Lapham Rising

by Roger Rosenblatt

  “Yahoo!” says Hector. He trots to my side. “I’ve always wanted you to make out a will. As your closest relative, I mean.”

  “Only geographically. If you want to stay while I’m taping, you’ll have to be quiet.”

  “As a Doberman.”

  “To begin with…” I address the camcorder.

  “Hallelujah!”

  “I won’t warn you again.” He bows his head.

  “To begin with, I wish to quote the poet Hesiod as an epigraph to this document. Hesiod, my kind of poet, wrote of the Ages of Man. As to his own times, he offered the following observation:

  “‘Ah, if only I did not belong to the fifth age of men which is now come. Had I but died earlier, or come into the world later! For this is the iron age. These men are utterly corrupt. By day and by night they fret and the gods send them more and more gnawing cares. But they bring their greatest trouble upon themselves. Everywhere the right of might prevails, and city destroys its neighbor city. Whoever is true to his oath and is good and just finds no favor. Fairness and moderation are no longer esteemed. The wicked are allowed to harm the noble, to lie, and to swear false oaths. Nothing but misery is left to mortals, and no end of this mournful state is yet in sight.’”

  “A bit flip for my taste,” says Hector. “But I like it.”

  “And now to the more practical portions of the will: my bequests and requests.” Hector sits up, his ears way up.

  “To the people of the East End I leave my island, Noman, as a wildlife refuge. I would like to know that the children of the area, and especially the poorer ones, will have a place to study nature and generally enjoy themselves in a protected environment. Let there be many boats full of happy young ones going back and forth day and night across the creek in full view of the majestic house of the Laphams, who, I am sure, will delight in the round-the-clock squeals of excitement. I should warn you that there may be some opposition to this bequest from one Kathy Polite of Polite for the Elite, Realtors. But pay her no heed. She is known to be unbalanced, and it would be kinder simply to ignore her.

  “To Chloe, Charles, Emma, and James I leave everything else I own, which admittedly is not much, except for what cash remains in the Money Room and a few book royalties that might provide an annuity sufficient for one good yearly family dinner in a two-star restaurant. Chloe, you are welcome to bring Joel to the dinner, at which you might raise a glass to my memory, but that is up to you. In any event, do not make a fuss about it and draw the silly attention of the other diners.

  “To Dave’s boy, Jack, I leave the cancellation of my loan. The money is his.

  “To the British West Indies lady who takes ticket reservations for US Air I leave a round-trip two-day excursion to the Hamptons, to show her what she’s been missing.

  “To José the carpenter, who works on Dave’s crew at Lapham’s property, I leave a brand-new swimming pool, to be purchased from Miss Alvarez at Anthony’s Aqua Heaven. Please see to it that the installation is as noisy as possible.

  “To Miss Alvarez herself I wish to say, I am not a Romantic. But you may have my copy of The Vanity of Human Wishes anyway.”

  Hector goes into one of his bloodhound sniffing spasms to suggest his impatience.

  “On the matter of my funeral: Joel, naturally, I leave this in your hands. But keep it simple. I know you may be tempted to go in another direction—a Gandhi-worthy procession of two or three million mourners stretching along the LIE, filling all the lanes, including the HOV, from the Moriches to Amagansett, all rending their garments and heaving with grief—but try to resist it.

  “No eulogies, please. I do not want the congregants subjected to other writers talking about how much they meant to me.

  “And I guess that’s it,” I tell the camcorder.

  “Aren’t you forgetting someone?” asks Hector.

  “I don’t think so. Whom did you have in mind?” I pretend to be perplexed about this. “Oh! You!” I love it that he can’t help wagging his tail and betraying his excitement. I turn back to the camcorder.

  “As to my dog, Hector, I leave him…”

  “Yes? Yes?”

  “I leave him to the Mexican carpenters across the creek. They are good guys and will take excellent care of him. Please tell them, however, that he is not to have nachos.”

  “But what about something for me? What will I inherit?”

  “Try the earth.”

  I address the camcorder again. “One more thing. My epitaph? ‘Do not resuscitate.’”

  Eighteen

  I’ve read that Mozart would grow melancholy when he approached the final stages of a composition, and that Velázquez would become surly and depressed when putting the final touches on a painting, and that Eugene O’Neill would so vigorously resist the moment when he was about to complete his final act that he would take long vacations in the tropics rather than endure the letdown of writing his last soggy lines. Such are my own emotions as I am about to survey my handiwork openly for what will be the first and possibly the last time.

  I throw off the tarp with a flourish, the way a sculptor might remove the drape from a statue he is about to present to an audience in a gallery. The heavens cooperate in the moment. Thunder. Ka-boom! The Da Vinci is revealed in all its preposterous splendor. It is a work of art, of industrial art. The parts hug one another like the pieces of a gigantic Chinese puzzle box, functional and mysterious yet forbidding and smug in their completeness. I know how the builders of the Trojan Horse felt when they stood back from their masterwork and took it in, before the horse received a single Greek warrior. They had manufactured a weapon, to be sure, but first they had made a thing of beauty.

  It is 7:41. Exactly ten minutes ago, at 7:31, Dave, Jack, and José and company packed up their gear and left Lapham’s construction site. Exactly thirteen minutes ago, at 7:28, the site experienced its last bang of the day. I made a point of listening for it. I stood on my dock, craned my neck toward the creek, and waited. Bang. More than the last bang of the day, it was the last bang, period. Bang.

  Now the storm arrives, not in a spray of droplets but with mature force. In the midst of the Sturm und Drang, I try to imagine how many white party tents are at this moment tottering on their tent poles on all the lawns of all the towns and villages of the East End. How many tent flaps are flapping; how many paper tablecloths are flying about in the wind; how many knives, forks, spoons, and napkins and plastic champagne flutes and tea lights are spinning through the air like shrapnel; how many canapés are sodden; how many contingency plans are hurriedly being put into effect; how many caterers are checking their contracts to verify that they cannot be held responsible for the weather; how many guests are apologizing for phoning at the last minute, unable to shake their summer colds; and how many hosts and hostesses are holding their heads with both hands as though they were in danger of flying off with the rest of the things.

  The porch leaks and the storm strafes the house at a slant, entering the front door and pelting the remnants of the parlor wall into a viscous mound of plaster of Paris. The rain thickens and falls in metallic sheets, and I am soaked through and a bit chilled.

  But the Da Vinci holds. The winches and the plates move easily. The pine ball I have been soaking in a tub of gasoline for the past two weeks lies in its pouch ready for ignition. Kathy Polite’s braid performs brilliantly. I had misgivings, I must admit, but damn! She’s as strong as a horse. I pull down the hurling arm using all the weight of my body. I fasten it at the base. I stand back. There. I take the extra-long fireplace matches I have been keeping dry, say a brief pagan prayer, and light the ball. It flares in the pouch like the sun itself, and for just a flash, the light it gives off illuminates everything in sight, including the looming skeleton of Lapham’s house across the creek.

  Outer walls, inner walls, pool-house walls, gazebo walls, atrium, aquarium, arboretum, auditorium, and asparagoretum walls; the piazza, esplanade, terrace, and gardens; the conservatory, the refector
y, the aviary, apiary, chapel, stables, pantry, bomb shelter, French doors, pocket doors, the voissoir and the spandrel and the joists—all are lit up in the white of white heat, as if the scene were London bathed in floodlights during the Blitz.

  Hector stares, then backs away. He is soaked through as well, his fur the color of unpolished silver, his mass diminished by the rain. Succinct little animal. He retreats to the shelter of the porch.

  It’s going to work, I know it. I did the research. I spent hours.

  During World Wars I and II, soldiers tossed grenades using a type of torsion catapult. Aircraft carriers used catapult technology to launch planes from their decks. Years earlier, Samuel P. Langley, the Wright brothers’ chief competitor, had built an aircraft called the Aerodrome that was propelled by a spring-powered catapult. And long before that, Alexander the Great had included catapults in his campaign artillery, substituting torsion springs for the gastaphetes, the old crossbow, in something like 400 B.C. By the third century B.C., great warriors were using the euthytonon for shooting arrows and the palintonon for throwing stone balls. And then later there were all of those flashy Romans and hairy Anglo-Saxons who fired off boulders, which I suppose constituted the world’s first weapons of mass destruction. And what list would be complete without David, of happy memory, whose slingshot was a primitive form of catapult and whose opponent, like mine, had the advantage of size? Such is the brief history of this remarkable machine, which has served noble causes from the first ticks of time.

  But none of the men who used the catapult in battle, not one of my distinguished and heroic blood brothers in arms, can have felt more satisfaction or a greater sense of purpose than do I at this moment.

  Would that a tenor drum rolled. Would that a phalanx of French horns blared. Would that banners—swallowtails, fan-ions, and a couple of flammules—were flapping on pikes held aloft by Roman legionnaires wearing helmets and cuirasses and bearing shields and a glassus. Would that they might unfurl a tapestry depicting the anabasis of Cyrus the Younger as he marshaled his ten thousand Greek auxiliaries against Artaxerxes II. Would that a grandstand were packed with the great people of history—Dr. Johnson, Shakespeare, Dante, Beethoven, Vermeer, Newton, Curie, Gandhi, Michelangelo, King, Dearie, Gilliam, and of course, da Vinci—all on their feet cheering.

  They acknowledge me. I acknowledge them. In my bearing I try to strike a balance between the demeanor of a victorious general immensely honored and that of a foot soldier simply doing his duty. Now all is hushed. A lone snare drum thrums a solemn march, and I am carried back to the earliest bright moments of the American Revolution, when all was bugles, fife, and promise, and the first Laphams were lost, or confused, at sea.

  I step forward. The rain grows sleety. I pull the trigger device. The arm is released from the slip hook, and the pine ball shoots forward at a forty-five-degree angle, just as Sir Ralph promised it would. The fireball is launched at so high a trajectory that it competes with the storm for command of the night. It trails a bluish light into the black rain, and makes a deep whoosh, like a wind in the Arctic, audible even in the midst of the thunder and the massive torrent. Hector hunkers down and tucks his head between his paws. The rain crashes, the air sizzles with lightning. A clap of thunder I hear as applause.

  Mouth open, eyes fixed, I await the hit, listen for the crash, watch for the moment of impact when the House of Lapham will flare into its own crematorium. A gasp. A blink. I follow the flight of the ball as a parent might gaze upon a child heading off to make his fortune in the world, and my heart thrills with sadness and pride and expectation.

  And then I hear something terrible yet familiar. And then I see something even more terrible. The fireball that was growing smaller and smaller in its flight away from me—a medicine ball diminishing to a bowling ball to a golf ball—all of a sudden appears to have reversed its evolution, as if in a parallax, and now seems (am I imagining this?) a bit bigger, and a bit bigger. Definitely bigger.

  What happens next I cannot bear to relate. Thus I shall describe the event as I imagine The Southampton Press will describe it a week hence, in a piece squeezed between one on the soaring prices of summer rentals and another announcing a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton at the home of P. Diddy. The Southampton Press is a responsible paper, so, to my regret, it will get the story right.

  A large house under construction was nearly destroyed when a fiery ball headed straight for it was diverted at the last second. Witnesses who happened to catch sight of the projectile as it flew its course in a heavy rainstorm reported that it looked like a small meteor or a new type of bomb. Police are certain it was the work of either teenage pranksters or Al Qaeda. As a result of the incident, the Office of Homeland Security has put all the Hamptons, including Quogue, on orange alert.

  Fortunately the construction site, which is the eight-acre future home of the Laphams of Newport, R.I., Darien, Ct., Hobe Sound, Fla. and several other residences in America and Europe, was saved from total destruction by the activation of a state-of-the-art air conditioner belonging to Mr. Lapham, sold under the brand name Tilles Blowhard. When the thermostat on the Blowhard sensed the presence of extreme heat in the atmosphere around Mr. Lapham’s house, the fireball having raised the air temperature to something higher than the desired 65 degrees Fahrenheit, a blower of exceptional power blasted a cold wind at the projectile and blew it straight back in the direction from which it had come. Witnesses far removed from the blast in East Moriches, Center Moriches, and beyond reported that the noise sounded like the word awe.

  Unfortunately, the fireball then landed on a small, undistinguished house on an island in the creek bordering the Lapham property, occupied by reclusive writer Harry March, and burned it to the ground…

  …though not before I rush in to grab Hector, The Vanity of Human Wishes, my Blossom Dearie CDs, my Junior Gilliam photo, and, I don’t know why, my pen and a writing pad. I guess I won’t need US Air or the hired car, after all. Rude of me not to call and cancel, but the phone is melting.

  The newspaper article ought also to mention that not only is my house on fire; my entire island, a victim of the “driest summer in memory,” is likewise ablaze. Tennessee in flames. My house is gone; my island is going. The fire spreads over it in scattered orange triangles, both equilateral and isosceles. I sit on my beach with my feet in the water and stare at the last two things to go, the Da Vinci and my wooden rowboat. The boat flares up nicely. I have no way out but to swim, and in this storm, and with my injured toe, I may not make it.

  In the house, only one structure remains unaffected by the fire: the statue of Chloe sits absorbed in the news, forever and ever, indestructible and immortal, God bless her. The Hungarian dwarf would be pleased. My dock holds as well, probably because it too has its feet in the water.

  Hector issues a volley of machine-gun barks at the flames. He is especially helpful in emergencies. I carry him over to Sharon, place him in her hull, and guide him toward Lapham’s shore. He looks annoyed, insofar as he can look anything, and tosses me a sarcastic bark.

  “Satisfied?” he asks.

  “I’m trying to save your life.”

  “The good Lord will save my life,” he says. I wish the remote had a torpedo button. As he fades from my sight I hear the loud, atonal strains of the Navy hymn.

  An empty bottle of Absolut vodka floats up to me, and I begin to scribble a letter to put inside in hopes that the vessel will ride the waterways north and eventually reach the Chautauquans. Since it is a vodka bottle, it stands a better than even chance.

  To the good people of Chautauqua:

  I’m sorry I will not be able to be with you for your program on the twentieth century. But I’m dead. I would like to take this postmortem opportunity, nonetheless, to tell you about the lecture I cannot deliver in person.

  Are you ready to hear this, Chautauqans? Are you sitting down? Yes, of course. You’re always sitting down.

  A loud pop from a burning log startles me,
and I turn to see the fire gobbling up my cord of wood, then rushing to the hill as if in a panic, and spreading everywhere. This is not the best atmosphere for writing. But it does add a certain urgency, a real deadline. I continue:

  My lecture was to be about Lapham, my sordidly ambitious, absurdly self-important, earsplittingly noisemaking, unwanted neighbor Lapham. For anything you want to know about the destructive, witless twentieth century, you may look to Lapham. Every time you see a monument to personal glory, some dumbass splurge at the expense of taste and good works—some house, for example, that is thirty times larger than it needs to be—there’s your twentieth century for you, and your twenty-first to boot.

  So just say it: Lapham. Scream it: Lapham. Wear a button: Down with Lapham. Paste a bumper sticker to your fender: No Laphams on Board.

  Now the air is clogged with smoke. I try to fan myself with the writing pad, but it doesn’t work. I’m going to get this done regardless.

  The foregoing, in a nutshell, was to be my lecture—a plaint-cum-fire-and-brimstone oration, a call to arms against my neighbor and his ilk, who with their banging and their flabby dreams have taken away my world, the world I wanted to hang on to.

  And what was this world I wanted to hang on to? Why, dear Chautauquans, it was you, your world of thought and of art and of friendship and of usefulness to others. Perhaps that last above all: usefulness to others. For no other reason would I have come to you to speak. And when your invitation arrived on the very day that Lapham began to build his house, I knew then that I would have something to tell you, especially you who, in your slightly pixilated but fundamentally lovely way, hold fast to the same world that my parents and their parents before them tried to preserve within the little land of the Marches down through time.

  But here comes the sad part of my lecture. For I had hoped to inform you that against all odds, I had defeated Lapham, reversed his upward direction, or at the very least slowed him down. Indeed, my original intention was to relate to you a tale of conquest, and to suggest how each of you might make that tale your own. Yet to my sorrow and embarrassment, I must report not my own victory but rather his. The fact that I am dead speaks for itself. And the object lesson I have learned, after all the high-flown theorizing and the gathering of evidence, and all the clever conclusions that the mind is capable of, is that the Age of Lapham—in all its vapidity and self-regard, in all its empire building and vanity, in its mindless dollars and its most powerful air conditioner in the world—wins. Just that: it wins.