Dear Money

by Martha McPhee

  From the café owner's wife, whose name was Nora, Emma learned to make blueberry pie with the wild blueberries Nora had picked and frozen in bulk last summer, a nice "Maine touch," but also from bags of frozen blueberries they'd carried out together, along with a dozen bags of groceries, one blistering, prematurely hot May afternoon across the Walmart parking lot in Bath. A "Maine touch" of another sort altogether, one that Emma had at first found interesting, in an abstract way. Nora's thick fingers worked the pastry, first turning the flour and butter into crumbs, thousands of doughy beads, then into one big ball. Nora had flour on her cheeks, on her apron. Her smile sparkled with the braces.

  Emma loved her because she didn't know anything about Emma's New York life, the sudden changes, Lolly's departure—a bad omen, observed the mothers at school, a sign of "economizing," of the arrival of choices unthinkable in the past that were made "of necessity" in the wake of a husband's career change. Emma's role as a banker's wife was a given; her role as a novelist's wife, to many, was a disquieting, open parenthesis. The successes he'd had with his writing were invisible. A banker's success is anything but invisible. "I'm leaving for the spring to renovate the Maine house," she caught herself saying, not because it was a lie, but because it was a justification, because it suggested nothing had changed. Once she would have spoken the words honestly, without a calculated thought.

  Nora, like her sister, said little but welcomed the company of someone new and interesting, but not, of course, too interesting. That was the balancing act Emma performed there among the Mainers. Silence between them begged to be filled, but one didn't rush headlong into it, Emma learned. No offbeat jokes about murdering the Hovs here! So Emma waited and let the idle, harmless patter flow, and occasionally her patience was rewarded. From Nora, Emma learned where the best blueberry fields were, on the cliffs that rose from the clam flats, high above the beach, with full views up the river and out to sea. From there, in the afternoon light, the tide low, you might see a man wearing waders clamming in the estuary, the pools of water turning turquoise and amber.

  One afternoon when the girls were up from New York, she brought them to the cliffs, where the roots of twisted pines wrapped around the rocks like talons, and the limbs of spruce were trained inland, in the direction opposite the prevailing wind. Maine would become a part of her girls, shaping them, too. Already it had defined their summers. She and the girls wandered down a trail and stumbled upon an old graveyard hidden in the woods. There, in the pine duff, shafts of forest light fell on the tombstones. The girls were ecstatic, running from stone to stone, trying to find the oldest dates and reading aloud the family names that could still be found on store and street signs in the village—the Percys and the Perkinses and the Spinneys. Here were Ephraim, Mary and Lorenzo Spinney. "Mommy, who were they?" Ephraim had lived to be ninety-one, his wife seventy-six. Lorenzo, their son, in a marmoreal flourish, had been "claimed by the sea" at thirty-nine.

  "That's sad, Mommy."

  "Yes, it's sad. But they're all together now in this quiet spot, right?"

  "Yeah," said the earnest, trusting Catherine, her eyes encompassing big thoughts she couldn't quite comprehend but wanted to very badly. She was pure in her privilege, and death something that happened to others, and only in old age. Elisabeth darted about the headstones, deciding that she wanted to be buried here, making Catherine, as was Elisabeth's way, face hard truths.

  The dramas of entire lifetimes played out in this small reach of shoreline, the tombstones a record of love and loss and final reckoning. What a fine place to pass eternity. She'd tell Will everything she'd discovered, how much more she loved Pond Point now that it would be theirs, in a way, forever.

  By the end of April Emma had a crew of six working on the house—hard-working men who loved their morning coffee, sometimes spiking it with peppermint schnapps (she believed, because they could seem a bit too gleeful), whose jovial voices recorded the sounds of progress. The roof was reshingled, the clapboards damaged in the winter storms repaired, the exterior scraped and repainted, the broken windows fixed with glass panes authentic to the period (hunted for and purchased at great expense). She had the porch rebuilt because of rot, hung a swing and cushioned it with a sturdy chenille check in tan and burgundy. Behind the house a changing room was erected with a comfortable bath and shower, a closet for a washer and dryer. The floors in the house would need to be stripped and sanded, the window sashes painted. A crew of electricians spent a week and a half rewiring, adding cable and wireless. A new kitchen was installed with white acrylic cabinets and white enamel icebox and stove and sink, a tiled floor. The toilets were replaced, the bathrooms made more commodious. The work went fast; there was little competition for the labor. Each detail she chose herself, the fixtures, the switch plates, the knobs. Every night she fell asleep early, exhausted.

  In the morning she'd light a fire, make herself coffee (glad to have the kitchen) and, wrapped in a comforter, sit on the swing and jot long lists of supplies to buy, watching as the sun popped into the sky, the spring winds blowing through the porch. She took up landscaping, raking, clearing underbrush, pulling out weeds, working with the zest and enthusiasm of an owner. For anyone else the tasks would have been drudgery. She installed creamy linen curtains on simple wooden rods with decorative balls, simple tiebacks dressing the windows. She found plates and pots and glassware and silverware, chairs and a table and a stunning red couch and bureaus, at flea markets and antique stores.

  She became the most delightful kind of scavenger—frugal, wise and prudent, but with a trained eye. She renovated with her own hands the pieces that needed it—sanding and staining and reupholstering some of the easier jobs. The house was an all-consuming art project, as she worked to create the kind of art she knew how to make. For the bed covers she invested in antique, hand-sewn quilts, a splash of pattern and color for the otherwise white rooms. At a sample sale in New York, while home for a visit, she bought all the linens and towels and shipped them to Pond Point. Later, opening the packages was like her own private Christmas—presents for herself. She cherished the solitude, delighted in making up the beds, ironing the pillowcases, filling the bureaus with fleece jackets and cozy pants for the girls, slippers and pajamas and swimsuits. And there was a part of her that also felt the weight of this good fortune, its fragility.

  Then one day, just like that, the crew cleared out, leaving the place wonderfully desolate all over again, leaving behind new copper pipes in the basement and faucets and refurbished floors and the spectacular kitchen with the gleaming Magic Chef stove. The house was finished. The same house, but different: her house, made beautiful and comfortable and clean for her family. It was early June. There was nothing left to do but admire the lilacs and absorb the neighbors (who had started opening their own homes for the summer), who came nosing about with compliments and tangential questions, who whistled through their teeth when they saw the remodeled kitchen with the fancy cabinets that closed with a gentle click, the fixtures and the new furnace.

  How much she'd accomplished in so little time! "And look at those hydrangeas!" they cried. "We have no luck with ours." If hydrangeas could thrive in Brittany, Emma thought, why not here? The way the neighbors spoke, the compliments, made her eager to unveil the house to Will. The sea grass in the dunes turned emerald and the air trembled in its purity, each day clearer than the one before, so it seemed the islands, kept at a distance by the banks of spring fog, now appeared to be advancing. The water reflected light like so many diamonds. Forever she could sit and watch the water, the tricks it played, the changing colors, a dance of blues and greens and silvers that seemed to cast a haze over the whole world. Day in, day out, boats passed, yachters engaging the season, lobstermen trolling, everything here coming out of hibernation. The air filled with apple blossoms, light and sweet and fragrant. For $195,000 she'd transformed the old Victorian on the tip of Pond Point and had staked her claim to this magnificent spot. Her house. In Maine.

&nb
sp; Above the front door she hung a simple plaque carved with the year the house was built: 1880.

  "What were you thinking?" Will asked. His voice was patient, but creases cut across his brow, the familiar furrow of worry. "It's beautiful, my darling, but just think, that's almost half my advance."

  "But you said we could."

  "I thought you understood the new constraints."

  "I economized with every bone in my body," she said, genuinely confused because the adjustment in their spending habits was not small. Rather, it was enormous, something that would take time to accommodate to. Once she wouldn't have thought about what it cost. She had this time, she assured him, as if thought had its own column on the spreadsheet.

  "I know, sweetheart, but we need to be in a different mind-set now. I thought you understood." Will was concerned, more than concerned. Such spending could throw them over the edge. He'd be able to absorb this one, maybe: a snake swallowing an elephant. It would not be easy. His budget would become that much tighter. It was a relief that the girls no longer wanted skating lessons; canceling Hindi gave them more time for school. They'd been considering the public school in the neighborhood because it was excellent. That switch alone could help pay for this. Will realized just how different their financial picture had become and that for Emma it was still quaint and abstract.

  "We're not relying on your advance. You told me that," she said, looking with eyes pinched together, as if trying to squeeze out the truth, if reluctantly—a sense he wasn't giving her the full story. The backdrop for this scene was their bedroom in the turret, a dark night, the girls asleep, voices hushed. No one can have everything.

  By the time we arrived for a four-day weekend over the Fourth of July, the house was unequivocally theirs—the girls' art projects taped to the walls, their puzzles and games taking over the coffee table, their books arranged on the shelves, their cover-ups and hats and rain gear hanging on hooks attached to plaques with their names in a bold, colorful script, their tennis rackets, their beach towels, the new shower house with the fine soaps and lotions and bath oils, the shining cabinetry in the kitchen filled with organic products and champagne flutes and demitasse cups, the gleaming chrome La Pavoni espresso machine. Last summer the house had been a testament to all that was makeshift, make-do and temporary. In came the new regime, and a clear and directed campaign of sorts had established and unified the brand.

  "It was luxuriously lonely," Emma said as she recounted her spring, regaling me with the stories of what she'd been through to get the house in order. We were sitting in beach chairs at the edge of the water, a big red canvas umbrella shading us, seagulls swooping down for their lunch of crabs, smashing them against the rocks. It was low tide. "Can you remember just a year ago? Less than a year ago, really," Emma mused.

  Theodor and Will and the girls collected sand dollars, Will taking a break from his work for our visit. Of course, we'd been given a tour of his new writing studio in the basement, with its long wooden desk and leather swivel chair. He was finishing the edits to Never Say Die. The book was to publish in spring 2005, followed by the sequel one year later. His editor, Leonardo Cavelli, had brilliantly dissected the book, Emma told us, "like a surgeon with his scalpel. So all that work will have a double payoff. It's remarkable how easily two books came of one." A brass measuring cup from Thailand held his pencils. The room was lined with bookcases, filled with Will's summer library, as Emma put it—none of the valuable volumes. On his desk was the tall stack of his manuscript (marked up with red ink) and a paperback copy of Look Homeward, Angel, which, I imagined, Will had read long before but was rereading so that he could appreciate the comparisons of his work with Wolfe's. As I looked at the desk, peering into the writer's room, it did feel at once familiar and foreign, mystical and lonely, and there was not a small part of me that longed for that heady cocktail, that envied Will for always getting it right, for understanding how to manage a budget and yet live elegantly. But I also knew from experience that the outsider looking in has no true idea of what hides beneath the veneer.

  And he wore his pride sheepishly, but wore it nonetheless, with a boyish grin, relishing Maine, his wife's renovation, his book, his close relationship with Cavelli, the editorial process, the long, wine-filled lunches, the risk balanced by the bounty and good fortune of his life: his well-dressed, intelligent girls, his beautiful, talented wife, who, he announced, was thinking of taking a class in interior design.

  To me they seemed unchanged, on the surface anyway, by their new circumstances. Somehow I expected a transformation, a touch of the rakish artist at the very least, but not so. It had not been that long; they had not been tested yet, I supposed. How different was I, after all? I was still jotting notes in the little notebook I kept in my purse, recording the details as I had always done for the inevitable project that would someday occur to me. At dinner the night before, on the porch, amid citronella candles to keep away the mosquitoes, Will had been the gracious host, happy to use all the new toys, the accoutrements (the grill with its own gas line, the bentwood rockers) of his latest success: the house, of course. A blitz of illegally procured fireworks erupted in the dark, shooting over the water, illuminating a huddle of people standing around various bonfires that polka-dotted the beach like inflamed haystacks. Will steered the conversation toward me and my joining B&B, a notion he apparently still resisted, the idea that I'd thrown writing overboard to go for the money. With the flickering candlelight randomly illuminating small sections of his face, he pressed me on what I thought about bond traders, Win, the career change.

  "The energy is thrilling, you know," I said. "My whole adult life I'd worked alone at a desk, in my imagination. I didn't know what it meant to work with others."

  "And the writing?"

  "I don't think like a writer anymore."

  "How does a writer think?"

  "Oh, come now. You know. I don't read behind the face to think what the story might be. I've stopped doing that." Which wasn't really true, but I had to make it so.

  "That's too good a metaphor for me to believe you," Will said.

  "I think about the market instead, what it's doing."

  "Is this true?" Will asked, turning to Theodor.

  "I believe she believes that," he answered. "Our conversations are certainly different. I hear a lot about the market."

  "And the market?"

  "Crazy, exhilarating. I have nothing to compare it to," I said. I realized too that I didn't have time to think about the nuances of people, character, as I had before.

  "The truth is," Will declared, "this is one story to watch, and if you stick with it, you'll have a front-row seat. The slicing and dicing and mincing of the American dream, like taking meat and grinding it into hamburger and then shipping it off to European insurance companies, Texas hedge funds, the central bank of China. These are our houses, our neighbors' houses. These exotic mortgages are going to come due and then someone will have to pay the bill. And there're not just a few of them, so imagine the ripple effect."

  "I suppose you don't think much about your old life either," I teased. He was curious, wanted to have the conversation, wanted to feel out how deeply entrenched I was by this point—could I talk the talk? And I sensed in him someone yearning for that forgotten token, lost and left behind on a past shore. The banker in him was coming untethered from the artist, eager to lift off.

  "I would never have imagined that mortgages would interest me," Theodor said. "But it's the scale of this world that I find amazing. Talk about a big canvas."

  "But, honey, don't we have one of those resetting mortgages? What did you call it? A 2-and-28 or something like that?" Emma asked Will.

  "Yes, my sweet, but we're not stupid. It's the people who don't know what they're getting themselves into who bring the house down."

  I felt a little jolt, a small crack in the wall of their finances that allowed me, just barely, to peer inside. That meant that in two years he was betting he'd have a chun
k of money that would allow him to rewrite the mortgage favorably. I bit my lip and held back from commenting.

  "Are you really just doing this for the money?" Will asked suddenly.

  "Will!" Emma's chastening tone clearly held a previous conversation, perhaps one in which she'd made him vow not to talk about my choice. But I didn't mind. We were close enough friends, and it was a curiosity. I knew that.

  "A few years ago you didn't think money was so base," I said to Will with a wink, then swept my hand around the porch to encompass the house. Perhaps I could have gone on to explain: the crushing burden of debt in a sea of wealth, giving up on myself, my talent. Perhaps I could have spoken as Theodor had to me, about the artist's foray into commerce. But I hadn't felt the need to justify myself. If I were a man, I wanted to say, would you question my choice?

  Just then we saw an eruption of spectacular red, white and blue fireworks, one after the next, and I remembered being a little girl, sitting on my father's lap during our town's annual July Fourth display, the point at which he'd always say, "The grand finale." I loved hearing him say those words, how he savored them, how they seemed like knowledge and wisdom, elevating the last moments, the fantastic repetition of shooting and bursting, to some higher truth. The beautiful, illegal and amateur display had the same effect now.

  When it was finished, it was Theodor's turn to change the subject, asking Emma about her spring, and did she think she could live up here year-round: "Never." Emma told stories about the locals, about lopped-off thumbs and lobster thieves and rumrunners and the harrowing tale of a woman torn to shreds by a motorboat—the stories she loved best, of the people she adored collecting.