His mind was filled with the image of the blond woman on the balcony above him, her beautifully fatigued face, her tall slender form as she gazed down and with her eyes asked him to come up the stairs and save her.

  11

  WHEN HE THOUGHT ABOUT IT—which, while driving back to town from Lake Agaway, he did—Wade realized that there was no one in town he could go to for advice concerning the hiring of an attorney. He would never again use the last lawyer he had hired, the guy who got him stuck like this in the first place. That had been a shot in the dark, a lawyer from the Littleton yellow pages, and he had obviously missed. Now, however, Wade knew what he was doing, yes-by-God, and he needed an attorney who would reflect that knowledge.

  There were a few people in Lawford who could recommend someone to him—Alma Pittman, Chub Merritt, Gordon LaRiviere—but Wade did not particularly want anyone in town to know what he was up to. Except for Rolfe, who was too long too far out of town and state and could not help him find a lawyer but might advise him generally; and there was Margie, of course, who was different from everyone else in town, because she alone happened to love him—or if she did not love him exactly, she could be brought to love him, he believed, by kindnesses returned, something he had up to now been reluctant to provide.

  It was an out-of-balance affair, in which one party, Margie, was a finer human being than the other. But both parties knew it and accepted it, so that the worst thing that could happen, Wade believed, was that Margie someday would find a man who returned her kindnesses and she would leave Wade for such a man. But Wade expected that he would not feel much worse about things then than he did now. Which was possibly why he refused to move in closer to Margie, why he kept his gaze slightly averted at all times, even while making love to her. It did not keep her a stranger, exactly, but it kept her from becoming a wife.

  Back in town now, Wade drove past LaRiviere’s, and as he passed he remembered drilling a well once for a man who was a Concord attorney, a guy named J. Battle Hand, whom neither Wade nor LaRiviere himself had ever actually met, but from what he could see, the man was successful: he had bought a large chunk of very expensive land down near Catamount and had built a Swiss-style chalet on the southern slope of a huge hill where there was a ski resort going up on the backside of the hill—condos, restaurants, shops, bars, saunas, a Ram
ada Inn, a half-dozen different ski slopes and tows: the works. And this guy, J. Battle Hand, owned the undeveloped half of the hill and evidently had no plans to do anything with it but plunk his own vacation home down in the middle of it, setting it in a stand of thick white birches with a lovely long view of the hills of central New Hampshire, only a mile and a quarter from where people drove whole days from Massachusetts and points south to get to.

  By Wade’s and Lawford’s standards, and even by the standards of the much larger town of Catamount, the house was palatial. LaRiviere’s bid on the well had come in slightly high, but he had been hired anyhow, probably because of his reputation for being able to set up and drill on slopes that discouraged most flatland well drillers. LaRiviere could drive out to a hilly site when they got ready to set up the rig and in seconds could find the one piece of ground where the rig could be backed into place and the drill sent into the ground vertically. It was uncanny, at least to Wade, who inevitably had picked someplace else to drill. LaRiviere would survey the ground with a quick gaze, note Wade’s spot, pick another, then humiliate Wade by first having Jack Hewitt or Jimmy Dame park the rig where Wade had suggested. Every time, no matter how they jacked it, the rig ended up tilted at an angle that could not be corrected by the drill. Then LaRiviere would have Jack bring the truck down a few yards and to the left a ways, where a batch of chokecherry bushes had obscured the surface of the ground, and sure enough, the rig sat level as a cake in an oven, and the drill bit, lowered into place, aimed straight down to the center of the earth.