They turned onto their gravel driveway. Miranda always gazed at the modern steel sculptures on the marble obelisks scattered on this part of their estate, even at night. She had chosen them after what seemed like countless hours of reading the reviews of the artists that had made her final cut. She liked the mix of new and old, disagreeing with her landscape architect, who favored the consistency of Victorian-era art throughout. But she was drawn to both, and wanted to re-create the feel of Kykuit, the Rockefeller estate, with its Georgian structure and modern art.
He parked in the barn and they went inside.
“Did you take a video?” asked Asa when they reached the kitchen.
“There was no video camera,” she said. “I took an oath while Dad and a few other people watched.”
“And Mom’s inaugural address was provocative. There’s a lot of malice in the air.”
“But you can watch the next meeting in two weeks,” she said. “You’ll learn a lot about the barn with the peace sign and how things really work around here.”
Cody, age fourteen, wearing a backward Red Sox cap covering short light brown hair, seemed confused.
“You said if we were there it would send the wrong signal to Karl, Dr. Evil.”
“He won’t notice you at the next meeting. There will be a crowd, and some reporters.”
“Cool,” he said.
“It’s not cool if she loses,” said Archer. “We don’t want to be embarrassed in front of the whole town.”
Cody went over to the massive stainless steel refrigerator and pressed a drinking glass on the cold-water dispenser.
“But isn’t that how you met Dad, by showing up at the Club with a blue tennis dress?”
“Aha, hoist with your own petard,” she said.
“Completely different situation,” he said.
“My tennis dress had a blue trim, and yes I knew I was violating the all-white rule at the Club. And I was a guest, which made it even more provocative. Guests are supposed to know their place. But I’m not a guest at the Commission anymore.”
“There were consequences,” he said. “My friend Jesse Brewer got a letter from the Tennis Committee.”
“And she took it in stride,” said Miranda. “I helped her write a response. We quoted a passage from Canto 9 of the Inferno to explain my transgression. A romance had been sparked by the transgression. And they adored the letter.”
“I haven’t read the Inferno,” said Cody.
“Well when you do, you’ll gain a special appreciation for it.”
“Let’s just say a lot of things have gone on at Longwood over the years,” Archer said, “and we’d rather just leave it at that.”
She stared at him, incredulous that he would even refer to that episode in front of the boys.
“I think I’ll go share my news with my friends.”
She walked toward her study down the main hallway with its high barrel ceiling, which was an odd feature in a Victorian. She still wanted to know what had possessed the architect to add it. But the town had no file for the house, and the plans had been drawn in 1902. Her study, with its glass and steel desk, sleek Macintosh computer and cobalt-blue accent wall, did not go with any other room in the house.
“It went more or less as I expected,” she announced in an email to her psychologist, one of many since high school; to Carla Teller, a friend from her tumultuous days on the Wang Center board, which asked her to leave after her failed coup against the CEO; and to her father, Emmet Kedzie, a retired executive in St. Johnsbury, Vermont.
“He swore me in. I told him what I wanted to do and he was appalled. But at the next meeting we’re going to consider my proposal to get the barn with the peace sign into code. If I could get that thing painted over, gone, erased from my world, I’d consider my tenure a huge success. So that was my evening. How was yours?”
“Whatever happened to the freshman-year feeling things out, getting to know your colleagues?” Carla emailed back.
“I’m no freshman. I’ve been attending these meetings on and off since we moved to Lincoln fourteen years ago. I tried to join three times. They know me, and I know them.”
Her psychologist responded, as Miranda knew she would, by asking if she took time to “engage” with her colleagues and “consider how they feel.”
Asa walked in before she could answer.
“I’m working, kiddo. I can’t go into section 4 of the Word program with you right now.”
“But I want to. We were supposed to do it last night,” he said and sat on her lap.
“Well, OK, for twenty minutes, and then it’s bedtime.”
He leaned into her keyboard, closed out the email and opened the tutorial on Microsoft Word where they had closed it two nights ago.
She asked him what a digitally enhanced image was, and he answered correctly. They moved on.
An hour later her father called.
“What’s the other woman on the Commission like?” he asked after they had caught up.
“Smart but timid. She wouldn’t take on Karl. She’s a female Bernard Gilson,” she said, referring to a fellow executive at the Fairbanks Scales Company that her father had forced out of the business. The ouster began a downward spiral in the man’s personal and professional life, culminating in suicide. Her father showed no remorse after it happened but stressed to his family that there had always been weak people and they were destined to fail in one way or another in the struggle of life. Her father went on to become a vice president of the company and one of the richest men in their poor rural town in northeast Vermont. After Miranda’s brother was killed in a car accident at fourteen, he denied her nothing, and she excelled in school, becoming her high school class valedictorian. Miranda’s mother had divorced him when she was in college, and was remarried, living in California. Miranda touched base with her maybe once a year.
“And that’s why she’s there. He picked her over you because he can’t control you. If you can get her to support you, it will kill him emotionally.”
“He doesn’t show any emotion, but he’s afraid of me. As soon as he heard I wanted to run for Selectman he appointed me.”
“Of course he’s afraid of you, kiddo. They’re all afraid of you. Even I’m afraid of you once in a while.”
“When?” she asked and laughed.
Chapter Three
Julia rode over to Miranda’s home two days later for organic tea and pomegranate juice on a rusty but functional bicycle with a wicker basket holding something in wrapping paper that poked out over the top. Miranda was outside, inspecting their modern sculptures attached to large marble cubes, for damage from the recent nor’easter, when the bicycle appeared on the gravel driveway.
Miranda didn’t think Julia would even accept her invitation to tea. She could have asked to meet at the Town Hall. They weren’t friends. But the bicycle exuded neighborliness, and mutual respect, the antithesis of Karl. Miranda stepped into the driveway and waved.
“Good afternoon, Julia, welcome to my Valhalla.”
“It’s most inviting.”
“Look at us, the guardians of Lincoln standing in front of a modern sculpture which doesn’t fit the exterior color code. What do you think of it?”
“That it doesn’t conform to the code? It doesn’t have to. It’s not the structure itself, and it’s not visible to passersby.”
“Yes, I know that. I mean of the style.”
“Not what I expected.”
“Well, lest you think I’m some sort of dilettante, let me explain.”
They walked toward the house and Miranda slipped her sunglasses back on.
“To me Lincoln is a unique mix of old and new. We have people like my husband doing cutting-edge thinking in the Urban Studies Department while living in a house built in 1902. Our home reflects that. We had to compromise on some things, like central air. Archer didn’t want it. And I wanted a minimalist sleek style of furniture. You’ll see that in my study and the kitchen but nowhe
re else.”
Miranda gave Julia a tour, starting with the paintings in the foyer. One was a restored Degas of waterlilies, which Julia glided past, but she stopped to gaze intently at the John Singer Sargent portrait of two sisters in sundresses standing on a cliff overlooking the ocean.
“This is magnificent,” she said. “May I ask when you acquired it?”
Miranda knew Julia had no interest in when she acquired it. It was an indirect route to find out how much they had paid for the work. And because it was a forgery, any question about it made her nervous.
“It was a bequest from one of Archer’s uncles quite some time ago. And here’s our new addition,” she said, pointing to a long canvas in the hallway toward the kitchen. “This is the blood of an eel painted in disciplined, logical strokes that to me evokes just perfectly the logarithms of the Macintosh operating system, which I find endlessly fascinating.”
“Blood as art?”
“Oh yes, why not?”
“Isn’t it cruelty?”
“The eel was killed for food, and the blood is a byproduct. Why not use it?”
“Well then, I suppose it’s not gratuitous killing. But still, you wouldn’t think of using human blood in art, would you?”
Miranda pondered.
“Well if it was the byproduct of an injury of a vanquished foe?”
Miranda led her upstairs.
“My son Asa is developing his inner ear in conjunction with art. He can walk into a home and tell within seconds what the relationships of the family members are like.”
“Really?”
“If there’s a strained marriage, or the home lacks a male power figure, he’ll know. When we drive through Waltham, he’ll say to me, ‘This place has no art. People are working all the time. I don’t like it here.’ Come on in here and look at his room.”
Miranda guided her down the hall into the last bedroom. The walls were a floor-to-ceiling fresco of mountains and hiking trails. The tree line and the ridges drew Julia closer. She put her face right up to the wall.
“Amazing detail. Like living inside the Sistine Chapel, what a joy.”
“I commissioned an artist to paint it from a digital photo I took in the Berkshires.”
“This is a very large bedroom. Or does the sweep of the scene create an optical illusion?”
“Ah, very discerning of you. The house had six bedrooms and servants’ quarters. We combined a bedroom with the servants’ quarters to create this room. But the sweep of the scene gives the illusion of greater height and depth.”
“Where does he go to school?”
“BB&N.”
“My fifteen-year-old daughter is at Deerfield, and she’s doing fine. But my younger son …” and she stopped suddenly.
Miranda walked Julia into Cody’s room, which was similarly adorned with a coastal scene, sailboats, a rocky coast and buoys under a summer sun.
“Again, magnificent. Your sons are fortunate.”
They slowly made their way down the back staircase and into the mudroom, between the back door and the kitchen.
Seated together over herbal tea, Miranda held to her revised plan and did not bring up official Commission business at all. Julia tried to, subtly wondering in the abstract if it was “fair” to “punish” someone for a minor legal transgression.
“I read a review of a new book about justice in The New Yorker a few weeks ago,” Miranda said, trying not to sound condescending. “I think the author’s name is Curtin. He argues that justice is an elusive concept formed by the mores of any given society. I think Lincoln has a distinct society where our social group dominates and we look at the outside world askance.”
Julia seemed fascinated.
“And this is where society wants us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Basically sprawl has ruined all the places we used to call home. Now we’re here with our two acres and a conservation trust.”
“I’ve never thought of it that way.”
“Archer and I moved here from Cambridge soon after he got tenure and became chairman of the department. We weren’t going to raise our sons in a place that disapproves of us.”
“Where in Cambridge did you live?”
“In a coach house just off Brattle Street until Cody was born. Then we could have bought a Victorian there, but it’s not the same. We wanted the countrified small-town life. And Cambridge is a city,” she said very cautiously, not wanting to make a political statement or reveal that she had not wanted to move to Lincoln. Miranda had wanted to live in Weston, the next town over, which looked quite similar but had almost no academics and no subsidized housing. Academics, with their phony rejection of materialism, their phony moral openness, their ostentatiously dented Volvos, had been grating at her for years. But she was married to one, and they compromised on Lincoln.
“Cambridge is urban and, what else can I say, it’s not Lincoln. If it were, half of us would live there and be able to walk to work.”
Julia nodded.
“My husband and I grew up here. His parents had sixteen acres of apple orchards by the Concord border.”
“I know. And the Lincoln Land Conservation Trust now owns part of it.”
Miranda knew the Nickersons had made inquiries with the Conservation Commission about selling the Lincoln portion of the land to a developer. The Commission told them the plan would never be approved. Then they sold a four-acre parcel to the Conservation Trust for $1.1 million, a fifth of what the developer had offered. They had kept five acres in town, still undeveloped and worth a small fortune.
“The part on the Concord side is now split-level ranches,” said Julia, with the ambivalence everyone in Lincoln felt about sprawl. Here Miranda and the academics agreed. She liked Julia’s aesthetic ambivalence about development. She sensed a fellow pragmatist, not wedded to profit and open to her reasoning.
“It’s not happening here on our watch,” said Miranda.
“I hope not.”
The phone rang.
“I’ve taken up enough of your time. I’m glad we had this chance to talk,” said Julia.
They had a friendly parting, Miranda walking Julia to her bicycle and watching her disappear down the gravel driveway. Then Miranda went to her computer and searched for something on the Internet about justice that would bear some semblance to what she had said she had read in The New Yorker. Archer subscribed, so she had to use his password to log on to the site and do a search. She knew all of his passwords. She’d hacked into his server years ago and he had them all listed in a note item right on his homepage entitled “PASSWORDS.”
Two days later she called Julia and asked if they could get together again to talk about next week’s vote. She accepted with a suddenness that showed a real interest in advancing the relationship, inviting Miranda over later that afternoon. The Nickersons’ house was also set far back from the road. All a passerby could see was a rural road mailbox with their name. Like most of the houses in Lincoln, it had no street number. Miranda drove past a gate that appeared to be permanently in the open position, and found her car surrounded by sheep. She waited, hoping someone would come down and shepherd them away, but she was alone. So she blasted her horn and inched forward. There was a neglected barn, a tennis court and ahead, up a small incline, a quite stately red brick Federalist house, covered with ivy and being tended to by Latino landscapers. Miranda was more than impressed. A housekeeper greeted her by name at the door and brought her to the back porch, where Julia was working on her laptop and sipping green tea.
“How nice to see you again, Miranda. Please join me.”
Miranda proceeded to explain the “broken window theory” of law enforcement. She had read a paper and a Wikipedia entry on it. Basically, it held that law enforcement at the community level was dependent upon order over the little infractions. A broken window sent a message that lawlessness would be tolerated. This encouraged more serious crime. Analogizing this to Lincoln, Miranda explained th
at allowing a prominent structure to remain out of code would tell developers the town wasn’t serious about enforcement.
“Look, these developers need to know we don’t want them here.”
“They’re always looking, but we don’t give them the permits.”
“If we’re lax about enforcement when it comes to the color code, or anything else …” She let the sentence finish itself. “All these retailers are looking at the Route 2 land—Starbucks, Bed Bath & Beyond, Petco. That’s not Lincoln. We’re above that.”
“It means a lot of tax revenue, which we can use to spruce up the Pierce House.”
“I don’t think we even need to own the Pierce House anymore. It’s a ten-acre estate, worth $14 million. Why not sell it to the right buyer, not a developer, someone who will preserve it? Have you thought of that? Then we can upzone the Route 2 land.”
“That’s a total change in direction.”
“And frankly, citing the owner of the peace sign barn is like a test explosion of a new weapon.”
Julia was taken aback by the language.
“Everyone is buzzing about it,” she said. “That’s what you wanted, right?”
“Every true leader has to make an example of someone, like Lincoln did to General McClellan.”
“I’m going to think now,” Miranda said. “I need to be alone.”
Chapter Four
Miranda parked her Range Rover in a tight, difficult-to-find, quasi-legal parking space two blocks away from Archer’s mother’s townhouse in the Back Bay. The neighborhood, straight lines of old row houses with impeccable brick exteriors, had become divided in recent years between the old-timers, like Rebecca Dalton and her friends who had lived there for forty years, and the new gentry with their millions earned in private equity or high tech. The old-time residents’ homes were slightly shabby, in need of tuckpointing or new windows. The new people kept their brownstones in impeccable condition. Most of them seemed like Mark and Ellen Kelleher, who owned the townhouse next to Rebecca’s. He was from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and had met his French wife while in school in Boston. During the housing bubble, they purchased their $2.7 million home with 10% down and rented the second and third floors to students, who as far as Rebecca was concerned, had no business living in the Back Bay. She hated their garb, their iPods, their beater cars, their utter lack of style and wit, unless you considered militant informality a style, which she did not.
Miranda's War Page 2