The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates

by Jacob Bacharach

Isabel said that she couldn’t say.

  “He used to be more into pussy than money. Then the Lord appeared to him, or he knocked one of his girlfriends up. Or both. Thus the decision to forsake the middling equestrian orders of the metropolis for a life of provincial riches. Shit, you’re about the right age. Maybe we’re siblings.”

  “God,” Isabel said.

  “God,” said Isaac. “God.” He laughed. “Literally, God. How fucking ironic is it that a guy who thinks he’s on a mission from Yahweh basically makes it his career to journey west and bung a bunch of poor ignorant yokels out of their land. It’s so fucking perfect you’d think it was true.”

  “Well,” said Eli, who’d been listening after all, “part of it is true.”

  “What part?” Isabel asked, wondering what he knew.

  “The God part,” he replied.

  • • •

  A few hundred yards upstream, a fisherman had come off the trail—it turned out that they needn’t have clambered over all that lousy terrain like a bunch of fools, and Isaac’s secret spot wasn’t really a secret. The fisherman waded into a broad and shallow part of the water and began casting his fly, whipping his slim, quivering road as if conducting some old, strange music. When Isaac spotted him, he frowned and grumbled and said it was time to leave. So they packed up and hauled themselves the hard way back up to the trail. Isaac had them continue along in the opposite direction from which they came. After a mile, they crossed a field into a parking lot at the far trail head, and Isaac led them out to Dinner Bell Road, which joined up with 381, down whose gravelly berm they hiked back to Ohiopyle village. Every few minutes, a flock of motorcycles roared past. Almost as regularly, a gas tanker would rattle their teeth and nearly yank them into the road in the vacuum trail of its slipstream. Once, Eli had to pull Isabel back from the road as she stumbled and almost fell into the path of a second tanker trailing the first. “That’s twice now,” he said, “that I have saved your life.”

  “Hero,” she said.

  “Get a room,” said Isaac.

  Then he stopped and held up his hand. They stopped. He pointed, raising his arm deliberately. Ahead of them, perched casually and unlikely on the road’s metal guardrail, a red-tailed hawk swiveled its lovely cruel head and regarded them with an almost human curiosity. They stared at it, and it at them, and it opened its beak as if yawning and screamed, once, a high-pitched collision of all the vowels in every human language. They stepped back reflexively. Another truck went past, and the hawk spread its improbable wings and flapped lazily once, twice, and, even more improbably, let itself be lifted by the changing pressure of the air, flapped a few more times, and disappeared over the rustling trees.

  9

  Abbie’s frequent trips to and from Uniontown for the expressway business and the looming start of construction on what would become The Gamelands and the way that Sarah had taken to wandering around their Pittsburgh apartment with a glass in hand and cleaning things that didn’t need to be cleaned led him, in the never-ending spirit of new beginnings that drove their marriage ever onward from its old failures, to suggest that they move down to Uniontown a year early. Sarah didn’t so much agree as discover that she could come up with no good reason not to, and so, in 1991, they rented a little house on Virginia Avenue just across the border from Uniontown proper in South Union Township, on the fifth fairway of the Uniontown Country Club. Lest you imagine—as Sarah briefly did before she saw the place—that this location signified some sort of luxurious links-side lifestyle: this was not, as was the case on Belmont Circle just up the street, one of the gracious early-century colonials whose French doors and oak-shaded lawns backed up onto that same fairway. Uniontown had, at that time, a population of just over twelve thousand—several thousand more if you counted the North and South townships—and the rental market, insofar as it existed at all, consisted mostly of dumpy apartments, double-wides, and old duplexes in the coal patches that still clung to an emphysemic life on the outskirts of town. Sarah would have been much happier in the slightly run-down third floor of one of the old Victorians in town; she might have at least talked a landlord into letting her paint the walls and floors white, which would have given her a project to occupy her days. But Abbie thought a house was more appropriate, whatever on earth that meant. When he described it to her, he called it a cottage. By the time she discovered its exact nature, he’d already signed a lease.

  It did have a certain charm from the exterior, a collection of mismatched roof lines that very nearly suggested something rural and English, but sometime in the seventies, it had been refaced with a sort of glazed brick that, depending on the height and angle of the sun, gave the alternating impression that the house was reflective or that it was smeared in a fine layer of shit. The interior ground floor had faux wood paneling, and the kitchen had a nautical theme, its notched and eyed cabinets with phony wrought iron hardware resembling barrels to be filled with salted meat for a long sea voyage. There were ships on the linoleum floor. The master bedroom was on the ground floor in an addition set at an odd angle to the rest of the house. It had a high cathedral ceiling, but only a single small window at its far end. The window looked into the back of a rhododendron, and even in the middle of the day, the room sat in a queasy twilight. There were two small dormer bedrooms and a bath on the second floor. These rooms and the narrow stairway that led to them were covered, even the ceilings, with flocked, patriotic wallpaper that picked up the kitchen leitmotif: it depicted bald eagles sewn in pale gold grasping anchors in their talons. The eagles’ beaks were open, and in each open mouth there was a tiny golden tongue.

  Most of their furniture had to go into storage—what hadn’t barely fit, either too big for the tiny rooms, or too fine for the thick carpets. “Abbie,” Sarah asked, “is it your intention to take me to smaller and shittier places forever until we’re like the last two people left on earth?”

  “Wouldn’t that be interesting, to be the last two people on earth?”

  “No, honey. It would not.”

  “You and me, against the world.”

  “We’d starve in a week.”

  Abbie did insist that they join the country club. “It’s what people do in towns like these.”

  “It’s not like we golf.”

  “We’ll start!”

  “I don’t want to golf.”

  “You’ll meet people. It’s important.”

  Actually, Abbie had a very particular, though unvoiced, reason to want to join the club, and that was in order to meet one Arthur Imlak. Imlak, whom he’d never seen or even spoken to on the phone, had owned the land that Abbie bought on the hilltop. His name kept cropping up in his business dealings around the county. The closing on The Gamelands had been attended only by Imlak’s attorney, a Pittsburgh lawyer named David Ben David, who said he mostly did trial work but did handle Mr. Imlak’s realty transactions from time to time. Ben David had treated the signing of closing documents with an unconcealed amusement, and when Abbie asked him what he found so funny, the lawyer had replied that he didn’t find anything funny, per se, but rather, that he hadn’t recently seen Mr. Imlak sell off any of his holdings. “He’s acquiring right now. And also, at this price? He must expect a favor from you down the road.”

  “I’ve never even met the guy.”

  “Yes. I understand it was our mutual friend, Ms. Sherri Larimer, who brokered the deal. For being functionally illiterate, she certainly does get around.”

  “I don’t think she’s illiterate, functionally or otherwise.”

  “No, just an expression.”

  “Is it?”

  “What is the expression? It is what it is.”

  “Where are you from? You have, I notice, a bit of an accent.”

  “Ah, I’m from here. But I lived for a long time in Israel. It makes me unplaceable.”

  “Members of the tribe,” said Abbie.

  “Yes,” the lawyer said. And he shrugged and repeated: “It is what it is.�
�

  Meeting Imlak proved easy enough. They found him, as anyone could find him in those days, holding court at the far end of the dining room bar at the club, a tumbler of vodka in one hand, the other free to gesticulate in an odd, Clintonian gesture, the four fingers clutched into a fist, the thumb laying straight out past the index, waving and pointing to punctuate each point that he thought he was making. His hair was still mostly black back then, and he wasn’t quite as grand as he would soon become. He had a boat, but it was at the Fox Chapel Yacht Club, and he had a place in Florida, but it was just a condo in St. Pete.

  The club was an immensely silly institution. Formerly a fin-de-siècle playpen for the county’s erstwhile coal and coke millionaires, built as a mad crossbreeding of Tara and a Loire chateau, immense, white, and imposingly scaled, it had burned down in the mid-eighties. That the fire had occurred at almost precisely the moment when the club’s membership had reached its historic nadir, and that the insurance payout covered much of the construction of a less imposing new clubhouse as well as the stashing away of a fair chunk of cash to defray operating costs for the next few years, was one of those serendipitous coincidences treated by everyone who’d been around or involved in the institution at the time as a combination wives’ tale and knowing joke, like the winking old belief that first pregnancies after a marriage sometimes lasted a wee bit less than nine months. When commenting to the Herald-Standard Darryl Pattaglia, the mayor’s cousin and the fire chief, was quoted as saying that the cause of the fire was “either a neon light on the second floor, an incandescent light on the first floor, or an Israelite in the basement.”

  He refused to elaborate on that, and the cause of the electrical fire, or it might be better to say, the cause of the cause, was one of the many reputedly criminal acts whose lack of a clear perpetrator led them to accrue, by reputation, to the Larimer clan. Sherri never said one thing or other about it, but she’d occasionally, apropos nothing at all, make some aside about ball and tube wiring as something like a metaphor for the unreliability and unpredictability of anything really, and people took this as oblique confirmation of what they would have believed anyway. As for the chief’s comments, people assumed Larimer had made him say it.

  The new, smaller clubhouse looked like the offspring of a Mexican restaurant and a mid-market chain hotel. Ironically, Abbie would discover that it was built using a prefabrication technique that he had, once upon a time, pioneered, if not quite invented. The invention belonged to a group of materials scientists and structural engineers at Columbia, but Abbie had loaned his name and reputation to the project, and he now received, from time to time, a minor royalty for its use.

  An aside: Imlak’s early fortune was based in large part on precisely those poor rental properties that Abbie had felt inappropriate for his wife. Arthur’s father, as he never failed to mention, had been a miner, then a foreman, and then he’d cashed out his whole pension to buy a few properties, which grew into a modest local empire of trailer parks and converted mansions. The younger Imlak’s entry into the energy business came later and by blessed accident. He’d acquired a diesel station and truck depot near Grindstone as part of a larger property transaction. He never intended to operate it for more than a year or so, but in that year, he noticed a very slight but nevertheless appreciable increase in gas and oil company traffic through that part of the state. Imlak was unrefined by the standards of people like Barry Fitzgerald, a vulgar businessman, but it was this almost prophetic eye for detail that set him apart from the vast herds of ruminant MBAs in America; it was a few extra trucks a month way back in the eighties that led him to a two-decade project of land and mineral rights acquisitions, a quietly scrupulous long position that made his at-the-time much richer friends think him slightly more eccentric than his minor millions gave him a natural right to be. Only later, in the new millennium, did his foresight result in a series of grand, glorious transactions, when it was discovered that something like fifteen percent of the rights to the extractable carbon in the Marcellus Shale in West Virginia and Pennsylvania were held by the blandly named ABM Corporation.

  If great books are frequently predicted by their opening sentences—“All happy families” and that sort of thing—then so too are certain relationships marked out by the first words that one person speaks to another, and so it was with Arthur Imlak and the Mayers—to which of them, Abbie or Sarah, he was speaking exactly no one later remembered or admitted to remembering. “Order the gimlet,” he told them.

  “That’s the specialty?” Sarah said.

  Imlak leaned on the bar and indicated the bartenders with a brief movement of his eyes. “They don’t know that it’s supposed to be gin, so they use vodka, and they don’t know what else is supposed to be in it, so they use twice as much vodka.” He swirled his glass. “If you want an especially fun night, ask for it neat. They don’t understand displacement either, so instead of measuring by volume, they pour by height.”

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  “Arthur Imlak,” he said. He shook their hands. “You’re new.”

  “Yes,” said Abbie. “We just joined. Abbie Mayer. This is my wife, Sarah.”

  “Ah,” said Imlak. “Members of the tribe.”

  Abbie regarded him strangely, and Sarah was taken aback. “I’m sorry?” she said.

  “Oh, no,” said Imlak. “I’m sorry. I am as well, oddly enough. My mother died when I was a little boy, and my father remarried. He’d never previously had much use for religion, but Beth, my stepmother, thought it would be a good idea to give my brother and me a faith, and she was Jewish. Now, my father was from a family of Lutherans who became some form of non-denominational Protestant. Vaguely Baptist, perhaps? I get it all confused. In any event, he didn’t believe in anything, but he agreed to a Jewish wedding and occasionally accompanied us to High Holy days and so forth. He appreciated Judaism, in part because so much of it was conducted in a language he couldn’t understand. Here, let me buy your first round.”

  “Thank you,” Sarah said.

  “No, thank you. Now tell me, Mayer, why is that name familiar to me?”

  “It’s a fairly common name,” Sarah said.

  “Yes, young lady, it certainly is. But it seems to have skittered across my desk recently. What business are you in? Oh, Jack, we’ll have two. No, three more gimlets, please. I’m running low myself.”

  “I’m an architect,” Abbie said.

  “Ah, indeed,” said Imlak.

  “Abbie is involved in property development,” Sarah said.

  “A noble calling. A man is not a man until a man owns land, as my father used to say. And that must be where I’ve heard the name. Are you by any chance related to one Veronica Mayer?”

  “My sister, yes. And my business partner.”

  “We’ve met, once or twice. Well, cheers.” He raised his newly arrived glass. “To new acquaintances.”

  They touched glasses. Imlak tapped his again on the bar before drinking. “A Western Pennsylvania thing, I think,” he told them. “And like a lot of atheists, I make up for it with a surfeit of compensatory superstitions.”

  “Yes.” Abbie sipped. The drink tasted like pure alcohol, like cleaning solution. He took a long gulp.

  “And you?” Imlak asked Sarah. “What do you do?”

  “Not much anymore. I was an interior designer.”

  “Do you golf?”

  She laughed. “As you noted, we’re Jewish. Do you know many Jews who golf?”

  “Oh, yes. Certainly. I own a place down in Florida. St. Pete, which is on the Gulf and therefore the more Protestant side of the state. The Atlantic Seaboard is all Jews and Hispanic Catholics, but even in the once-restricted environs of Tampa Bay, one finds many of our people whacking away hopelessly at little balls. I chalk the penchant up to our propensity for wandering aimlessly across huge tracts of land for very long periods of time.”

  Sarah smiled and said, “Perhaps I’ll take it up, then.”

 
“You should. You can join my foursome.” He winked. “One of us just died. Fiorello Pattaglia. He was eighty-six and smelled like cheap bar soap, but he was a judge, and his son is the mayor. We’re a wonderful group. I mostly drink, and Dick and Harry—yes, it’s true; it can’t be helped—use the occasion to sneak cigarettes where their wives can’t catch them. We consider score-keeping to be irrelevant, and sometimes we even forget to golf.”

  “That sounds like my kind of game.”

  “Yes. Now, my other advice is no matter what you do, don’t join the women’s groups. One is called the 9-holers, the other the 18-holers.” He laid a hand very briefly on her knee. “Pornographic, I know. The ones who play the half rounds are mostly dotty old ladies, and the ones who play the full round are fiercely competitive and mostly bitches, except for Joyce, our ladies champion, whose going-on-ten-year reign has made her kind to a fault. You’re better off playing with men. Of course, the club officially discourages ladies from playing except during their own designated times. I suppose they worry that some sort of plaid orgy will break out spontaneously. But I put together the financing package for the new clubhouse after the old one burned down and they’re beholden to me, so I get to break the rules. Also, they know I could join Pleasant Valley instead, so they kiss my ass.”

  “How did the old club burn down?” Abbie asked.

  “Do you know the story of Crassus?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it was nothing like that,” Imlak said, and again, he winked.

  • • •

  The author will here risk an anticlimax by telling you right now that Sarah sleeps with Arthur Imlak, because when he thinks about how to tell the story, he has to decide against the false tension of a hinted-at development and consider the pall of inevitability that the ultimate realization of a long-foreshadowed eventuality casts retroactively and retrospectively over everything that came before. It is a sort of a disclaimer. What did happen did not have to happen. It was, in the mathematical sense, improbable, and that the probability eventually collapsed upon the occurrence of the unanticipated event says nothing about the event’s likelihood prior to it actually happening.