by T. C. Boyle
“Screw the patroon,” Jeremias said, and it was more than Joost could bear. Before he could think, he was on him, the sword of office jerked from its scabbard like a sudden slashing beam of light, the woman clutching the child and Jeremias falling back before the stagger of the horse. “No!” Neeltje screamed, and Jeremias, holding up the stick to defend himself, glanced at her—she saw him, he glanced at her—at the moment the sword fell. The woman screamed too. Then there was silence.
Chiefly Nuptial
So Walter sought out the twelfth heir to Van Wart Manor, as the smoke-wreathed figure of his adoptive mother had challenged him to, and then, six weeks later, he married Jessica beneath the ancient twisted white oak that loomed over Tom Crane’s cabin like a great cupped hand.
Actually, he didn’t so much seek out Depeyster Van Wart as blunder across him, as if their meeting had somehow been preordained. He got up from the table that morning in the kitchen that still reeked of potato pancakes, groped for his crutches and told Lola that that was exactly what he intended to do: ask Depeyster Van Wart. He borrowed her beat-up Volvo—was he sure? Shouldn’t he rest, just out of the hospital and all?—and backed down the narrow gravel drive, past the trees lit with birds, past the chin-high cornstalks, staked tomatoes and random swelling pumpkins of Hesh’s garden, and out onto the molten blacktop of Baron de Hirsch Road.
If he’d been asleep all these years, unconscious of the impact of history and the myths that shaped him, he still wasn’t fully awake. Thus, he had never connected this Depeyster Van Wart with the eponym of the infernal tool-and-die company that had employed him at minimum wage for the past two months, never connected this figure of dim legend with the dinning caliginous hole where he’d learned to dread the keen of the lathe as he might have dreaded the screech of some carrion bird come each day to tear out his liver anew. No: Depeyster Manufacturing was just a name, that was all. Like Kitchawank Colony, Otis Elevator, Fleischmann’s Yeast. Like Peterskill or Poughkeepsie. It meant nothing to him.
He shifted into first and lurched off down the road, the new foot dead on the gas pedal, and he’d actually reached the first intersection before he realized he had no idea where he was going. Van Wart. Where would he find Van Wart? There were probably thirty Van Warts in Peterskill alone. Leaning on the brake and casting around him for inspiration, he suddenly focused on Skip’s Texaco, with its twin pumps and phone booth, sitting directly across the road from him. He pulled in, lifted himself from the car, and consulted the white pages.
VAN WART, he read, DEPEYSTER R. 18 VAN WART RD., VAN WARTVILLE.
He’d lost a foot, been haunted by ghosts of the past, listened in silence to the story of his father’s perfidy and desertion: he was numb. Van Wartville. It meant nothing to him. Just an address.
He took the Mohican Parkway to the upper end of Van Wart Road, uncertain which way the numbers ran, and discovered to his irritation that here they were in the five-thousand range. The first mailbox he came across told him that much. Rusted, battered, the victim of innumerable scrapes and vehicular miscues, it read, in a script that might have been adapted from the Aztec: FAGNQLI, 5120. Swinging southwest, toward Peterskill, Walter looked neither right nor left, the roadside scenery so familiar he hadn’t given it a second glance since he was an eighth-grader on his way to music lessons. He was in no hurry—it had taken him all these years to begin pursuing the specter of his father, so what was the rush?—and yet before he knew it he was speeding, the alien foot dead on the accelerator, hydrants and mailboxes flashing by like pages in a leafing book. He shot past banks of elm, oak and sycamore, past junked cars, startled pedestrians and scratching dogs. He took the warning light at Cats’ Corners at sixty, downshifted for the S curve beyond it and came out of the chute doing seventy-five. It wasn’t until he blew past Tom Crane’s place, with its hubcap on the tree and the fateful pasture below, that he began to locate the brake.
The houses were clustered more thickly now, falling back from both sides of the road on lawns that were like coves and inlets of green; there was a church, a cemetery, another blinking yellow light. He saw a station wagon backing out of a driveway on his right, and up ahead on the opposite side, like the residue of a nightmare, the cryptic marker that had set the whole thing in motion. Jeremy Mohonk, he muttered to himself. Cadwallader Crane. For one inspired instant he envisioned himself swerving wide, out across the opposite lane and onto the shoulder, bearing down on that insidious road sign in a cloud of dust and obliterating it with a ton and a half of vengeful Swedish steel. But then he was dodging the station wagon—downshifting, stabbing at the brake pedal—and the sign, still canted heavenward, still mocking, was behind him. A moment later, just before he reached the Peterskill town line, he found what he was looking for, Number 18, the numerals cut into the stone pillar outside the gates to the old manor house on the hill. Van Wart Manor. Van Wartville. Van Wart Road. He began to understand.
The woman who answered the door was middle-aged, black, in a cotton shift and apron, and she looked so familiar he thought he’d begun to hallucinate again. “Ye—ess?” she said, drawing it out to two rich clarion syllables, almost yodeling it. “Can I help you?”
Walter was standing on a porch the size of the quarterdeck of. one of the ghost ships anchored off Dunderberg. The house to which it was attached rose over him, fell away beneath him, stretched out on both sides of him like some great living presence, some diluvian monster arisen from the deep to devour him. He saw naked rock, black with age and dug from the earth in some distant epoch; he saw beams of oak that had stood as trees in centuries past; he saw scalloped shingles, wooden shutters, gables, chimneys, a slate roof the color of the morning sky in winter. How many times had he passed by on the road and glanced up at the place without a glimmer of recognition? Now he was here, on the porch, at the door, and he felt as he had on the morning of the potato pancakes. “Uh, yeah,” he said. “I’d like to speak to Mr. Van Wart?”
He’d rehearsed the scene all the way over in the car. There he would be, son of the father, hunched forward on his crutches. Van Wart would open the door, Van Wart himself. The monster, the bogey, the unenlightened Nazi Bircher fiend who’d fomented the riots that shamed his father and broke his mother’s heart. Van Wart. The man who could once and for all damn or vindicate the name of Truman Van Brunt. Hi, Walter would say, I’m Truman Van Brunt’s son. Or no. Hello, my name’s Walter Van Brunt. I think you knew my father? But now he was on the steps of a mansion, a great big gingerbread thing that might have been drawn from the pages of Hawthorne or Poe, talking with a maid who looked like … like … like Herbert Pompey, and he’d begun to feel dislocated and unsure of himself.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking hard at his crutches, the hair gone long down his neck and creeping over his ears, the twenty-seven black specks above his upper lip that might have been a mustache and then again might not have been, “he’s not in right now.” The maid had stopped yodeling, and her face was set with suspicion. “What you want with him?”
“Nothing,” Walter mumbled, and he was about to mumble further and in an even lower and less audible tone that he’d be back later, already thinking about the Peterskill library and the handprinted card catalogue he’d used for high school reports on the state of Alaska, John Steinbeck and the B.&O. Railroad, wondering if there would be any reference to Mohonk or Crane, when a voice called out from deep inside the house: “Lula? Lula, who is it?”
Through the open door Walter could see heavy dark pieces of furniture, a worn strip of Oriental carpet and a gloomy portrait on the wall. “Nobody,” the maid called over her shoulder, and then she turned back to Walter. He could have taken this as his dismissal, he could have swung around on his crutches and thumped down the stairs, across the drive and into his car, but he didn’t. Instead he just stood there, propped up under the armpits, and waited until the footsteps stopped at the door and he was looking up into the tanned inquisitive face of a woman who looked so familiar she mi
ght have come to him in a dream.
The woman seemed to be about Lola’s age—or no, younger. Forty or so. She was wearing corduroy pants and moccasins, and some sort of Indian headband encrusted with plastic beads. She gave him a puzzled look, shot a glance at the maid and then turned back to him. “May I help you?” she said.
He was hallucinating, no doubt about it. If the maid had Pompey’s bridgeless nose and bulging eyes, then this woman, with her icy violet stare, her high cheekbones and strong jaw, reminded him uncannily of someone too. But who? He had a sense of déjà vu, felt the flesh tearing as he went down on the hard cold pavement, heard the derisive laughter of the bums ranged along the deck of the U.S.S. Anima. He was almost there—he’d almost got it, that face—when her voice came back at him again, softened now, alarmed even. “Are you all right?”
“I’m Truman Van Brunt’s son,” he said.
“Whose son?”
“Truman Van Brunt’s. My name’s Walter. I wanted to maybe talk with Mr. Van Wart … about my father.”
She didn’t flinch at the name, didn’t raise a hand up to mask her face or fall dead away in a faint. But her eyes, which had begun ever so slightly to defrost, went gelid again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help you.”
So much for the seeking.
Next day, after spending a futile hour in the library (he found references to Mo-ho, Mohole, Moholy-Nagy, the Mohr Diagram and Mohsin-ul Mulk, but no Mohonk, while the Cranes were represented by the juridical reminiscences, circa 1800, of one I. C. Crane), he drove down to Depeyster Manufacturing to pick up his check and tell Doug, the foreman, that he’d be coming back to work in a week or so but couldn’t stand at the lathe anymore on account of his foot. The factory was housed in an ancient brick building on Water Street in Peterskill, amid the derelict warehouses and the tottering ruins of the stove works, wire, hat and oilcloth factories that harkened back to Peterskill’s boom days at the end of the last century. The industries had grown up here along the river’s edge to take advantage of both the fresh water for cooling and waste disposal and easy access to shipping and railways. But the semi-truck had come to supersede barge and boxcar, oilcloth had given way to Formica, pot-bellied stoves to gas and electric ranges, the demand for hoopskirt wire wasn’t what it was and no one wore hats anymore. To Walter, of course, the ruins along Water Street were as incomprehensible as Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid at Giza. Someone had made something there once. What it was or who made it or for what purpose couldn’t have interested him less.
He parked the Volvo in the employees’ lot next to Peter O’Reilly’s primer-splotched ’55 Chevy, exchanged a mumbled greeting with the sullen, bullet-headed brother who worked the loading dock and wore T-shirts imprinted with uplifting slogans like “Off Pigs” and “Free Huey,” and then shoved his way through the big steel door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Unfortunately, the weight of the door threw him off balance, and he lurched into the raging din of the shop like a drunken pencil peddler, fouling his crutches and snatching wildly at the time clock to keep from pitching face forward on the concrete floor. In the next moment he came within an ace of being run down by some idiot on a forklift, and then Doug had him by the arm, leading him along the pocked and faded brick wall to his office.
Walter had been absent for almost three weeks now, and during that time he’d begun to forget just how dismal the place really was. Cavernous and dim, lit at intervals by flickering fluorescent lights that descended from the ceiling on aluminum stalks, reeking of cutting oil and degreasing fluid and vibrating with the ceaseless racket of machinery, it could have been one of the subterranean sweatshops of Metropolis. People ran about in filthy green smocks, dodging in and out of clouds of vapor the color of ginger ale, shouting at one another over the clamor like pale frantic drones. Walter didn’t like it, didn’t like it a bit. As he swung along beside Doug, nodding at his coworkers—they looked up blearily, in a pall of smoke, from their lathes—he knew all at once that he wasn’t coming back. Ever. Even if they offered him a sit-down job in the inspection room, even if they made him foreman, president, chairman of the board. The job had been Hesh’s idea in the first place. Something temporary, something to hold him till he decided what he wanted to do with his degree. All that had changed now.
“So,” Doug said, once he’d pulled Walter into a grimy office decorated with oil-soaked rags and trays of rejected muffins and aximaxes that rose in tottering array to the ceiling, “we heard about your foot.”
In here, behind the smudged glass door, the noise was muted to a dull insistent drone, the sound of a distant phalanx of dentists gearing up their drills. Walter shrugged. He was leaning heavily on his crutches, and the stump of his leg ached. “Yeah,” he said.
Doug was about thirty, a Depeyster Company lifer whose salient physical feature was an upper lip as broad, hairless and mobile as a chimpanzee’s. Once, when Walter had questioned his lathe settings, Doug had reminded him that he wasn’t paid to think, and then, in an offhand and edifying way, had mentioned the key to his own success. “I’m different than the rest of you guys around here, you know,” he’d said, nodding significantly. “And you better believe it—I got a hundred and five I.Q.” Now, pausing to light a cigarette, he glanced down at Walter’s foot and asked, “Does it hurt?”
Walter gave him another shrug. “Look, Doug,” he said, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to work anymore. I just came in to pick up my check.”
Doug had begun to cough. He hacked for a moment, took another drag of his cigarette, and then leaned over to spit in the wastebasket. His eyes had watered, and he looked bewildered, as if Walter had just asked him to dance or name the square root of 256. “I don’t got it,” he said finally. “You got to go up to the front office for that.”
A moment later Walter found himself gliding along a carpeted hallway, looking for Miss Egthuysen’s office, while cooling breezes wafted around him and the mellifluous strains of violin, cello and viola poured forth from hidden speakers to massage his ears. There were potted plants, framed watercolors; the walls looked as if they’d been painted yesterday and the skylights glowed with sunlight that was like a shower of gold. The contrast wasn’t lost on him. No more than a hundred feet from where he’d sweated over the lathe and counted the interminable minutes until the five o’clock whistle blew, there was this. Walter felt cheated.
Miss Egthuysen was the secretary. Doug had scrawled her name and the number of her office on a soiled scrap of paper—#1, or maybe it was #7, Walter couldn’t tell which—and escorted him through the door at the far end of the shop and into the inner sanctum. Then he’d swung around without a word and faded back into the gloom of the shop. Walter was cursing under his breath—cursing Doug, cursing the hours he’d wasted in the pit behind him, cursing Huysterkark and Mrs. Van Wart, cursing the meanness and perfidy of a world every bit as rotten as Sartre had made it out to be in Philosophy 451—when he found it, #1, a frosted-glass door with nothing but the single numeral painted on its face. He tried the door. It was locked. No one answered his knock.
Cursing still—cursing Miss Egthuysen and the bosses who’d hired her, cursing the eggheads in lab coats and ties who strolled out of this very hallway and into the shop once a month to make notations in loose-leaf binders—he swung around and considered the slip of paper in his hand. What he’d taken to be a one could actually have been a seven. Or a nine, for that matter. Doug’s scrawl was just about undecipherable—but then, with his soaring I.Q., Doug couldn’t really be expected to waste his precious mental resources on so tedious a consideration as penmanship. Walter trudged back up the hall, located #7, and tried the door.
It was open.
Manning his crutches with a clatter, he leaned against the corrugated glass and pushed his way in. He saw a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet. Plants. Framed pictures. But wait a minute: something was wrong here. This wasn’t Miss Egthuysen gaping up at him in alarm, slipping an envelope into the desk and slamming the drawer w
ith a report like the blast of a shotgun, this was the man in the tan summer suit, the one he’d glimpsed now and again probing among the eggheads at the door to the shop. “I, uh—” Walter began.
The man was glaring at him now, boring into him with a look of such ferocity that Walter suddenly began to wish he were out in the shop breathing fumes, back in the hospital, anywhere but here. “Uh, I was looking for Miss—” Walter murmured, but then stopped cold. There was a nameplate on the man’s desk. Of course.
“What are you doing here?” Van Wart demanded. He was on his feet now, and he looked alarmed. He looked angry. Threatened. “You were at the house yesterday, weren’t you?”
“Yes, but”—guilty, guilty, why did he always feel guilty?—“I … I work here.”
Van Wart’s face went blank. “You work for me?”
“Just since the end of May, but I didn’t know. … I mean, I didn’t realize—”
But the eponym of Depeyster Manufacturing wasn’t listening. “Well, that’s rich,” he said, dropping into his swivel chair as if the news had somehow weakened his legs. “Out on the floor?”
“Uh-huh. I run one of the lathes?”
“That’s really rich,” Van Wart repeated, and suddenly he cracked a grin that was like a crevasse leaping across an ice field. “Truman Van Brunt’s son.” Then he glanced down at Walter’s foot and the smile faded. “I was sorry to hear about your accident.” There was silence. “Your name’s Walter, right?”
Walter nodded.
“I read about it in the paper.”
Walter nodded again.
“I knew your father.”
Walter said nothing. He was waiting.