by JoeAnn Hart
“See what? See golfers kill another goose?”
“Call your momma and tell her we’re coming over for a lesson. I know where I can score a nice fat goose in Chinatown on the way.”
Luisa shook her head. “You need wild animal, not overweight, spoiled thing.”
“Farm-raised will be fine,” said Vita, winning the leg back again. “After all, we can’t go around killing the fairway geese on purpose.”
Luisa shrugged and wiped her hands. She didn’t see why not.
Chapter Five
The Long Drive
THE FOLLOWING evening, Gerard turned out of the Club’s gates and gunned his little black convertible down Eden Road, flying too fast over the speed bump and coming down hard with a lurch. It had been a difficult day, but then again, Mondays always were. Over the weekends, members were thrown together with too much alcohol and time, and by Saturday night the topics of money, goods, and one another had been picked to the bone. By Sunday they would start sniffing around at the Club itself, and the staff in particular, until they puffed a mild grievance into a crisis, muttering their birdcall, “something must be done, something must be done,” and would not rest until they had their goat. Gerard could always count on someone storming into his office every Monday to bite his head off. This afternoon, it had been Linzee Gibbons, the chair of the House & Grounds Committee.
“The balls have got to go.” She absently slashed her tennis racket through the air. “All week, golfers have been returning from the back nine talking about the new blight on the landscape. And now they’re here, even on the terrace. Haven’t you any aesthetic sensibilities, Mr. Wilton?”
Gerard had nodded thoughtfully and squinted his eyes, as if giving his aesthetics serious consideration. “You’re right, Mrs. Gibbons.” He smiled his self-deprecating best and opened his palms like a flower. “I was so determined to fix this goose infestation, I just wasn’t thinking about how the balls would look on your lovely grounds.”
In truth, he knew exactly how they would look. Obvious. He wanted them to stand out and be seen, the physical evidence that he was on top of the problem. If only the wind hadn’t acted up, rolling a few inflatable eyeballs close to the club-house, making his plan seem messy and slipshod. As it was, the geese, with their usual insouciance, had quickly become habituated to them, not even bothering to look up when one rolled by.
If only humans were as adaptable. After the two bird fatalities during the Fourth of July weekend, the members had become fixated on the subject of goose control. The board organized a Goose Committee, divided into two subcommittees: Prevention, which was the information-gathering arm, and Eradication, which aimed to take action. As usual, however, as soon as they were in a group they were incapable of rendering an intelligent verdict. They had one joint committee meeting to select a steering committee, and then got drunk in the course of discussing the comparable worth of Canada geese and spotted owls. The Rules Committee, sitting in on the joint committee meeting, had located a golf course in the Pacific Northwest where there was a two-shot penalty for hitting a spotted owl. Then there was the recent incident in Maryland, where a golfer, his shot ruined by a honking goose, had bludgeoned it to death with his 7-iron. That was a criminal matter, they all agreed, and not a regulatory one, and so beyond the ken of any committee’s concerns.
But meetings had meaning in spite of their disjointed results, as Gerard had written in his thesis at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, “A Guide for Selective Clubs Operations” [Chap. 2, Sec. 3]: Members are to be encouraged in their committee labors and praised for bearing the brunt of the work. Arnold Quilpe must be sustained in his illusion that he ran the food service, Linzee Gibbons in hers that she maintained the house and grounds, unaware that Gerard spent most of his days undoing their pigheaded attempts at management. While the committees argued about spotted owls, he and Barry had just gone ahead and ordered the yellow vinyl eyeballs.
“They’re tossing about behind the service sheds like fleas,” chomped Linzee Gibbons. Her skin, feathered with lines, was deeply tanned, which made her tennis outfit seem aggressively white and brought attention to the teeth crowded to the front of her mouth, making her look very Windsorish. “What is the point of all my work if the course is to be made into a circus?”
Gerard stood next to her looking out the window, his hand on his chin, shaking his head. “I’ll have Barry round them up and stake them again around Oxbow. They weren’t meant to scare the members, after all, just the geese.” He swallowed his weak attempt at a laugh when she glared at him from under her pink plastic visor, which cast her eyes in red shadow.
“My father would have known what to do.” She lowered her voice. “A shotgun. That would take care of your geese.”
His geese. It was their Club, their grounds, even their manager, but the geese were all his. He clasped his hands and looked at the ceiling, imploring the ghost of Mrs. Gibbons’s father. “The trouble is, of course, the state,” he said, appealing to her staunch Republicanism and forcing her to flick her head in agreement. “The hunting season is short and in the fall, at any rate. Maybe we can make a dent then, but for now. . .”
“But for now.” She grasped her racket handle with both hands. “You’re to gather those balls and dispose of them. When my father was president. . .” She tightened her pink mouth.
Oh, no. Gerard glanced around for the tissue box. What was it about fathers around here, that they produced such overpowering sentiment? So much mythmaking with so little material. But maybe that was it. Maybe the fathers were such an unknown quantity that anything could be projected on them. “I’ll have Barry right on it, Mrs. Gibbons,” he said softly. “Thank you for getting the ball rolling on this.”
She lifted her head and seemed confused for a moment, then straightened her posture. “Good.” She gave the tennis racket a quick, decisive movement, narrowly missing Gerard’s diploma on the wall behind her.
After she left, he adjusted the frame and, while he was at it, rubbed a spot off the glass with the sleeve of his linen jacket. At school, he’d taken Spanish so he could communicate directly with house-keeping, but the cleaning industry in the Boston area had since changed to Brazilian immigrants, and he knew no Portuguese. The head of the service spoke English, sort of, and translated the instructions to the Brazilian crew, but Gerard wished he could talk to them personally, and in detail.
After he’d finished writing a memo to the head of the service, he buzzed Barry’s office but got no answer. It was Monday, after all. Barry would still be out patching the turf as meticulously as a surgeon grafting skin, while his crew roamed the course like a pack of hunting dogs, retrieving broken tees, pencil stubs, cigarette butts, beer cans, torn pieces of scorecards, and what-ever else the members had tossed aside over the weekend. Gerard didn’t want to bother him, so he didn’t page. Instead, he left a message about the balls on Barry’s voice mail, to make sure they were taken care of first thing in the morning.
All part of a day’s work, he reflected as he stopped at the light. And he was very good at his work, if he had to say so himself. Not just in the handling of the forty-five employees under his wing, but the way he worked the two hundred bond-holding members as well, like Mrs. Gibbons. Some days he felt he held them in the palm of his hand. And for this they showered him with gifts. Ski weekends, bottles of wine, envelopes at Christmas, all for what they considered extra attention but which Gerard bestowed to every one of them.
But he would have to get rid of the geese or the members would start looking around for someone who could, since their loyalty extended only to their immediate level of comfort. Staring at the red light, he considered Mrs. Gibbons’s father. Gerard had always assumed they couldn’t shoot any geese until hunting season, but the animals were interfering with the Club’s livelihood. A farmer had the right to kill a predator. What about the rights of a country club? The geese were spoiling the grass, his grass, the very surface the game was played on, without
which there could be no Club. There used to be skeet facilities over by the curling rink. Maybe some members could take up shooting clay pigeons again, and then who could blame them if a goose wandered into the line of fire?
By habit, Gerard glanced to his left and groaned. On the rare day when geese were not an active thorn in his side, the billboard at the intersection was, looming offensively across from the warm brick walls of the Club. Two previous Club managers—one, old Desmond, who had been there for thirty-eight years (and awarded a full page in the History), and the Australian woman with an ersatz-uppers accent who’d lasted mere months—had been fighting both the zoning board and the owner of the property to have the billboard dismantled since its erection ten years before. Now it was up to him.
This winter, though, it had been unpatriotic to complain, bearing as it did the image of firefighters raising a flag on burning remains. Gerard was relieved to finally have the public service ad gone, giving everyone permission to return to normal, and he could begin lobbying again for the board’s removal. This new ad was a promotion for corrective laser surgery at the ophthalmologist clinic in the next town, showing a man giddily throwing away his glasses.
When the signal changed, he turned right onto the frontage road and immediately braked in traffic. Maybe he should have left by the service road, which would have cut off a few hundred yards of this rush hour mess. But then he shook his head. No. The service road was too abrupt a change from beauty to squalor. Better a soft transition on bucolic Eden Road before the assault of drive-through Polynesians and mattress discounters. Besides, it was important he experience the Club with the perspective of a member, from the first moment of turning into the gated and urned entrance in the morning, with the club-house in the curvy distance crowning the roundabout like a tiara, to the final salute from the security guard at the gate-house at the end of the day. He’d hated to leave the Club on such a fine evening, but he had to go to his apartment to shower and dress so he could return for an events consultation after dinner. When the Rundlett-Farnsworth wedding was abruptly canceled in June, the Webers and Cranes jumped on the October date for their children, Bonnie and Duncan, whose engagement had not even been announced. But good dates were hard to come by, so sometimes the cart had to be put before the horse.
Gerard stretched his neck and saw a mangle of cars ahead. He wished people were more attentive so that these things wouldn’t happen in the first place. He looked at his watch. This traffic had better start moving or he wouldn’t have time to stop at the dry cleaners. He settled back down into the leather seat of his Mercedes, an older model he bought from Jay Freylinghuysen, a member who sold semivintage cars from the parking lot of his insurance agency. A Samaritan hobby, like Poodle Rescue, he called it, as if he’d found them abandoned by the side of the road. Smiling at the thought, Gerard automatically looked at the side of the road and caught the sight of a ball bouncing along the divider.
No. Not one of the vinyl eyeballs. It must have blown out of the service entrance. He signaled to pull over and retrieve it, before it caused an. . .! Or was that what this traffic was all about? He sank deeper into the cracked leather, almost below the level of the wooden steering wheel, and watched in horror as a burst of wind lifted the ball and dropped it solidly in the middle of the oncoming lane. An animal cry escaped his lips. He closed his eyes, but he could not shut out the metal cacophony of screeches and honks that sounded on and on, ringing, beeping, and shouting his name.
The plump gosling pecked furiously at a red-veined yellow ball that had washed up on the distant, deserted shore of Oxbow Lake.
“Forbes.” Stripped down to his boxers, Barry stood ankle-deep in the water, trying to entice his gosling to go for a swim. “Leave that alone. Come here.”
Forbes would not be deterred from his hatred for the eye until Barry whistled a series of maternal calls, which made the gosling pause, then come waddling. Barry had kept him in the back of his office these past few weeks while he worked, supplying him with a bowl of mash and keeping him quiet as best he could, but now he was feathered out and eager to take his place in the world. It was time to train him to stay near but at a distance, so Gerard wouldn’t suspect they were together. A metallic beetle ran across Forbes’s path, so he stopped to examine it. Barry waited patiently, as always. He liked the whole deal, feeding the gosling, cleaning up after it, protecting it from predators, i.e., Gerard. And because he didn’t want to leave the little feller home alone at night, he stayed in, cooking dinner and watching TV instead of going out and causing trouble like he used to. In a funny way, he was the one being domesticated, not the other way around.
Forbes maneuvered the beetle onto its back and poked at its stomach with his little beak. Barry never tired of watching Forbes. It let him see the world through those bright little eyes, and that world was big and mysterious and full of surprises.
The beetle having escaped, Forbes stopped to taste a bit of interesting vegetation. The leaves were white from insecticide, and Barry took a quick step out of the water, waving his arms. Forbes cocked his head in wonder but let the leaf fall from his beak and continued his trek to the water.
Note to self, Barry thought: Check the ingredients on the can of insecticide to make sure there was nothing that could hurt his baby. Barry had been taught that the chemicals used on the course were as safe as mother’s milk, to one degree or another, and that the hazmat suits were more to protect the workers’ clothes than anything else. And it was true, he’d never seen a goose lying around dead from poisoning, but maybe they changed in other ways. Maybe the flock didn’t migrate anymore because the birds were depressed and couldn’t drag their feathered butts in the air. Maybe they had shorter life expectancies. Or panic attacks. He’d better check that label.
“Let’s go, Forbes.” Barry whistled again, and Forbes ran toward him, his neck lowered for balance, beeping in joy when his feet touched the water. It had taken years for Barry to learn to swim, awkwardly at best, but Forbes just did it, simple as breathing. Humans were pretty helpless creatures in comparison. No wings, no webbed feet. All they had were smarts to survive, and sometimes it seemed not too much of them.
They both looked up at the sound of the pager, hidden in the folds of Barry’s khakis on the shore. It buzzed and buzzed. He was tempted to answer it in case it was one of his crew with a problem, but it couldn’t be. He’d sent them home early. It could only be Gerard, and he always had problems. Everything was an emergency to him.
“Man.” Barry leaned back into the water, with the sun wheeling westward overhead, experiencing the simplicity of being an animal on earth. “Gerard’s got to learn to relax. He’s wound tight as a golf ball.”
Barry submerged his head, to the great delight of Forbes, who dunked his as well. After shaking water from their ears, the two of them paddled away from shore while the pager continued to sound its alarm.
Chapter Six
The Backswing
AS SHE rubbed Lancôme sunblock on her neck, Madeline Lambert wondered just what was going on with her husband. Charles had left for the office that morning so reluctantly, so sad, seemingly dissatisfied not just with work but with life itself. He used to bounce out the door, chipper and alive, ready to embrace each day. Now it had been weeks since he’d even embraced her. When she saw him sitting on the back porch steps, fully dressed in his three-piece suit, staring at the golf course like he’d never seen it before—the same exact view he’d known from childhood—she wanted to throw her arms around him and coax him back to bed. She was still in her gauzy nightgown, enticingly so, she thought, and it wouldn’t have been the first time Charles had to get dressed twice for work. But his sadness had seemed so untouchable, she hesitated, unsure of herself. Then he started up about the goose again, pointing to the distant spot where it fell and putting a quick end to her plans.
And yet she couldn’t blame it all on the goose, as much as she wanted to. Charles hadn’t really been the same since he went to that Budd
ha Ball Clinic in New Mexico last winter. It sounded like something her mother would do, if her mother played golf. Would Charles become like her, always searching for a miracle cure? When Madeline was growing up in Santa Cruz, psychoanalysis had been the great drama of her mother’s life, but later she abandoned Freud for high colonics, isolation tanks, and est seminars. She lived in Sedona now, and the last time they talked it was harmonic hot stone massage, with crystal bowls and suede mallets. Over the years, each new therapy enhanced her mother’s belief that there was something wrong with her, which propelled her into the next nutty treatment. Her pursuit of sanity had become a madness of its own. What cure was Charles looking to find? And what would happen to them both if he found it?
She dropped the sunblock back in her quilted tote, and her hand instinctively adjusted her bathing suit under her left arm, letting her finger trace her scar. It wasn’t so nice of Charles to leave for the clinic so soon after her scare either. Granted, the lump turned out to be nothing, but still, there had been a few anxious weeks. For her. For him, apparently nothing. He seemed far more moved by two dead geese.
“Madeline Lambert. How I love saying that name. Gives the tongue a workout. How are you this afternoon, my pet?”
She sighed inwardly. It was Thursday, the day Dr. Nicastro closed up his office at noon and came to the Club—not to golf with his colleagues but to sunbathe. He didn’t even play tennis, but he liked the pool and he liked the food. His size was proof of that. He was a urologist, a “colorectal man” he liked to say as he extended his hand during introductions. He was put up for membership the year before by one of his prostate patients and was generally considered a hero among the middle-aged men at the Club. Because of that, the men ignored his occasional bouts of bathroom humor. The women tried to play polite keep-away.