Lapham Rising

by Roger Rosenblatt

“I’m sure you were.”

  “But maybe she would be too much woman for a man your age.”

  Too much for a man of any age, I theenk. And then I think of something else. A vision comes to me in the form of a long, thick, swishy, tail-like braid of hair.

  “Is that you, Wrinkles?” she gasps into her end of the phone. “Well! Ah do believe this is the very first time Ah have received a call from your distinguished self.”

  “It’s your lucky day, Chittlins. You have something I want.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a bit late for that?” she says. “Late for you, Ah mean.”

  “I want your hair. I want you to cut off that braid of yours and give it to me.”

  “And why on earth should Ah do that?” she asks. “Ah cannot think for what sick and perverse purpose you could possibly desire mah extra-long, extra-thick, world-class braid of hair.”

  “I need it. Just leave it at that.” I know she won’t.

  “Are you going to hang yourself? Give me an incentive.”

  “Never mind why I want it. I’ll pay you for it. Plenty. And it will grow back soon. You stand only to profit from this transaction, Kathy.”

  “Ah worry when you address me by mah Christian name instead of the usual insult, Harry. Ah worry, and yet mah interest is piqued. What do you call plenty?” She is beginning to speak in the short, orgasmic breaths that accompany the sale of a house.

  “Athousand dollars,” I tell her.

  “Ah don’t clear mah throat for a thousand dollars.” I picture a closed-mouth, cocky smile.

  “Five thousand, then.” I need to get the deal done.

  A sigh of mocking pity seeps through the receiver. “Let me bring you into the twentieth century—or the twenty-first, to be technical about it, my hermit crab.”

  A chill invades me as I realize that it is she and not I who ought to be addressing the Chautauquans. Like Lapham, Kathy is the twentieth century. The two of them ought to be together. They should be wed at once by the Reverend I. Love Everyone in Saint No Offense Church with Hector as their ringbearer. It would be the event of the season. Her wedding gift to him: a morocco-bound volume of The Collected Aphms, at long last. His to her: a cash register twenty feet high and twenty wide, on which she could hop from key to key dressed as an adjustable-rate mortgage. On their wedding night, they could dance to Hootie and the Blowfish and watch Survivor. He could say: “I want her to win.” And she: “I want him.”

  She inhales and continues. “For your edification, Harry March, five thousand dollars these days will not suffice as a deposit to take a house off the market for a single night. On an average sale—an average sale, mind you—one that takes me as long as ten minutes to consummate—mah commission comes to four hundred thousand dollars. And do you know that in order to hold that cashier’s check for four hundred thousand dollars in my delicate-as-china hand, Ah do not need to lose a single hair on mah oh-so-desirable head?”

  I ought to get out more. If I knew more people, or even knew of more people, I would never have had to approach Ms. Southern Discomfort in the first place. Maybe I should have gone into real estate myself; imagined estate has proved to be far less practical.

  The urge arrives to gather up everything Southern and dump it on her from an extreme altitude—levees, gumbo, étouffée, catalpa trees, sweating Mississippi courtrooms with redneck juries composed of men named Wayne and slowly revolving ceiling fans, cicadas, hoop skirts, mud, buckshot, whips, bayous, verandas, juleps (mint and original), hooch, “Swanee,” Big Daddy’s white suit, Big Daddy, and Big Daddy’s house—just lift it all by crane, open the claws, let it drop, and bury her forever, except for that braid.

  The hour grows late. I’m sunk if she doesn’t come through. It could take me weeks to find and prepare more horsehair, and by then Lapham’s house will be open for business. The Quiogue stables can’t help me now; their horses have just had haircuts. I suppose I could look on eBay, but there’s no time for delivery even by FedEx, which anyway, I am certain, has put me on its blacklist.

  What must be done must be done tonight, before tomorrow morning’s lecture to the Chautauquans. How else can I show them the way? And if I don’t show them, how will they show others? My subversion is a small gesture, to be sure, but it will make a statement, an impression. Worlds of thought and action have been moved by less, have been revolutionized by more obscure acts than mine. Believe me. Check your history. Besides, I refuse to give up now, after my bounty of headaches, backaches, earaches, toothaches (from holding the flashlight), scraped knees, bloody hands and feet, frayed nerves, heartburn, sleepless nights, and bang-bang days. It’s been too much fun.

  “All right. How much do you want?”

  “Why, Ah want you, honey.” I picture her spreading open her arms like Aimee Semple McPherson. “Ah want your house, your island, the works. And Ah’ll pay top dollar.”

  “Because you can turn it around and get back twice what you give me,” I feebly suggest.

  “Three times. Maybe four. You sell me your little Island of Dr. Moreau, and Ah’ll pay you enough to enable you to live out your shriveled, mean-spirited days in the comfort of the finest assisted-living facility on the East End, with plenty of dollars to spare in case you want to take a day trip to the Aus-able Chasms or catch a bus to see a revival of Cats. And for all that, Ah shall gladly cut off my luxurious braid of hair and hand it over to you mahself.”

  “Never!” I shout into the phone.

  “Harry March!” she shouts back, making my name sound like two imperatives. “You’re hurtin’ me! Never say never.” Another intake of breath. There’s a pause. Then: “Ah must say, Ah get all hot just thinkin’ what you might be planning on doing with mah hair.”

  “You’d be surprised,” I tell her. “What about fifty thousand? It’s all I have.” I may be lying to her; I don’t really know. Hector says we’re rich, but he can only count to seven. I haven’t checked the Money Room in quite a while. In any case, her reply makes the effort unnecessary.

  “This conversation is concluded. Sell me your island, and mah hair is yours. Your island. Your house.” She means my life. “That’s mah price, sweet pea.” She hangs up, and my heart sinks with the click.

  I look down at my little white anarchist, cold as I can look.

  “Thanks a lot, Hector.” He seems enthused by what he has overheard.

  “De nada,” he says. “Well, so much for the Da Vinci.” He tries unsuccessfully to rub his front paws together. “Now you can drop the lecture too. Isn’t that good? You can’t do one without the other.”

  “That’s right, rub it in.”

  “But I’ve provided you with the perfect out. You can tell them your dog ate your homework.”

  “You know,” I tell him as I head for my rowboat, “for a self-proclaimed born-again Christian, you practice very little charity.”

  He wags his euphoric tail. “Now why don’t you just forget all this nonsense—forget Kathy’s braid, forget your crazy plot—and calm down and concentrate on little Hector, devote your remaining days to ensuring little Hector’s happiness and welfare? I’ll take you to church with me, and you’ll see the light and learn to love Jesus and America, and then you can write a best-seller about a dog who talks to God. And it’ll make us lots of money, so we can buy Lapham’s house and live in the lap of luxury. I love laps.”

  “You’re very annoying, you know.”

  “We’re both very annoying. That’s why we’re friends.”

  “Are we friends?”

  He gives me the Quizzical head tilt. “Of course we’re friends.”

  Eleven

  Get your leash.”

  “I hate that,” he says.

  “You hate your leash?”

  “I hate the fact that I automatically obey certain things you say. That you programmed me when I was too young to resist.”

  “Those were the days.” I have no time for this. “Get your leash. We’re going to town.” I climb in the b
oat.

  “‘Get your leash,’” he grumbles. “‘Get your leash.’ ‘Lie down.’ ‘Heel!’ Imagine ordering someone to heel! ‘Beg!’ Imagine ordering someone to beg!” One day I taught him about Pavlov, and he hit the ceiling.

  “Are you coming or not?” I know he is; he lunges at any opportunity to get off the island. He crouches where the platforms meet on the dock, then springs into the rowboat, seeming briefly like an ordinary dog. “Good boy!” I tell him, though I know I always have to pay, one way or another, for needling Hector.

  The phone rings as I am about to untie the ropes from the cleats on the pilings. Maybe Kathy’s calling back. Leaving Hector in the boat, I move as quickly as I can up the beach, up the lawn, and into the house. I get to the phone on the seventh ring.

  “Well? Have you changed your mind?” I ask.

  A strangely arresting silence follows. “Not bloody likely,” says the voice at the other end of the line.

  “Chloe?” I find myself standing straighter.

  “Harry, the children called me about your e-mail. They’re very worried, and so am I.”

  “Oh, no no no no, Chlo. Everything is great.”

  “Joel is worried too.”

  “I’ve never met Joel,” I say, as if that comes to her as news. “But if the event I’m planning requires a professional touch, I’ll be sure to let him know.”

  “He’s worried because I’m worried,” she says, putting me in my place. “Harry, please try to focus. You’re sounding crazier and crazier. I don’t know what you’re planning, and I know you won’t tell me, but promise me you won’t do something stupid or dangerous.”

  I remain quiet.

  “Harry?”

  “Chloe, I’m very grateful for the call. Give my thanks to Joel too. And I apologize for the wisecrack. But I was just about to go off island. May I call you back tomorrow? We’ll have a nice long chat.”

  “That was both gracious and coherent, Harry. Now you’ve really got me scared. I hardly need to remind you that you’re the last one to determine that you’re okay.”

  I’d put up an argument if she were wrong.

  “Harry, I love you. The children love you. Whatever it is you’re doing, please remember that there are people who care about you.” Her voice cracks. “I’ll leave it at that.”

  “Got to go, Chlo,” I tell her, my voice also cracking. I’ll leave that at that, too.

  As I’m about to climb back into the boat, Hector looks up. “I heard you say Chloe. Did she mention me?”

  “Yes. She asked if you were still alive.”

  “Praise the Lord!” he says. “She was thinking about little Hector!”

  I guide us outside the L of the dock, brace my feet against the ribs of the boat and ply the oars with deep and even strokes. Four minutes from shore to shore across the Styx. Dave, Jack, and the Mexicans declare their surprise at the sight of us, since I only ever leave Noman to buy provisions, twice a month. The Mexicans greet Hector as they might Zapata. He in turn does his usual Mexican hat dance of excitement. Their fondness for him is ethnic-based; I once told them I’d named him after all of them.

  Even when I do go off island, I rarely travel far. Usually I shop either at the little country market in Quogue, to which I can easily walk once I get across the creek, or at the supermarket in Westhampton Beach, to which I can hitch. Ravioli and Devil Dogs, I have discovered, are obtainable everywhere. Today, however, I need Southampton, second to Riverhead as largest town in the area. Like most Hamptons towns, it has been manufactured for people at play, and is the likeliest place, I have reckoned, to find a solution to my problem.

  Tied up at Lapham’s dock, which is sufficiently large to accommodate six Love Boat cruise ships complete with viruses and rapists, is a sleek forty-foot job of blue fiberglass and radiant teak and cherry. I put in next to it, jetsam beside the Isle de France.

  “You know what that is?” Dave asks. Of course I do not. “It’s a Hinckley Picnic Boat, the best powerboat in the world. Draft is six inches. Has both gas and jet engines. Costs four hundred and fifty thousand bucks.”

  “Put me down for two,” I tell him.

  Up close, Lapham’s construction site appears more menacing than it does from Noman. It is worse than a mythical animal. It is real, and has grown into a village; no, a city; no, a nation-state erupting from the soil to assert its dominance and flex its muscle. The eyeless cavities of the windows await glass. The vast, mouthy entranceway is ready to receive the double portals. The steps to the Parthenon are in place, as are the chimneys, all twelve of them. It goes on forever, the flagstone pathways leading to outbuildings and more outbuildings, including an indoor basketball court (heated, says Dave) and a garage for fifty cars (also heated). A putting green. A tower. A moat. A chapel. The bomb shelter. Where are the slave quarters? Where is the prison? And off to the side of the pool house, the Tilles Blowhard, dark and lethal, points its black hole at me like one of the guns of Navarone. Krento was right: the house is nearly done.

  “Yet another room?” I ask. On the left wing of the monstrosity, Dave’s men are hammering away at a structure in the shape of a top-heavy X, with circles at the shorter tips. It looks like a distorted pair of scissors.

  “Uh-huh,” says Dave. “At the last minute he decided he wanted a special room to exhibit his collection of antique asparagus tongs, if you can believe it.”

  “I can.”

  “Leave Hector with us,” says one of the carpenters.

  “Only if you promise to mistreat him.” Hector and I skirt Lapham’s property and head for the road, where we’ll catch the bus to Southampton.

  “Be careful, Harry,” Dave calls after us. “You’re going out into the world.”

  “Das right,” says José. “Ees not like your island. Ees a jungle out there. Anything can happen.”

  “True. I may run into some Mexicans.” They talk to me as if I were a child. I may not be as smooth as some, but I can certainly handle myself in Southampton, for God’s sake.

  We leave the Lapham empire and walk along Quogue Street, or as it was known in my youth, Main Street, which, in the eighteenth century, served as a wide, flat drag for sheep and cows when Quogue was a patchwork of farms. Past former boardinghouses for seaside seekers in the 1920s and 1930s since gutted and remolded into bulbous single dwellings. Past more grand houses under repair, or in the ecstasies of expansion, or wholly new constructions wrapped in white Dupont Tyvek building paper, used to repel moisture and dampness, and me. Tyvek. The word covers the Hamptons. The signature of King Tyvek the Mummifier, the Mummy himself. Bandages shredded and askew, he bursts from his sarcophagus and mauls the wooded lots. The deer flee, crazed.

  The constructions rise on brown, yet-to-be-landscaped grounds among the building permits, contractor signs (“You Dream It, We Build It”), and a thinned-out forest of green Porta Pottis. One fine day, a million sprinklers will erupt in unison and announce the houses’ grand openings. Like Lapham’s, these junior mansions all have massive (if fewer) fieldstone chimneys, Potemkin porches on which no one ever will rock, and rococo balconies over their front doors. Interspersed among the older houses, they stand looking vaguely related to one another, like the overweight children of a demented family.

  Past the khaki-shingled Church of the Atonement (Episcopal, 1884), with its stained glass saints and angels, where my mother prayed, mainly for my father, who would not have set foot in that or any other “house of superstition” if his life had depended on it. Past the Inn at Quogue, which changes management every year or so in search of the perfect Bloody Mary.

  Past Jessup Avenue, Quogue’s one-block “business section.” When so much is new or renewed in one’s hometown, one feels the imprint of places no longer there—more pentimento than palimpsest. That’s where the schoolhouse used to be. That’s where Tommy Trudeau, my boyhood buddy, lived, before his family moved back to Indiana. And so on. Now one in three buildings houses a real estate broker. I pull Hector quickly
past Polite for the Elite so that we can avoid the haranguing voice of Dixie.

  Past the Quogue Free Library, before whose entrance lies the great rusted iron anchor from the schooner Nahum Chapin that went down off Quogue Beach in 1897, all hands lost. Mrs. Damato the librarian sees Hector and me walking by as she is about to enter the building. It was she who gave me my first library card, led me to Swift, scolded me for doing cannonballs from the Post Bridge, and stood beside my parents at the train station when I went off to college. She served the same purposes for Charles, Emma, and James. I nod to her respectfully. She smiles sardonically.

  “You used to be such a sweet little boy, Harry. What happened?”

  “The war,” I tell her, and move on.

  “Tell me again,” Hector says impatiently as we arrive at the highway and wait for the bus in the dense afternoon heat. “We do not own a car because…?”

  “Because we don’t need one,” I explain for the hundredth time.

  “Oh yes! The bus is so much more convenient. Why can’t we take the bus with the hair dryers?”

  He’s referring to a special luxury jitney that runs between New York City and the Hamptons, a mobile beauty parlor where women get peeled, waxed, manicured, pedicured, massaged, and blown dry for the evening parties they are riding toward.

  “Because it doesn’t use this route. And it’s idiotic,” I tell him.

  “To you, everything comfortable is idiotic.” He rubs the side of his head with his paw. “When we’re in town, can I go to Puppy Pompadour?”

  “No. You look fine.”

  “Can I ever go to Puppy Pompadour?”

  “No.”

  The county bus system on the East End may be a pathetic enterprise, as he suggests, but it affords useful transportation for those of us whose Bentleys are in the shop. A wounded fleet of small and scarred buses—steel-blue, pea-green, and dirty-white in color—sputters up and down the northern and southern jaws of the alligator all day long, like pacing penitents. On the southern jaw they rattle along the Old Montauk Highway, so called to distinguish it from Route 27, Sunrise Highway, which runs roughly parallel a few miles to the north. As late as the 1950s, the Old Montauk Highway was the main road out to the Hamptons; the Long Island Expressway, known as the LIE, did not extend this far east until 1972. The drive from the city to Southampton took between four and five hours, and getting to East Hampton, which seemed as distant as Portugal, required much of the day.