Down the Shore

by Stan Parish

  “What happens now?” she asked. “What’s next?”

  “We go to some parties,” I said.

  “Can we give you a ride, sweetheart?” my mother asked Clare. “We’ve got plenty of room.”

  • • •

  “Some of those people are unreal,” my mother said, as I drove us to a party near the university. “The woman next to me kept going on about how she just went back to work after twenty years, and now she’s got her real estate license, and just adores showing properties. It barely feels like work, apparently. She asked me if I’d gone back to work and I said, ‘Honey, I’ve been working this whole time.’”

  “They’re not all like that,” Clare said. “Most of them would never think of working.”

  My mother laughed. I plucked the cigarette from her lips, took a drag, and tossed it out the window.

  “Stop smoking,” I said.

  • • •

  I wondered what had happened to Clare’s Saab as we crisscrossed Mercer County, driving from party to party, encountering faculty members with more and more white wine on their breath as the day wore on. My mother took the wheel after she caught me swigging from a flask of bourbon with a classmate and his uncle, who had asked me if my dad would like to join us for some twenty-three-year-old Pappy Van Winkle, to which I shook my head. Our last stop was out in Ringoes, Central Jersey horse country, where the split-level ranch homes of the people who tend to the animals alternate with the estates of their owners. My mother took the long driveway very slowly, ducking her head as the house came into view over the hedge that surrounded it. Everyone was gathered on a bluestone patio by the pool, and I lost Clare in the crowd while my mother let herself into the house to find a bathroom. Feeling lightheaded from the whiskey and the heat, I decided to watch the party from a hammock in the shade. My mother seemed to be enjoying herself, chatting up the varsity soccer coach, a square-jawed ex-National team goalie from Croatia. In a simple navy dress and modest string of pearls, she was indistinguishable from the women around her. She had seen dozens of graduation parties in her day. She knew what people wore to them.

  I wondered if she liked being a guest here instead of running things behind the scenes, work she actually enjoyed. And then she refused two consecutive hors d’oeuvres plates proffered by college kids in dinner jackets. We had skipped breakfast and the only time my mother doesn’t eat is when she’s working or nervous. Then the soccer coach was gone, dragged off for a photo op with someone’s family, and she was left alone in the crowd. I watched her shield her eyes and scan the faces gathered by the pool before she reached into the outside pocket of her purse for a cigarette. Don’t, I thought. She stopped midreach, as if I had shouted to her, and looked around to see if anybody else was smoking, which they weren’t. I swore at myself for leaving her alone, and stood up too quickly for my low blood pressure to handle. My vision collapsed to a pinpoint, and everything outside of that went white as the blood drained from my head. I staggered toward the pool, wondering how my mother would feel if my adult life looked like the jagged party scene in front of me, full of gold-buttoned navy blazers, horses, and big lawns. I searched for her as the crowd came into focus, but she was not where she had been.

  I went looking for a girl named Ashleigh who had been close with Courtney since our freshman year. I found her in the buffet line and asked what she knew about Courtney’s cousin, Kelsey, which, as it turned out, was not much. Kelsey’s father had been a contractor in Spring Lake, and had built enough big houses to build one of his own. The family had risen on the wave of new money down the shore. Ashleigh was saying that Kelsey might be seeing someone when we were interrupted.

  “Hi, excuse me,” my mother said, placing her hand on Ashleigh’s arm. “Can I borrow my son for a second?”

  I followed her through the crowd to the corner of a fence where two chestnut horses stood grazing.

  “I’ve had all the fun I can stand,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  She had been talking to the man who owned the house when he spotted Clare at the buffet, and wondered aloud who had brought him. My mother said that she had, and our host told her emphatically that Clare’s family hadn’t been invited.

  “Not that they would have been able to make it,” she said, scoffing, imitating him, exaggerating his disgust and pomposity. He had asked my mother if she knew what Clare’s father had done with the money people had entrusted to him. My mother runs a business that requires her to come prepared, especially to parties. She told the man that she had no idea what Clare’s father had done, or how anyone could blame a child for it.

  “The fucking nerve on this guy,” she said, lighting a cigarette.

  “Did he tell you what happened?”

  “No, Tom, that’s not the point. And don’t repeat that story.”

  In the car, she adjusted the rearview mirror to find Clare’s face.

  “Is there anywhere you’d like to go, sweetheart? Anywhere else we can take you?”

  “That’s OK,” Clare said. “My things are at school.”

  My mother turned to face him.

  “Where are you going when they close down campus?”

  I hadn’t thought about that. Clare didn’t answer.

  “Why don’t you stay with us?” my mother said.

  The cash register woke me, and the ring of the drawer became the ring of my mother’s laugh as she made change for one of her morning customers. Clare and I had stayed out until just after 3:00 a.m. at a party thrown by a boy named Sky. When the last keg was kicked, I drove us back to Lawrenceville, and we had just passed through the gates when Clare asked if my mom meant what she had said, if he could really crash with us for a while. I told him my mother always meant the things she said, and that it was fine with me as well. I waited with the engine running while Clare packed a bag, trying to imagine how this would play out, and what Clare would think about the way we lived. I had a clear memory of driving home and a less clear memory of bringing Clare upstairs and showing him the couch and finding him a blanket. Some combination of alcohol and nervousness had clouded my mind, and I woke up hungover and unsure what had happened in the end. I pulled on dirty clothes and walked down into the shop, pausing at the stairs to see if Clare was still asleep. The couch was empty, the blankets folded neatly on one arm.

  “Need help?” I asked, pushing my hair out of my eyes.

  My mother shook her head without looking up at me, so I walked back into the kitchen for a slug of orange juice. When I closed the refrigerator, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, she was standing just behind the door.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “You scared me.”

  “Really? I scared you? How do you think I felt when I woke up at 2:00 a.m. and you weren’t home, hadn’t called, hadn’t said where you were going?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “We went to a party.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you about driving home when you’ve been out like that? You’re on probation, Tom. And let me tell you something else, because obviously nothing that I’ve said so far has sunk in: if you get pulled over, or wind up with the cops for any reason, I won’t be there to get you out. Do you understand me?”

  I nodded.

  “Watch the register while I grab something from the back and then you can go find Clare. He helped me set up this morning while you were sleeping it off.”

  She was on her way out when a man in a suit walked in and set his briefcase down.

  “Do you have the Times?” he asked, filling a paper coffee cup from a carafe.

  “No, sorry, didn’t get it today,” my mother said. “Looks like they forgot us.”

  “There’s a stack of papers by the back door,” I said.

  My mother tugged on her right earlobe.

  “Could have been yesterday’s,” I said, grabbing a rag and wiping down a clean
counter.

  “Sorry,” my mother said. “Check back tomorrow.”

  The man waved it off.

  “Go put those papers in the recycling,” she said to me when he was gone.

  “Why? It’s definitely today’s.”

  “There’s an article about Clare’s dad in there,” she said. “I don’t want him to see that in my house.”

  I walked back through the kitchen, and grabbed a paring knife to cut the bailing wire.

  The story was just below the fold: MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS IN CASE OF FUGITIVE FINANCIER. I dropped the papers into our blue bucket, and headed up to my room with the top copy tucked under my arm.

  The article read like a follow-up to whatever piece had announced that Michael Savage was on the run. It began by describing how Clare’s dad had gone out on his own after a long spell on the commodities desk at Lehman Brothers, where he had made a small fortune for himself and a much larger one for the firm. The third paragraph described the opening of Savage Asset Management: “The street address on the fund’s letterhead—1793 Carriage Way, New Hope, PA—offered no hint that the offices shared a suburban strip mall with a Wawa convenience store, a dry cleaner, and a nail salon.” Clare’s dad had employed half a dozen young, hungry traders and some light back-office staff. The reporter had talked to the clerk at the neighboring Wawa, who described the day they took possession of the space. A team of young men in suits had come crashing through the doors in the bitter cold hours before sunrise, demanding two gallons of coffee and every can of Red Bull they had. I pictured them acting like drunk teenagers, tossing things over the aisles to each other, tearing into packages before they had paid. They bought cigarettes, batteries, Tylenol, Sno Balls, Pepto-Bismol. Like men heading out to sea, the clerk said. She’d had to ask one of them to activate the unscratched corporate card he offered her as payment. And she remembered a man—old enough, she thought, to be their father—who stood outside on the sidewalk, talking on his cell phone.

  The story went on to quote an old Forbes profile of Michael Savage and a former colleague’s theory that his trading savvy stemmed from the severe color blindness he had suffered all his life—that it was like a missing sense that sharpened all the others. The knowledge of things he couldn’t see compelled him to seek out every piece of available information, whether he was picking stocks or cars or sofas for his office. But his desire to have every fact extended to the kind of nonpublic information that can land a man in jail. And his traders, it turned out, had been chosen for their connections as much as anything else: a college roommate at a big consulting firm, a cousin at Pfizer.

  He was driven to know everything. How could you stop that kind of momentum before you crossed a line? To come across some vital knowledge and then say: Wait, I can’t know that. There would be no way, I thought, to pull up short. I remembered the freshman at Lawrenceville who, back in January, ran straight at me as I walked out of the library, and then ran into me, unable to slow down in time. I laughed at his frantic sputtering. I told him to relax. “Dean Doyle is looking for you,” he said. “Two cops with him. Looking everywhere.” And then I was running for my car.

  Michael Savage had been reported anonymously for insider trading, blindsided. I wondered who that would have been. A principled whistle-blower? A former colleague, stuck at Lehman, who resented his success? Or maybe it was someone who stood to gain from being an informant. I knew more about that situation than I cared to admit, and put that thought aside. A raid on the offices turned up piles of falsified trading records. There were large chunks of capital that were either missing altogether or not where Michael Savage claimed. But there had also been two big redemptions that he’d had no trouble meeting, a sign that he was making money and had cash on hand, although no one could be quite sure how. There had been no massive losses and, as far as anyone could tell, no extravagant lifestyle financed by unwitting investors. No polo team, in other words. No private islands. The Savages lived relatively modestly in an old Pennsylvania farmhouse on the Delaware. The Times had asked a forensic accounting specialist to comment on how long it would take to untangle the paper trail and figure out where all the cash had gone. Years, he said, especially without cooperation. Decades, even. I tore the article carefully along the fold, tucked it into my wallet, and dropped the rest of the New York Times into the trash.

  Clare and I had plans to drive to Maryland that afternoon. Lawrenceville was the southernmost of the old prep schools, and every year the newly minted graduates followed the southern boys to parties at their houses on the Chesapeake and plantations in Virginia, sometimes road tripping as far as West Palm Beach before they went their separate ways.

  I walked into town alongside a stream of women driving alone in expensive cars, which made me wonder how Clare’s mother had spent her days while her husband was doing god knows what with other people’s money. Clare was walking toward me, looking fresh and rested and completely unaware that his family was all over the news.

  “How’d you sleep?” I asked him.

  “That couch is actually really comfortable. And your mom is great. That was the best omelet I’ve ever had.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Listen, everyone’s meeting behind the field house to drive down to Bethesda. Do you need anything from your room before we go?”

  “Nothing from my room, but could I borrow your car for an hour?”

  “For what?”

  “I need to pick up something at my parents’ place.”

  He wouldn’t say what, and clearly wanted to do this alone, but that, as my mother liked to say, was a personal problem. The Times had run a small aerial picture of the house, and there was no way I was passing up a closer look.

  “I’ll drive you,” I said. “No big deal.”

  • • •

  “This is it,” Clare said, pointing to a gravel drive that filled a freshly cleared gash in the woods between the Delaware River and the narrow winding road. It was a service road for the construction of an outbuilding behind the house, a capillary connected to the wide main drive. The unfinished guesthouse was covered in DuPont weatherproof sheeting, and bookended by two Dumpsters splattered in that smooth, light-colored mud that’s peculiar to construction, the lifeblood of a building site. No way to know when they broke ground that all the planning and the sketching and the permits and the lumber would lead this far and no further.

  The main house was long and low and made of stone. Clare unlocked the door and led me through the dark entryway into a living room that overlooked a pear-shaped pond. The room was sparsely furnished, and I saw from the marks and discoloration on the wide pine boards of the floor that things were missing—rare antiques, I imagined, family heirlooms that couldn’t be replaced after an asset sale. There was nothing flashy about the house, nothing that looked less than a century old. Michael Savage wasn’t interested in displays of wealth, which distinguished him from almost every wealthy person I had ever known. Clare was standing with his toes on the fringe of a threadbare Persian carpet, staring down at the deep imprints of piano wheels, like fossilized hoof prints in the dark knotted wool. He walked briskly out of the room, and I heard him pacing and pausing, hunting for the instrument. I wanted to tell him I was sorry, but as he walked back into the room we heard the sound of heavy wheels on gravel. Clare’s head jerked toward the window. I followed him outside.

  A moving truck was idling beside my car. Two men in boots and back braces jumped down from the cab, paying us no mind as we came down the front steps, the shorter one telling a story about a weekend in the Poconos that ended with a shotgun full of rock salt. Clare and I stood behind them as the hinged metal door flew up to reveal a brown leather sectional. The men climbed inside and began shifting the pieces to unload.

  “Your folks here?” the one with the shotgun story called.

  “They don’t live here anymore,” Clare said. “They moved.”

 
The men stopped. The quiet one spit on the floor of the container.

  “What do you mean, ‘They moved?’” the shorter one said. “This is when they told us to show. Last time the color was wrong and now you’re saying they don’t live here?”

  “They’re gone,” Clare said.

  “Listen, kid,” the man said, jumping down, coming toward us. “This thing is paid for. It’s a custom piece. I can’t take it back again. If it don’t go here, then tell me where it does go so I can get it off my hands.”

  • • •

  Clare punched the cigarette lighter into my dash for the second time in ten minutes, rolling a Camel Light between his fingers, waiting for the coil to heat. The couch had shaken him. We sat staring through the windshield at the cinder block wall of Lawrenceville’s hockey rink waiting for everyone to assemble.

  “You play?” Clare asked, holding up a guitar pick he had spotted in my cup holder.

  I learned guitar from a cook who worked for my mother, a big Texan man who gave me his Yamaha acoustic when he left us for a restaurant in New Orleans. One day I was playing in my room, figuring out a chord change in “Over the Hills and Far Away,” when I looked up to find my mother in the doorway, clutching the frame as if she was expecting a hurricane.

  “Who taught you that?” she asked.

  “No one,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Your dad loved that song.”

  It was the first time she had mentioned him in three years. Someone upset the string of bells that hung from our front door, and she was gone.

  Clare jumped as Bart Higgins rapped his knuckles on my window.

  “We’re riding out,” he said. “It’s 95 South most of the way. Stay close.”

  Bart ducked his head to see who was riding shotgun, and from the expression on his face, it was clear that he had seen the Times.

  “Hey, Clare,” he said, giving me a sideways smile.