by John Enright
“So, what if we just told them Witherspoon doesn’t exist?” Charlie asked.
“We could, I suppose, but I doubt it would work. They’d just think we were lying, deepening the conspiracy, hiding our outsider coconspirator. No, now they have uncovered their cell of local terrorists and—in their minds—the Englishman’s fingerprints are almost on the bomb. Lord Witherspoon has become a creation of necessity.”
“But he does not fucking exist.”
“Ah, there’s the rub.”
“Why us?”
“Charlie, that is the single most popular question of all time.”
Chapter 6
There was nothing very remarkable about their little village. There was just the one business street stretching several blocks up from where the New Jerusalem ferry docked, with one each of the requisite shops and churches, the post office, and the volunteer fire department house, plus the cluster of realtor offices on Water Street facing the marina. You could exhaust the sites in a ten-minute walk. The British had gone to the trouble of burning the whole place down during the War, so there were no colonial era buildings. There was a handful of restaurants that catered mainly to the summer crowd, a pizza place, and one saloon for the locals. Dominick avoided the village, especially now that the summer crowd had left and it had been returned to control of the natives. He did not belong there. It was just as well that he not be seen there. But there was the matter of his mail.
The village post office was the obverse of quaint—a one-story, four-corner, flat-roofed, unadorned, cement-block blob from the fifties, ugly in its extreme utility, that could have just as well been (and not belonged) in any one-silo corn-state town or some exurban mall. But there was no avoiding it, and it was normally devoid of other customers. At the beginning of the summer, when he arrived at Brenda and Charlie’s, Dominick had taken a P.O. Box there. Not that he got much mail, but for occasional business and legal purposes he needed to have an address other than general delivery wherever he was. This entailed his checking his mail every so often and recently mailing off things in return.
Although Dominick’s expenses were few, he had not yet discovered how to live totally for free. From time to time he had to restock his checking account and pay off his credit cards. This entailed correspondence with agents and lawyers in Richmond and Washington. His assets were real and so not difficult to liquidate, but there were always the middlemen and -women who had to be involved and who justified their skimming by prolonging and complicating the sale. Middlewomen. And how are you today, madam? Good to middling, good to middling, she would say, not knowing that in the original old dirty English, middling referred to a man and a woman putting their middles together. There was that French auction house woman from Alexandria whom he would not mind middling with again, but too many years had passed. She had probably retired.
Everything that Dominick had to sell had been given to him, left to him. He liquidated the pieces one at a time because he knew that their value increased as they aged, as he aged. In a sense, their mutual survival was like cumulative interest accruing. This was truer for the old maps and prints than it was for the antique cars and motorcycles. Also, the old paper did not leave puddles of oil and command storage fees. So, the ranks of his father’s collection of motorized memorabilia had been depleted first. There were just a few prize pieces left, and a man in Las Vegas had been interested in buying the lot. Not needing the cash, Dominick had been putting him off. But now his agent informed him that there was another interested buyer, an Emirates oil sheik who wanted to start a museum in honor of the invention that had made him rich. With two eager bidders in play, it was time to sell. The sale would set Dominick up, cushion him from the need for further transactions or interactions for years to come, maybe even until forever. Forever was Dominick’s term for death.
Dominick did not share his father’s passion for collectibles. Dominick did not share much of anything with his father. All they really had in common was a woman—Dominick’s mother, his father’s one-time mistress. He had grown up knowing father only as an abstract term indicating something masculine, removed, symbolic—Father Time, Father Christmas, Father of the Country, Holy Father, God the Father. His mother would never speak of him. Dominick remembered only vaguely the few times they had met when he was just a small boy—rides in the big car, ice cream cones on a pier, a nightmarish trip to a zoo, getting sick on a sailboat ride. He could recall the events but not the man. He was a teenager before he figured out that his unmarried mother did not have to work because his unknown, absent, abstract father paid for everything. By the time Dominick got to graduate school at Oxford he knew that he too would never have to find and hold a job. Then his father had died and left him not property or cash or an endowment—all that stayed in his real family—but a few of his eccentric collections—minor things, given all his millions—that his widow and legitimate sons could not quibble about in probate.
Was it guilt money he had lived on all his life? Did it matter? Was the ease of his existence just a simple way to ease another man’s conscience? Dominick doubted it. He had read about his father, how he had taken over the family business and expanded it many times over into a financial empire. The man had no conscience. The yearly stipend for his mother and him had been a fraction of the maintenance cost of one of his yachts. The money meant nothing to him. It was a gratuity, the tip a man of his stature left for a whore. For Dominick’s college graduation his father had sent him a vintage Mercedes, but he had not come. When Dominick inherited the car collection, he noted that his father owned three other Mercedes of the same vintage; his had been just an extra. His mother had been a kept woman, he a kept bastard son. What was it they were being paid to keep? Why, their silence, of course, their complicity. And now his father was gone—forever—and it all meant nothing.
This Monday afternoon Dominick had to stop at a lawyer’s office before going to the P.O. There were papers to be notarized before mailing, and Dominick used Atticus’s lawyer’s office for that. The secretary was a notary. She did it for free. When Dominick mentioned to Atticus that he would be stopping there, he decided to come along. Atticus had not been out of the house since the dinner at Charlie’s several nights before. He had been sort of hovering around in the wings watching Lydia. A dynamic had changed in the house, an arrow of attention had changed direction. Now, rather than Lydia fussing over Atticus, Atticus had become the caretaker. Dominick had distanced himself as much as possible, but he could not help noticing. Nothing much else had changed. Lydia did not seem different, perhaps just a bit more removed, but her new iPod addiction could account for that. She hummed to herself and sometimes sang along to what was in her earphones in that strange off-key way people sing when they cannot hear themselves.
The first nor’easter of the season had been predicted, and the clouds were already lowering and rushing, gray militias gathering for battle. Rust-colored gusts of leaves whisked down the road in front of them. The streets were deserted in a premature dusk. Dominick was struck by how many houses stood bravely dark and deserted, as if left behind to go it alone against the storm. He stopped the car at a rise where they could look out over the nickel-colored bay with its pinstripes of whitecaps.
“Nasty tonight,” Atticus said.
“Ever been out there on a day like this?”
“Only once, as a boy, with my dad and the crew of Covenant II, trying to beat a storm into port. We had left to take her south, about this time of year, but we broke a spar and had to turn back.”
“Your dad was a good sailor?”
“He was good, but he took too many chances. He almost bought it that time, racing a crippled ship into a storm. There’s nowhere to hide on this side when she blows like this.”
“Do you miss it?” Dominick asked. “The sailing, I mean.”
“Oh, you can miss things but not want them back. You got to be realistic. The wife and I once had a great sex life, but I can’t imagine doing that again. Know
what I mean?” The first spray of rain raked the car. “I miss my daughters, and they’re still around, but the daughters I miss grew up and left a long time ago. What do you miss, Dominick?”
“I don’t know. I have never really needed anything I didn’t have, so I guess I have never wanted anything enough to miss it when it’s gone.” Dominick turned the windshield wipers on.
“Ever go sailing with your dad?” Atticus asked.
“Once, just once that I recall.”
“Was he a good sailor?”
Dominick put the car in gear and headed on down the gradual slope into the village. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I was too young to notice.”
Dominick parked in the handicapped space next to the door of the lawyer’s office so that they wouldn’t have far to duck through the rain. No actual handicapped person should be out on a day like this, which gave everyone a handicap anyway. Atticus had brought a large envelope with him that Dominick figured he was taking to the P.O., but now he brought it into the office with him. While Dominick was signing and getting his documents notarized, Atticus went in to see his lawyer, but he was quickly back out again, followed by the lawyer, a large man in shirtsleeves and a wide tie.
“No, Jameson, I don’t think so, not in this current climate, and I never put any kind of sticker on my car. You never know what potential client you might offend. You know, they did a study, and the people with the most bumper stickers on their vehicles are the people most likely to engage in road rage.”
Atticus was still holding out a green-and-white bumper sticker. “How about you, Agnes?” he said, turning to the secretary. “I know you’re with us, and no one would dare take offense from you.” In bold white type on a Kelly-green background the bumper sticker read SAVE OUR BAY and there was a circle with a diagonal line over the initials LNG.
“Why, no, thank you, Atticus,” she said, handing Dominick his finished papers. “My husband happens to think that new facility is just what’s needed hereabouts to perk up business now that the fishing industry’s collapsed. It wouldn’t stay on my car long.”
“You know, there are a lot of people who feel the same way, Jameson,” the lawyer said, “that what we need is more shipping on the bay, not less, that we need the jobs.”
“This isn’t shipping. These are giant liquid natural gas tankers, potential Roman candles three football fields long. Their comings and goings will totally shut down all other activity on the bay at least a hundred and seventy times a year. Don’t they care that the tankers, the terminal, and their miles of pipelines under the bay are potential terrorist targets that could take us all out?”
“It’s anti-progress, Jameson, anti-business. The government’s got no problem with their going ahead. And talk about terrorists, who was behind that bombing a week ago? That didn’t win your cause any supporters.”
“No one from Bay Savers was involved in that, I can assure you.”
“Well, it didn’t look good, and now outsiders are involved. No one likes that.” Trying to terminate the conversation, the lawyer turned to Dominick and stuck out his hand. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“No, we have not,” Dominick said, shaking the offered hand. “Well, come along, Atticus, before it gets worse outside.” And he hurried Atticus out the door. Back in the car he said, “Atticus, please do not get involved in such conversations when I am with you. This is your cause, not mine. And do not even think of putting one of those stickers on my car.” He glanced over at Atticus, who looked suddenly pale and shrunken and old, and Dominick remembered his terminal condition. “You okay?”
Atticus was looking straight ahead into the rain. “Fucking assholes,” was all he said.
The nor’easter blew throughout the night, rattling the windows and shaking the old house, whose flat sail-like façade took the brunt of the gale full on. Dominick could not sleep. It was too much like being inside a creepy amusement park ride. The wind moaned through deserted rooms. Something on the floor above him came loose and knocked constantly like someone left outside in the storm pleading to be let in. Beneath it all was the sound of the sea—the waves booming against the cliffs, the growl of the surf, an almost human howl of elements meeting on the worst of terms. It all grew closer as the night worn on. Wrapped in a quilt, Dominick sat in the dark in an armchair close to the window of his room and lit a cigar. He thought he could hear voices in the cacophony, deep choral voices arguing in a foreign tongue. He could not imagine being at sea on a night like this, the monstrous seas. How insignificant it must make you feel, how crushable. Drowning would be an unpleasant forever. In a cold sea like this it would be a dry drowning. No water would be found in your lungs. You would have just stopped breathing, suffocating yourself. Forever.
Why had Atticus asked about his father? What business was it of his that Dominick even had a father, much less if they had ever gone sailing together? The things people thought important. Things long gone and best forgotten. The fear of memories, afraid of the past. How can you fear something that has already happened? You are free of it; it has passed. That last huge crashing wave didn’t get you, did it? As the past grew deeper, darker, longer, more removed, the future foreshortened and flew in your face. Dominick flicked his long cigar ash onto the floor. There was just the distance between here and approaching forever that mattered. The past was just a good-bye. Why did people choose to live there, asking ancestor questions? So that by searching for beginnings they could avoid turning around and facing the end?
Storm thoughts. In his pajamas, robe, and slippers, but still wrapped in his quilt and smoking his cigar, Dominick went down to the kitchen to fix himself something. He wasn’t sure what—a pot of tea, a sandwich, a stiff drink? It was hours after midnight. Lydia was already there, standing at the stove, wearing a green down vest over her nightgown and a pair of men’s slippers. She was watching a pot that was not yet boiling. “Oh, I hope I didn’t disturb you, Dominick.”
“In this racket, hardly. Like minds.”
“Were you having bad dreams too?”
“No, I meant coming to the kitchen in search of something comforting.”
“Tea?” she asked
“Tea? Yes, that too,” Dominick said, going to the sideboard where the scotch was kept and pouring himself a stiff one.
Lydia was singing to herself now, “Tea for two and two for tea, me for you and you for me.” Without her earphones in she sang on tune, a young girl’s voice. She forgot the words and hummed instead. Then she lost the tune and stopped altogether. Dominick walked through the house with his glass and cigar to the front door and switched on the porch light to watch the storm. There was not much to see—just bright curtains of rain slicing in from the surrounding darkness then back out again—but you could feel it here, just inches away, bouncing off the door and pushing at the foyer windows. Unlike some beast it will never tire, Dominick thought. Storms are perceived like sunsets over water—always focused just on you. This storm could be a hundred miles wide, but it would always seem that you were its central point of attack. He could feel the frigid ocean air seeping through the cracks around the door and windows, not giving up, undaunted by walls. You had to like storms. If there was any one entity Dominick felt worthy of deification it would be storm, the storm god—pointless to worship or supplicate, too deaf with its own howling to hear prayers, mindless and terrifying, wholly impersonal but also able to make you feel as real as you will ever feel.
Back in the kitchen Lydia had a pot of tea brewing under a cozy and was setting out cups and saucers, cream and sugar. Dominick went to the sink, extinguished the stub of his cigar, and dropped it into the trash. Lydia poured and passed.
“You know, Dominick, there are two questions that women everywhere always ask, and I’ve never asked you.”
“No, I am not married, and no, I have no children.”
“You’re so lucky. Children are an unmitigated curse. We have two, you know, twins, so I know. I never wanted any, b
ut Atticus tricked me, got me pregnant, then insisted I go through with it. I never let him trick me again, I’ll tell you that.”
“Twins,” Dominick said.
“Two more useless and bothersome creatures I’ve never known. They’re Atticus’s girls, not mine. He spoiled them rotten.”
“But they are out of your life now. That must give you some relief.” Dominick got up to pour himself another scotch.
“Oh sure, out of my life just as I have next to no life left. Ungrateful little witches. You’d rather drink whiskey than tea? I never could stand the taste of it myself, no matter what they mixed with it.”
“I noticed there are no pictures of your daughters in the house.”
“I wouldn’t stand for it. And they know enough not to try and set foot here.”
Ah, the present tense, the future tense lurking. Dominick felt more comfortable here. “And do they know of . . . of their father’s condition?”
“You mean that death stalks their parents? It couldn’t happen soon enough for them. Then they can take everything their father hasn’t already given them.”
Privateers, Dominick thought. “Where do they live?”
“One is in London, the other over in Boston.”
“Both married?”
“Why? You looking for a wife? I wouldn’t wish either of them on you.”
“No, no. I have no need for a wife. Just curious.”
“They both have husbands, last I heard. The one in London married an Arab. The one in Boston married some nothing doctor. They don’t eat meat.”
“Strange for twins to live so far apart.”
Lydia laughed. It was much too close to a cackle for such a dark and stormy night. “They can’t stand each other. They have that much sense anyway. They were always in competition, first for their daddy’s attention and then for everything else. God, they were awful. The lies, the deceptions, the just plain meanness. There’s not another creature in god’s creation—except maybe cats—that can act as evil and mean as little girls to one another. And I know, because I was one once. But those two just never grew out of it.”