As if to support my conclusion, the heat from the fire has grown ovenlike. Where is the Blowhard when you need it? More popping of logs. When I turn around this time, all I see behind me is a sky in flames. Perhaps this is more atmosphere than I needed. Only a few sentences to go.
So what lesson may I bring you, my worthy Chautauquans, as I picture this letter of mine being read to you, seventy-five hundred strong, sitting in your amphitheater—and read to you, what’s more, by two teenage interns who came across the vodka bottle as they were making out on your beach? The lesson is this: the reason Lapham has won this time, and will win again, and will always win, is that you allow it to happen. You sit together in your amphitheater, but you do not stand together.
Rise up, Chautauquans. (I stand for dramatic emphasis.) Rise up to defend your world of thought and poetry and music and your lacy red-and-blue porches stuffed with gladiolas and your leafy glades and your true-blue lakes. Rise as Lapham is rising, and smite him not with weapons—they will backfire, take it from me—but rather with your books and your songs and your laughter. Beat him back with your modesty, the knowledge of your frailty—that is to say, with your humanity.
Or if you prefer, you all can go out and live on your separate islands and seethe and fume and rant and go nuts in the company of your sarcastic, barking Bible-thumping dog. It worked for me.
Nineteen
Sirens whine in the dark distance. I sit soaking my feet in the tide, my toes, including the bad one, rummaging through the pebbles in the creek bed. All around, the reek of scorched wood mixes with the weedy smell of decay. The greedy fire feeds on everything, insistent against the rain. The megaphone lies on its side nearby, next to The Vanity of Human Wishes. I am too far gone to interpret this symbolically.
Across the creek, red lights flash and spin. I can just make out the dim shapes of the rescue vehicles: a fire truck, an ambulance, many police cars. Other cars pull up, including—my heart sinks—a creamy Mercedes. I hear the unmistakable banjo music of the Old South.
“Harry March! You swindler! You crook!” She is using the bullhorn this time. “We had a bargain!”
Police and firemen are yelling to me as well. It seems that they have brought along every available vehicle for my rescue except the floating kind, and now, with the flames at my back creeping toward me, they are trying to decide how to get me off my island. A strange yet satisfying peace comes over me. I may die after all, but Kathy Polite will wind up with a derelict property, an eyesore. And Lapham too. I will have accomplished the unthinkable: I will have dragged Hamptons real estate values downward.
“Answer me, Harry. Are you there? Are you still alive?” She cares.
“Yes, Magnolia.” I aim my megaphone into the pulverizing rain. “I live, but not for long. And yet I die content because my diabolical plan worked. It worked! I tricked you out of your beautiful braid of hair so that I could use it in my Da Vinci catapult, which I designed intentionally to boomerang and set fire to my unspoiled island and cheat you out of your fortune. What do you think of that?”
“Crazy as a loon,” she shouts. “Ah’m arranging to rescue you so that Ah can kill you mahself.”
“Stay away.” Give me death rather than another conversation with that woman. Hell, I know I’ll probably swim and live, but I am determined to sit here till the last possible minute. I don’t want to rush it. On the other side of the creek, I will have to talk to people, answer questions, become an object of sympathy. Someone will offer me a Dixie cup of brandy and a towel, and wrap me in a red plaid blanket. Strangers may hug me. Kathy may hug me. Gaah. One tiny bright thought: given that I alone have suffered the consequences of my actions, the police most likely will not arrest me, unless attempted catapult is a felony.
But if I am to be true to eighteenth-century principles, I should take whatever they dish out to me like a man-sized man. I should concede defeat, lick my wounds, and pick up and settle elsewhere. Miss Alvarez had a point about my behaving like a Romantic. The Da Vinci debacle certainly was a Romantic’s act. In my single-mindedness, I may have lost sight of the more generous purposes of a simple way of life. Could be. Somewhere, I am sure, a calm, quiet place awaits me where I may do something worthwhile again. Another island, perhaps. Or a little cottage near the sea, far removed from developers, removed from Lapham. And, there is always Vermont. For everyone, in every time of despairing optimism, there is always Vermont.
If I have lost my possessions, I still have essential intangibles: Chloe’s cautious but genuine affection, the love of my children, and the devotion of Hector, I am fairly certain, wherever he may be. And they have mine. As for romance, I might wait for Miss Alvarez, if she would wait for me. When I turn seventy, she’ll be thirty, hardly any difference in our ages at all. Then too, she is so serious-minded that by the time she’s forty she’ll look older than I do. I think I’ll mention this to her as a selling point when I propose.
Who knows? Maybe I will begin to write again, practice what I preached to the Chautauquans, and use the weapons I believe in. Why not? I could write the story of all this—of me and Hector and Lapham and the Da Vinci—and pass it off as a novel. It’s a pretty good story. Not that anyone would believe it.
Behind me and to the sides, the fire sparks and flares, but the wind is no longer against me, so its approach has slowed, at least for the moment. The flames make a huge jack-o’-lantern of the house. The shingles crackle and sputter. The creek is black, and across on Lapham’s side the headlights of the rescue vehicles beam like twenty pairs of surprised eyes. I stare back, just as surprised. Another pair of eyes joins the automotive party. The latest arrival whispers like a Rolls. Suddenly my toe acts up and smiles more broadly.
“Harry! Mr. Lapham is here!” Kathy calls to me. “He drove over from his very-nice-Ah-must-say rental cottage in Southampton when he heard about the fireball. He was so pleased that the Blowhard worked. Do not despair!”
I peer into the shadows on the far side of the water to try to see what Lapham looks like. It is too dark, though I sense a great deal of hurried activity, which makes me nervous.
“Mr. March! Mr. March!” A high-pitched voice cuts through the rain and the wind. “Sir!” It identifies itself as belonging to the faithful mouthpiece, Damenial Krento. “Sir! Mr. Lapham is coming for you himself!”
“What do you mean?” I shout back, with all the insincerity that question implies.
“Mr. Lapham has heard of your plight. He is coming for you in his Hinckley Picnic Boat.”
“No!” I yell.
“Do not worry, sir. The Hinckley Picnic Boat is the best powerboat in the world! It draws just six inches of water. It has both gas and jet engines, you know, and costs four hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
“I don’t care about the Hinckley Picnic Boat. Tell Lapham to stay put!”
This can’t be happening. Life, so called, cannot be so cruel as this. After months of steaming and cursing him out, after all the planning and plotting, after a lifetime of resisting Lapham and all the other Laphams stretching back to the dawn of their dismal lineage—after the banging—am I now to be reduced to a state of impotency in which Lapham must be responsible for saving my skin?
I’d rather roll into the creek. I’d rather swallow mouthfuls of sand until I asphyxiate myself. To be in his debt would be bad enough, but to owe him my life! To have to say, Thanks, Lapham, old boy, and then engage in the other pleasantries to follow: Why yes! I’d love to play eighteen holes at Stinkerton. Why yes! I’d love to come to dinner. Why yes! I’d love to sit in your two-thousand-square-foot dining alcove, under the crystal chandelier imported from Berlin and left over from Kristallnacht, and play a game of whist, and afterward watch a movie in your home theater that seats six hundred. It’s just like the old Palace! Why yes! Field of Dreams, it’s my favorite too! Why yes! I’d love some asparagus stalks. But how to grasp them?
“Go away!” I shout into the darkness. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You’re a mess.” A different voice. That of Miss Alvarez. “Idiot!” she shouts. “Take the help.”
“You go away too,” I shout, not entirely unhappy that she is here.
“Do you want to die out there?” Kathy sounds frighteningly tender. I slide more of my body into the water to cool off.
“Señor March! You must do as we say!” The Mexicans too have driven over for the occasion. More shouting still. A raucous fugue from various sources. I picture the Shinnecock Indians, who are wondering if they will ever get their casino and thus achieve the wealth and contentment of the Pequots in Connecticut; the members of the 1938 Hurricane Society, who are wondering if they will ever get rid of the Indians and their loathsome tepee on the highway; Dr. Whatshisname, who is wondering if his genius will be acknowledged during his lifetime; Parrot Light, the reporter, who is wondering whether she should describe the fire as a “blaze” or a “conflagration” the Amherst English major, who is wondering if he should change his thesis title to “Death Comes to a Minor Talent” the two teenage Kristens from Westhampton, who are wondering nothing whatsoever; the Panelle Hall panel people, who are just now making plans for a panel to be entitled “Fire: How Safe Are We?” One More Time’s proprietor; the policewoman; Mr. and Mrs. Turtle; the doctor; the cabdriver; Medusa and Fairy Tale Dora, who is calling to me in Spanish; Mrs. Damato, the librarian who is dolefully shaking her head; and Dave and his boy, Jack, who at first wonders if all this would make a good film, then tastefully decides against it. My entire social circle, present at the destruction. Everyone except the US Air lady, who is undoubtedly too dutiful to leave her post, and the FedEx man, who very likely is celebrating privately.
“It’s a matter of principle,” I shout, louder than ever. “If I put my life in Lapham’s hands, I capitulate. I give in to everything I despise. I surrender to all that is bringing down civilization. I—”
“Put a sock in it,” she shouts. I cannot tell whether the voice belongs to Kathy or Miss Alvarez. I sit, knees up in the self-protective fetal position, and I clutch The Vanity of Human Wishes to my chest.
Hmmm hmmm hmmm: I hear the whir of Lapham’s mini-yacht coming toward me. He zeroes in using searchlights that flood the creek with long and probing beams, like the ones with which guards at Sing Sing might comb the prison yard for an escaping convict. Mentally I measure the beams, which sparkle in the rain and seem not merely to search but to pry, to investigate every chink and crevice in the surroundings, even digging beneath the agglutinate banks of the shore.
On he comes. The ravenous bow of the Hinckley Picnic Boat rises and falls as the vessel throws off bulbous wakes on both sides, tidal waves in the making. The bow trails a blue-green phosphorescence that melts into the night. All I am able to do is stare. I don’t suppose a boat like that could hit a rock and sink.
I rise and limp to the dock at the extreme end of the L to get a better view of him. Amid the slapping of waves against the Hinckley’s hull, I hear a familiar sound: Hector barking. He has Hector! Now I’m sorry I saved him. “Traitor!” I yell. He merely barks back.
The wind howls like a wolf. The rain drops like a theater curtain. Out in the boat, something is moving. I see it: a sleeve, a hand. He is waving at me. Lapham, in full-blown brainless bonhomie, is waving at me.
Bang bang bang bang bang. His boat bangs against the water. Always a bang with Lapham. He carries the noise of hell with him. And he is clearer now, nearer.
Dear God: Do something. Even if I don’t believe in You, why be petty?
Dear Satan: Is it too late for us to make a deal? Or did that one with Kathy count?
The whirring ceases. The banging ceases. The engine has stopped. Hector has stopped. Now the wind and the rain have stopped as well. Just like that, stopped. Deciding to keep the Hinckley Picnic Boat at a safe remove from the fire, Lapham drops anchor, hooks a small ladder to the gunwale, and climbs down into the water, which I assume is no more than six inches deep. He appears to be wearing a blue blazer and a commodore’s cap tilted back on his head like a cocky Air Force ace. He slogs and splashes, his shadow rising against the sky, rising and rising and striding in its terrible confidence toward me. He is waving more frantically now, giddily, still in silhouette.
Now he pauses to get his bearings. He cannot be thirty feet away. And all at once the moonlight breaks through the clouds and begins to draw a path, first upon the creek, then upon the beach, and now upon Lapham, who is revealed to me at last. I gaze in stupefaction from the end of my dock, where to my right the Da Vinci smolders.
He is six feet tall and of heavy build, I think. He may be slimmer or thicker, it’s hard for me to be sure. And if you told me he was really six-foot-four or five-foot-eight, I could not contradict you, because he carries himself like a thug with a swagger, and yet also like a dandy with a little skip.
His face: the moon illuminates it so gradually, so ceremonially, that I have ample opportunity to take note of its features from top to bottom. Yet I can tell you only that it unveils itself as a face that resists, indeed argues against, description.
The strands of hair that show beneath the peak of his cap are blond, perhaps gray or dirty blond, or auburn, or brown, possibly black. The hairline is neither rounded nor a widow’s peak, neither receding nor encroaching on the eyes. The forehead seems neither broad nor narrow, neither high nor low. There are wrinkles in the expanse over the eyebrows, and yet there aren’t. No sooner do I spot one wrinkle than it is gone, and then, when gone, it reappears. I see age in the face, and then I do not. The eyebrows themselves are both bushy and sparse, extended and abbreviated. I do not mean that one brow is one thing and the other another, but rather that each appears to possess all of these qualities at once. So too do the eyes themselves, the so-called windows of the soul, which in this case are both blue and brown. No, green. No, olive. No, hazel. No, gray. A sort of grayish, hazelish, bluish, oliveish, brownish-green. Yes, that’s it. And the cheekbones, they are both high and sunken. And the ears, they protrude like the handles of teacups, yet they are barely visible, stuck flat against the sides of the head. There are lobes. There are not.
The nose is Roman and aquiline, but with a crooked ridge and a square knob at the tip, which also—I know this will sound odd—appears raddled, like W. C. Fields’s nose, but at the same time elongated and of anteater grandeur, like Louis Calhern’s. And yet it is snubby too, like Condoleezza Rice’s. He has Betty Boop’s mouth, but then again his mouth is larger than Betty’s, and the lips look like two thumbs pressed against each other, or maybe like two crayons, Crayolas, and yet different. And the chin, it is prominent and recessive, jutting and retreating. I’m sorry. I know this all is terribly imprecise, but it is the best I can do. Perhaps I’m too exhausted to be accurate. Perhaps it’s the night, or the light.
In any case, as he steps toward me, I find myself reacting to his arrival in the strangest way. Against my will, against my history and my family’s history, and certainly against all that has transpired on this day, I feel a counterforce arising in me, a shock of gratitude, a chill of recognition, a sort of—what?—epiphany of fellow feeling. For all that he is and represents, Lapham has come to save me, after all. If he is encumbering this drowning man with help, he does not mean to do it. He only means well. However awkward he is, however preposterous in that blazer (Jesus! It’s double-breasted!) and that cap (commodore of what?), in his own mind, such as it is, he only means well.
I sense myself sliding into feelings of warmth toward him, much as I imagine I might harbor affection for some large, dumb animal, a yak or an ox, if it trampled me in a field and then, driven by some instinctive chromosome of kindness, returned to sniff me and nuzzle my shoulder. And so I am aware that involuntarily I am nuzzling back, and whereas the act itself may be alien to me, the spirit it evokes is nevertheless familiar, though it is one I have not experienced in a long time, in ten months at least, that’s for sure. Humane: I am feeling humane.
Steadil
y, relentlessly, he splashes in my direction. His pillarlike legs, covered in white linen, part the waters. His feet, covered by low-cut tennis shoes, cast a spray as he hits the shore. My hand begins to lift on its own, as if performing in a séance. I am rising (dare I say it?) toward a friendly wave. My throat clears. I am rising (can this be happening?) toward a “Hi!” Timid and faint though it may be, there is no denying its approach. I am nearly there, at both the wave and the “Hi!”
But he walks past me. Lapham walks past me. He does not see me. I am here, plain as the moon can make me, about to welcome him to my island and my bosom. But he strides straight past what’s left of the Da Vinci, what’s left of the dock, and me, until he has proceeded ten yards or so inland, as far as he can go toward the fire. There he halts. Save for this one open patch, the island still burns like a long, thin log, every inch of it in flame and embers.
I turn and watch him, his back to me now, as he stuffs his hands into his pockets and relaxes his shoulders. He looks to the left. He looks to the right. He breathes in. He breathes out. At last he speaks. And his voice is not flaccid, as I have guessed it will be. It sounds like a gargle laced with a wheeze. And it booms.
“What a venue!” he says. “What a venue!”
I tear off my clothes and toss them in a heap. I perch, I crouch, I spring into a stupendous belly flop, and then I swim into the night, away from him, away from here. Suddenly, behind me, I hear another splash. Hector has leapt from the Hinckley Picnic Boat. He catches up and paddles beside me. His head glows silver in moonlight. We do not say a word.
Lapham Rising Page 16