The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates

by Jacob Bacharach

  “That’s a despairing vision.”

  “Is it? I think not.”

  “I still like to think we could be better stewards of the natural world.”

  He laughed and placed a hand on her shoulder, almost familial. She shivered, and she did not feel compelled to shrug it away. “Stewards? You see, that’s our arrogance, as a species. Even in meaning well, we claim dominion. We are imperialists to the core.”

  “Well,” Isabel said, thinking she could tweak him a little, “didn’t God grant us dominion?”

  “Even God errs,” Abbie said.

  “Does she?”

  He spread his arms like a conductor before an orchestra. “Are we not incontestable evidence of His immense folly?” Then, humming Rigoletto’s lalalas from “Povero Rigoletto,” he left her and walked back into the house. A few seconds later, he leaned back out of the door and said, “And do stay close to the house, my dear. There is a monster in the woods.”

  • • •

  That night she watched Isaac lounge on a couch and get terrifically stoned and lay his head and legs suggestively or invitingly on Jake’s lap, who seemed disinclined to return the affection in kind in front of her, although he was certainly not uncomfortable receiving it. They listened to a scratchy vinyl recording of Sawyer Brown, playing “All I Can Do Is Cry” again and again on a beautiful old Marantz that must once have been Abbie’s. Isabel begged off to bed, thinking she’d read, since the bedroom opened right onto the room below, and there’d be no dulling the music or Isaac’s never-ending giggling, but the beer and wine and scotch had gone to her head, and she woke up at sunrise the next morning with a thin, three-ring binder butterflied across her chest. She’d wandered through Abbie’s library before returning to Isaac’s side of the compound, and found, right there on a shelf with the books he’d authored himself, this transcript of a long-ago arbitration, in which Abbie and his sister and their lawyers argued about who had the rights to the proceeds from the sale of a vast tract of land. She found Jake and Isaac still asleep on the couch, clothed mostly, though they seemed to have lost their shirts at some point. She stepped softly past and walked to the main house, which felt empty. She quietly returned the binder to its shelf and then padded to the kitchen. There was a kettle on the stove, and after a little poking around, she found both tea and an old metal traveler’s mug. She made herself a cup of Lady Grey—it seemed an odd variety to have lying around—and then walked outside.

  It was a cold morning. There was a gray hoodie slung haphazardly across the arm of a deck chair. Isabel assumed it must belong to Eli and pulled it on. Having nothing else to do, the house sleeping, she decided to walk around the property. She set off across the broken terraces and the meadow toward the tree line below. Uniontown looked less lovely in daylight, a grayish-brown bloom like lichen on a rock, but it disappeared from view as she approached the tree line. The woods were attractive, the trees spaced evenly with little undergrowth other than an astonishment of ferns sprouting from the dead leaves. She saw a hint of a trail and followed it. Isabel had grown up in the city, and her experience with woodland in her youth was mostly limited to the imagination of Frederick Law Olmstead, although there had been one fall in which Isabel’s mother convinced herself that the two of them would take a road trip to New England for the leaves. Isabel was fourteen then. Their brittle camaraderie had broken down on the second day in the sort of mutual recrimination and acrimony that only mothers and daughters who really love each other are capable of, and they returned home, garnering a speeding ticket in Connecticut that only made things worse. What Isabel remembered most about that trip was that it was the first time her mother had mentioned the fact that her father had been married to another woman. It was during an argument brought on when Cathy had playfully asked Isabel if she had a boyfriend, and Isabel had replied, with all the seriousness she could manage, that she had “plenty of them.”

  She went to college closer to nature but continued to avoid it. Madison wasn’t without woods, but while her friends would go tromping off on hikes, either because they didn’t feel like drinking that weekend or else to spend a weekend drinking someplace cool, she rarely joined. But since moving to Pittsburgh, she’d made an effort; she’d visited Raccoon Creek and Moraine State Parks and gone with Barry one weekend to a cabin owned by an adviser of the Institute. The cabin was in Allegheny National Forest, but it turned out to be just a hundred yards from a gas well access road, and the weekend was ruined by the uninterrupted rumbling of tankers going to and from the site. But it was Frick Park that had really convinced her that she could like nature, or its approximation. A heavily wooded six hundred acres in the middle of the city’s East End, it was all shale cliffs and gullies and dogs and deer and the uncanny sense, even on the wide, crushed gravel trails, that this was what that city had been before it was a city, and this was what it would be after the city was gone.

  She’d started running. She was closer to forty than she cared to think about, and she could no longer be effortlessly thin. She’d been a runner in high school and college, then dropped it for years. She didn’t like it, but she liked that she did it anyway. She would run from her house down through the pretty blocks of 1940s’ houses in Regent Square, cross Braddock Avenue and follow Hamilton past all the four-bedrooms and the occasional English-style cottage to the edge of the park, then half-stumble down the steep path to the Lower Frick parking lot. She’d run along the restored Nine Mile Run, through wetlands full of crickets and frogs, beneath a housing development on land that someone other than Veronica Mayer and Phil Harrow had eventually developed instead of them, until the end of the trail where the stream emptied into the Monongahela River.

  But a park, however canopied and wild it’s been permitted to remain, is still a park, and a forest is a forest; the one resembles the other as a man does the god in whose image he was made—an image that’s also and only a remnant of the thing itself. What she’d thought was a trail had died out. An experienced hiker could have oriented herself by the slope of the land, but Isabel was almost immediately lost. She’d been walking for ten minutes. She knew this made her comical, a city girl who gets lost before she’s gone a quarter mile, but laughing at herself didn’t diminish her sudden unease. She found herself in a denser thicket, surrounded by high clumps of waxy, impenetrable mountain laurel, the air still, without even the sound of birds—also dark, because it was early yet, and the steeply angled post-dawn light cast only a vestigial glow, like the last embers of a bonfire. Looking around, forcing herself to remain calm, she only saw more trees and more mountain laurels. The slope was now subtle and harder to discern. She heard a sound—she thought from behind her, but she couldn’t tell—and all of her good sense and self-possession fled. She thought of Abbie winking at her and telling her that there was a monster in the woods. A monster! As if anything could be so absurd.

  There are so many things we won’t admit to ourselves, desires and fears mostly. Isabel, for instance, was mildly afraid of the dark; at home, she didn’t mind, but even in a hotel room, she’d keep a light burning in the bathroom all night. She was an easily panicked driver. When she didn’t know the way, she’d turn down the radio, as if that would help to navigate. She was afraid of revolving doors and had to put down her panic every time she accompanied Barry to the offices of the Carnegie Endowment downtown. And now she was—to her chagrin—afraid of some spectral presence in a forest, the silliest fear of all.

  She stood as still as she could. That’s what people did. They didn’t pound off into the forest or grab the baseball bat and descend the stairs to investigate the sound in the night. They pulled the covers closer and convinced themselves it was nothing. They turned their heads imperceptibly to see what was behind them and hoped that they’d find nothing there but their own mind imposing pattern and presence on nothing at all. Isabel held her body rigid, and she turned her head imperceptibly, toggling her eyes as far as they would go to get a glimpse behind her, canting them
so hard that it hurt. She didn’t see anything. Slowly, very slowly, she rotated the other way and did the same. She didn’t see anything. She sighed, a long slow exhalation. She’d been holding her shoulders stiffly in place, and she let them slump. She closed her eyes, and she opened them. She nearly screamed and choked it into a rough cough. There was big buck stepping out of the laurels. We consider ourselves observant until forced to realize the basic weakness of the human sense of sight. How had she missed that clot of brown in the sprawl of green? She hadn’t been looking for it, and so she hadn’t seen it. The animal was fifteen feet from her, no farther than the far side of a big living room. She hoped that it would bound away when it saw her, right back into the bushes, but of course, it had seen her—smelled her, heard her—long before she’d seen it, and it had walked out anyway. It regarded her placidly with one black eye. There was something disconcerting about the gaze of an animal that lacked the binocular arrangement of human eyes. What did its other eye see, and how did it reconcile those two different visions into a single image in its brain? Its new antlers were wide and covered in velvet. It looked at her for a while, and Isabel looked at it. Then a slight breeze kicked from behind her, and the deer’s nostrils flared. It made a sound like a bark or a cough of its own, and it bounded back the way it had come.

  She’d been holding her breath. She collected herself for a moment. She was still lost. But then she heard the sounds of engines and of men behaving foolishly somewhere off to her left. She followed them, tripping through the low branches, and she was embarrassed when she emerged into the field not two minutes later. She’d been just a couple of hundred yards beyond the edge of the trees the whole time. Up by the house, Eli and Isaac and Abbie and Jake had hitched a pickup to the back of Abbie’s wrecked Land Rover and were attempting to drag it away from the tree against which it leaned. They weren’t having any success, but they all seemed to be having great fun, even Isaac, who was the last person anyone would have expected to enjoy that sort of emphatically male entertainment. “Where were you?” asked Isaac.

  “Taking a walk,” Isabel said. She felt as if she must be covered in leaves and patted her hair. “Everyone was asleep.”

  “Asleep,” Isaac giggled.

  Abbie was wearing hiking boots and a huge terrycloth bathrobe with the Marriott logo sewn into the breast. “I hope you didn’t venture too far into our little forest,” he said.

  “No. I did see a deer, though.”

  “Did you hear that, Abbie?” Isaac turned on his father with a complicated expression.

  “I did.”

  “Abbie’s spirit animal is the deer,” Isaac told her in that tone of his that implied she’d be over-literal to interpret it merely as a sneer.

  Eli leaned out of the window of the truck and said, “Isaac, come help me,” even though there was nothing for Isaac to do.

  Isabel pretended not to notice the swift tension between Isaac and his father. She smiled at Abbie and said, “I did not, I’m pleased to report, run into anything monstrous, though.”

  “Oh no?” said Isaac.

  Abbie ignored him and told Isabel to come in for coffee. She did, and that was when he told her, without prompting and in great detail, about the vision he’d been granted in the temple many years before.

  When she was safely back in Pittsburgh, safely back at work, she went to lunch with Barry. They sat in the little amber dining room of the teahouse on Atwood, where she’d had lunch with Sawyer not a month before, eating the same oily curry noodles, and she told him about the trip. She told him that she found them all very weird. “I thought I liked weird people,” she said, “but those are some weird people.”

  Barry told her she wasn’t wrong, but, he said, it would be a good idea for her to keep up this friendship with Isaac.

  “Why?” She laughed. “I mean, they don’t give us any money, do they?”

  Barry looked around as if there might be spies, which was his funny affectation before he spilled an especially good piece of gossip. “Iz, come on? You didn’t notice?”

  “What?”

  “Imlak is that kid’s dad. Everybody knows.”

  “Jesus, really?”

  “Compare the noses. Why do you think I keep him around? For Abbie Mayer? What’s he done lately?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

  7

  The basic error in every conspiracy theory is that the conspiracy theorist believes, a priori, that the conspirators know what the conspiracy is, but plans carried out in secret are no more immune to dumb momentum, inattention, and decay than those acted out in the open. Maybe less so. It would be giving Abbie and Veronica and Phillip Harrow too much credit to assign devilish intentionality to every detail of their crass land grab. In the month or so since the young Barry Fitzgerald had tipped Abbie and Phil off in the dusty hallway outside of the zoning board, Phil and Veronica had quietly pestered their couple of contacts in the Charleston and Harrisburg statehouses respectively, harried midlevel legislative staffers who’d passed their middle thirties without moving on to Washington, who’d hitched their careers to the wrong sorts of idiots and madmen. They’d tell you anything for the price of a costly steak and some booze. There was indeed a plan, or actually, a set of three or four competing plans, to build a new highway route along and through the half-ruined towns of the Monongahela Valley, a decaying industrial artery of the Steel City, and onward through the collapsed coal economy of Fayette County and down to Morgantown, West Virginia, which was already connected to Pittsburgh via interstate but stood to gain a bunch of construction jobs and federal highway dollars. This was all predicated on a vague theory that the road would somehow revitalize the economies of Donora and Monessen and Charleroi and Brownsville, the actual mechanics of which no one could quite diagram or explain.

  The Mayer-Harrow triumvirate had an incidental, or exigent, interest in the highway. Though Harrow had built plenty of roads and interchanges over the years, the truth was that big infrastructure was a jobs program; highways were constituent bribes, high cost but low margin; the loose millions and billions that flowed into them went mostly to payroll, and state and federal contracts made contractors responsible for cost overruns. Since the jobs were bid out and awarded to the lowest responsible bidder, even the opportunities to pad out an estimate and build profit into the budget were constrained.

  Housing, on the other hand, was profitable, especially if the land was cheap. There was a great deal of underdeveloped and rural land between Pittsburgh and Uniontown, rolling acres that would be just a half an hour from the city with a proper highway connection, ideal for the development of bedroom communities, a phrase that Harrow had begun repeating with talismanic intensity, as if it might abracadabra the idea into existence. And so they decided to get involved in the bid process on the dream highway, to get in early on the decision about the road’s final route, to figure out as best they could the location of future exits, and in so doing, to give themselves an early opportunity to buy up the best parcels for future development, cheaply and quietly, before any other speculators or developers got to it.

  Whichever route it took in the end, the longest stretch of the highway would pass through Fayette County. “It’s time to call Sherri Larimer,” Harrow said.

  Phil and Veronica had arranged the meeting, and they’d all loaded into Phil’s big car and floated on its glossy suspension over the potholes on Route 51. They crossed 70 and went past the Knotty Pine and the Cedarbrook Golf Course and up the long slow hill that crested right around Blue Top Road and then down the steeper side, past the car dealerships, into Perryopolis, a tiny borough noted principally for its auto auction and its speed trap.

  In fact, there was a pretty little village, frame houses and a patriotic town square, a half mile east of the highway. If you could call 51 a highway. Years later, a woman named Beth Yuell who’d once cooked with Alice Waters out in California moved there and bought one of those old houses on a half-acre lot and turned it into a
bed-and-breakfast-cum-restaurant. She bought quail from local hunters, and in the spring, she went up into the mountains with her golden Lab and brought back muddy paper bags full of morels, which she served with the white asparagus that she grew herself on another plot of land she’d bought on the other side of the river. She told Abbie that she’d come back—she’d been born in Belle Vernon, twenty miles away on a different river—in order to make less money and get more for it. She’d given Isaac his first, his only, job when he was in high school. He waited tables there for six months to save money for a three-thousand-dollar bike that Abbie refused to buy for him and then stopped showing up. Years later, when he was in college, he showed up with a half case of Chateau Margaux. His apology, he said. Beth didn’t ask where it had come from, although she had a fair idea.

  But that was all yet to happen. That day, the proprietors of MH Partners, LLC and Mayer Design Lab were to meet Sherri Larimer at Marge’s, which was on the side of the southbound lane of 51, just before the auto auction. Marge’s had a reputation as a titty bar, a reputation that was confirmed or compounded, depending, by the presence of the by-the-hour Perry-O Motel a mile or so farther down 51. The Perry-O was reputedly the nexus of area prostitution, and it was also a popular spot, at the time, for married men who preferred to have sex with each other rather than with their wives, in part, one supposed, because if ever spotted on the premises, they could reasonably claim to have been screwing hookers, which was better than being queer. Regardless, Marge’s specific reputation was undeserved. It was a dive, to be sure, a windowless pile of cinder block with a grease-clogged fry fan sprouting from the rear wall like an oozing pimple on a featureless face, and there were surely women—and men—here and there, who’d exchange hurried sex in a parked car for a little drug money, but the owner-bartender was a ham-armed woman named Bev who lived with her third husband (a genial but quiet former truck driver now on the Social Security of his late first wife) in a single-wide trailer out back. “I don’t need a bunch of meth-sick drop-outs shakin their asses to nig-nog music on my bar,” she told Abbie, months later, when he’d tried to joke with her about the bar’s reputation. He’d raised a skeptical eyebrow—mostly to convince himself that he wasn’t a passive recipient of such an overtly racist comment—then quickly changed the subject and asked why the bar was called Marge’s if her name was Bev.