Strong Motion : A Novel

12

No one ever had trouble finding the Hollands’ house on Wesley Avenue. It was the one with fourteen adolescent white pine trees crammed into its narrow front yard. Bob had planted the trees in the spring of 1970 and then watched approvingly as, over the years, they killed the ground cover with their acidic droppings and enveloped the yard in gloom. Every weekday morning before he biked to campus, he policed the forest floor for gum wrappers and Whopper boxes. On weekends he pulled wind-blown trash from the treetops with a long-handled rake, the pines swaying like shaggy dogs submitting mutely to a brushing. They writhed when he turned a hose on them to rinse sulfuric air pollutants off.

In the back yard, behind a high fence protecting the cheerful lawns of an engineer and an assistant athletic director, Bob had allowed the land to regress into the Illinois prairie that had predated (he never tired of explaining this) the arrival of the Europeans’ wasteful and destructive agriculture practices. Resident amid the chest-high growth were moles, snakes, mice, blue jays, and lots and lots of hornets. There were also lawn-mower traps, in the form of steel stakes hidden in the undergrowth and projecting four inches above the earth. Bob had planted these in 1983 after Melanie, discovering mice in the bedrooms, paid a neighbor boy to destroy the prairie with a mower and a hoe. Now the prairie was sequestered from the house by a low chain-link fence, and any small animals that crossed the border were eaten by the Hollands’ specially appointed cats, Drake and Cromwell. Periodically Bob put on gloves and ventured in among the hornets to uproot maple saplings and other broad-leafed intruders.

The house itself, of which only the roof and third-floor dormer still stood above the pine trees, was unusual in having a half-circular living room and, directly above, a half-circular master bedroom. These rooms, plus the dining room and front porch, belonged to Melanie. She kept them reasonably neat, and visitors to the house never saw the Bronze Age kitchen or the Stone Age basement, where there were piles of laundry whose bottom strata dated from the mid-1970s. Bob stayed mainly in his study, which was the only room on the third floor. Nowadays, for months at a stretch, the children’s rooms were visited by nothing but airborne dust. The doors were always open, though, exposing the furnishings like the unburied dead — granting them no rest.

As Louis came up Davis Street from the El stop a dry wind from the west was blowing in his face. The flat, unwatered lawns were as brown now in June as they used to be in August. House after house stood deserted-looking in a deep post-graduation silence, a desolation which the charcoal smoke creeping around from one solitary family’s back yard made all the more complete.

It was cooler among his father’s pine trees. Yellow beams slanted through suspended yellow pollen, the sun hanging in the branches as if it hadn’t moved in twenty years. The smell of resin was sharp and suppressive of insect motion. (Melanie often said she felt like she lived in a cemetery.) Taped to the front door was a message in Bob’s hand that said Louis, I’m at the Jewel.

He went straight upstairs to his room, dropped his bag, and fell down on the waiting bed, overcome by the heat and the lifelessness of the neighborhood and the fact that he was home. He didn’t know why he’d let himself come home. He shut his eyes, wondering, Why, why, why, as if the word alone could carry him over the next five days to the moment his return flight left. But the thought of the return flight led to the thought of Boston. He rolled onto his stomach, pulling at his face with his hands. He tried to think of something, anything, that had made him happy in the past, but no trace of pleasure remained from the days he’d spent with Lauren, and although there was something about Renée that had had some happiness attached, it was nothing he could remember now.

Telephones rang. Mechanically he rose and answered in his parents’ bedroom.

“Louis?” Lauren said. She sounded next door. “I miss you.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in Atlanta, at the airport. Did you have a good trip?”

“No.”

“Louis, I was thinking, I just had this thought. You know how you said you couldn’t see living in this country? Well, I was thinking we really could go to some island. We could both work and save some money, and we could go and start a restaurant or something. Just the two of us. We could have some kids, and go to the beach, and then we’d work in the restaurant.” She paused, awaiting a response. “It sounds so stupid when I say it, but it’s not stupid. We really could. I’ll be everything for you, and anywhere we go is fine with me.”

Louis listened to the breath coming out of his nose at regular intervals.

“You think it’s stupid,” Lauren said.

“No. No, it sounds nice.”

“You didn’t want me to call.”

“It’s OK.”

“No, I’m going to hang up right now and not call anymore. I’m sorry. Just pretend I didn’t call. Will you promise to pretend I didn’t call?”

“Really, it’s OK.”

“The other thing I wanted to say”—she lowered her voice—“is I want to make love with you. I really, really, really want to. I wanted to say I’m sorry we didn’t when we had a chance. As soon as I was on the plane I started crying because we hadn’t. And now”—her voice was becoming squeaky—“now I don’t know if we ever will. Louis, I mess everything up, don’t I. When I’m with you, I’m so happy, I try to have everything be perfect. But when I’m alone — when I’m alone I only want things your way.”

There was a very long pause, with respiratory sounds at either end of the line.

“Be tough,” Louis said.

“OK. Goodbye.”

He wanted to be off the phone, but he hated the sound of this “goodbye.” The word accused him of not loving her. If he loved her, wouldn’t he tell her not to say goodbye yet?

“’Bye,” he said.

“All right,” Lauren said, hanging up. Another charge had registered on her credit card.

Having heard the modest but penetrating ticking of a ten-speed’s freewheel in the driveway, he went down to the kitchen and found his father unstrapping a knapsack from his back.

“Hi Dad.”

“Howdy, Lou, welcome home.”

There was no sign of any $22 million in the kitchen. The linoleum was still torn in front of the sink and back door, the fruit bowl still held, as always, one moribund banana and one obese and obviously mealy apple, there was still the same archaic dishwasher with the words worn off its buttons and dried drools of detergent below the leaky door, still the dirty windows with the storms on, cobwebs and pine needles in the corners, still the old drainer with its rusty ulcerations, still the economy-size bottle of generic dish soap with a pink crust around its nozzle, and still the old father, nattering in his mildly entertaining way about the local drought and its probable global causes. Bob was dressed like a lawn-care-service employee — cuffed blue stay-press trousers, Sears work shoes, and a Greenpeace T-shirt dark with perspiration. Louis watched with an irritation verging on contempt as the man crouched womanishly by the refrigerator and transferred vegetables from the knapsack to the crisper. The beers on the top shelf were still Old Style. Louis took one, reaching over the hair that would now always be thicker than his own, smelling the armpits to which deodorants had long been strangers.

“You forgot to take your ankle clip off,” he said.

Bob touched his pants leg, noting that the clip was there, but he didn’t take it off. He smoothed the emptied knapsack and folded it in two.

Louis looked around the kitchen as if it were a witness to what he had to put up with.

“Well so here I am,” he said. “You want to tell me why you sent the ticket?”

“So you couldn’t hang up on me,” Bob said.

“Expensive way to do that. Or is money no object now?”

“If you’re worried about that, you can paint the garage for me. And scrape it first. But no, if you want to be strictly logical, there’s no reason for you to be here. There’s no reason for me to care if I see you unhappy, no reason why you and your mother shouldn’t keep making each other miserable and poison the whole family.”

Louis rolled his eyes, again calling upon the kitchen as his witness. “I take it she’s already in Boston.”

“She left on Thursday.”

“It’s nice how she always lets me know when she’s there.”

“Yes, I know she doesn’t call you. But the fact is you wouldn’t want to see her now anyway.”

“Uh-huh.” Louis nodded. “That’s very considerate of her. She knows I’m not going to want to see her, so she spares me the awkwardness of saying no to an invitation. That’s so amazingly tactful.”

“Lou, this is why I wanted you here.”

“‘This’? ‘This’? This — what, attitude problem of mine? This failure of my niceness regarding Mom?” He swallowed some beer and made a face. “How can you drink this stuff? It’s carbonated gallbladder.”

“I thought you might want to come,” Bob said, determined not to be provoked. “You’re obviously very angry, and I thought if you understood better why your mother, for example, is behaving the way she is—”

“Then I’d understand and accept and forgive her. Right?” Louis dared his father to contradict him. “You’d tell me what a tough life Mom has, and what a tough life Eileen has, and what a comparatively easy life I have, and then because it turns out I’ve got things so good I’d go and say, Gee, Mom, I’m sorry, do whatever you want, I totally understand.”

“No, Louis.”

“But what I don’t understand is where everybody gets this idea that I’ve got things so easy. You live in this house with her, you see her every day, but you can’t say to her, Jeez, Melanie, aren’t you being kind of mean to Louis? Instead you’ve got to fly me home, so I can be the one who understands.”

“Lou, she understands, but she can’t help herself.”

“Yeah, well, I can’t help myself. And that’s why I’m not going to have anything more to do with her. She can’t help it, I can’t help it, that’s the end of it.”

“But you can help it.”

“What, oh, because why?” he asked the kitchen generally. “Because I was elected at age ten to be Mr. Understanding? Because men have things easy?”

“That’s part of it, yes.”

“I’m the one who has things easy? Not Mom who can do whatever the hell she wants and then say she can’t help it? Not Eileen who, you know, cries whenever she can’t have what she wants? Are you serious? That’s such total arrogance. I’m saying I’m no better than they are. What’s wrong with that?”

“What exactly is your problem with her?”

“My problem with her. I’m not even going to tell you what my problem is.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t feel like it.”

“Because you’re embarrassed. Because you know it isn’t worthy of you.”

“Oh, I see. Tell me more about this problem of mine.”

Bob always savored any lecture invitation. He picked up the black banana and, holding it before his eyes, slowly stripped it. “Maybe it’s the old romance of the left,” he said in his musing, classroom voice. “I tend to think of you and Eileen as sort of the two sides of the national equation. Eileen being the kind of person who thinks she needs wealth and luxury, and you being the kind of person who—”

“Who says hell no, beans and rice are fine with me.”

“Yes, you can laugh at me now, but that’s how it seemed.” Bob began to eat the banana; no one else in the family would have touched such a black one. “I thought you felt more or less the way I do. And I used to believe there was a sizable class of people in this country who wanted nothing more than a decent job, decent housing, decent health care, and first-class non-material satisfactions. Because it seemed as if people should be like this. And then in the eighties this turns out to be as wishful as all my other thinking. The decent working people in this country turn out to have the same consumer greed as the bourgeoisie, and every single person is dreaming of having the same luxuries that Donald Trump has, and would poison the world and kill his neighbors to get them if that would help.”

“Oh,” Louis said. “So I’m greedy. I’m a Donald Trump just like everybody else. That’s my problem with Mom: I want a snazzy town house just like Eileen’s, and I want my VCR and my BMW and I’m pissed at Mom because she won’t give it to me. That’s what you’ve determined?”

“You’re angry because she’s lent money to Eileen.”

“Yeah, even if that were the problem, which I don’t really grant, the thing is it’s a fairness thing, a frankness thing. I mean, your working class wouldn’t care about BMWs if they didn’t have to see all these worthless rich assholes driving them around and talking on their car phones. And before you say it — I’m not saying Eileen’s a worthless rich asshole. I’m not saying I necessarily even have a problem with her.”

“No,” Bob said, tranquilly finishing the banana. “You just see an opportunity to torment your mother and still have justice on your side.”

“Me? Are you kidding? I’m trying to stay away from her! I’m trying to shut her out of my mind! Which is literally what she asked me to do. She said, let’s pretend this didn’t happen, and what do you think I’ve been trying to do? You know — in my own stupid trusting way. I don’t know where you get this idea I’m tormenting her. I went and talked to her one time, when I found out that I was the only one being asked to pretend this didn’t happen, I mean, that Eileen wasn’t. I had one five-minute lapse, and that was it. And now you tell me you ‘hoped’ I might not be as ‘materialistic’ as Eileen. Well. maybe I wasn’t! Maybe I was this perfect, greedless guy you always wanted me to be. But I get no thanks from anyone, and then you give me this little talk about how ‘disappointed’ you are, and how innocent you were, and how I’m like the working class that never seems to do what the marxists want it to. I mean, it’s no wonder us workers all turn out wishing we could be Donald Trump. We’re sorry you’re disappointed. You think I want to disappoint you? When the only possible justification I have for living this stupid fucking way I live is that maybe at least my father thinks it’s not so stupid? But you obviously can’t see this, because you obviously don’t have the slightest idea what I’m really like, because for twenty-three years you’ve been too stoned to notice. You talk about innocent, you talk about dumb, look at me here.”

Bob’s eyes had widened suddenly, as if he’d felt a knife go in his back. Louis, taking deep breaths, dropped his eyes to the floor. “And you’re hurt, I know, I’m sorry. It was an exaggeration.”

“No, you’re right,” Bob said as he turned towards the door. “You hit the nail on the head.”

“Yeah, walk away now, would you. Make me feel like the invulnerable one, huh? Like the only person in this family who doesn’t get overcome with grief and guilt.”

“I have nothing more to say now.”

“You walk away. Mom walks away. Eileen walks away. What else am I supposed to think except that I’m the one with the problem? — That I’m always so fucking right? Is that it?” He was speaking to an empty doorway. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. What am I doing wrong?”

He listened to the creak of wooden stairs. “AREN’T YOU GLAD I CAME HOME?”

Bob Holland had come from a small town north of Eugene, Oregon. In the East, at Harvard, he’d written his doctoral dissertation on the origins of land speculation in seventeenth-century Massachusetts and met Melanie, whom he began to stalk relentlessly but didn’t succeed in capturing until he’d returned to Boston from a two-year post-doctoral stint in England, at the University of Sheffield. The young Hollands came to Evanston in the early sixties and conceived Eileen the same month Bob was offered tenure. For a few years he was the history department’s shining star, teaching hugely popular courses on Colonial America and nineteenth-century industrialization, giving exams with questions like Describe what might have been or Was it progress?, and bestowing A’s and B’s on all comers. He grew marijuana in planters on the roof, turned his lawn into a jungle, rode buses to Washington. Student activists caucused in his basement. He was teargassed and spent a night in jail, once.

However, as everybody knows, the spirit of those days soon wasted itself in violence, licentiousness, self-indulgence, commercial co-optation, and despair. Each autumn’s fresh crop of students contained more well-groomed and unplayful weeds than the crop before it. Bob managed to cultivate militancy in a few of them, but history and numbers were against him, and his mind was a little too scrambled by disappointment and hallucinogens for him to be able to thrive in the increasingly hostile environment. As early as 1980 he found himself classed by students and faculty alike as just another Old Marxist Drone.

The Drones were an exclusively male bunch. They sat in their own corner at faculty meetings, well apart from the newly emboldened conservatives in their bow ties and the recently hired minority faculty in their assertively ethnic costumes and all the kiddies, leftist and otherwise, in their tight short skirts and herringbone blazers. The Drones had red faces and tousled hair. They wore flannel shirts and down vests. Among themselves they traded the too-obvious smiles of people who are publicly intoxicated and think it’s funny. They saw fascism everywhere — in the administration, in the cafeterias, in the bookstore — and said so on the record. They proposed Jerry Garcia and Oliver North as commencement speakers. They raised their hands during earnest policy discussions and tried to have humorous remarks about psychedelic drugs inserted in the record. They were all terribly nostalgic about psychedelic drugs.

Lacking public support for an assault on society at large, the Drones subverted the only authority they knew, which was the university. They never missed an open party or reception. They clustered around whatever food and alcohol the university had paid for, and grimly, but winking now and then like the conspirators they felt themselves to be, consumed many dollars’ worth. They were gleeful in abusing privileges, borrowing stacks of library books never to return them, working departmental copy machines to death, and insisting on their share of funds to bring in guest speakers — ex-Yippies or minor functionaries from Romania or Angola — to whose lectures only the Drones themselves came, with their keen appetite for refreshments. Challenged by their peers, they fell back on a hoary argument: Society is corrupt, this university is a product of society, therefore this university is corrupt.

There were Drones in Bob’s own department who hadn’t seen an article into print since Kent State. When the subject of publications arose, these men regarded their truncated careers with the proud, resigned faces of amputees. Drones taught Rocks for Jocks, seminars on Popular Culture, and courses in Russian History for which the syllabi hadn’t changed in three decades.

Bob himself, atypically, was a good scholar. Even during the darkest Reagan years, when he was getting stoned five afternoons a week, he immersed himself in primary and secondary sources and came up with many marvelous, marvelous historical facts and insights which, shorn of their cannabidiolic aura by the sober glow of his computer, still retained enough mettle to form the bases for a book called Filling the Earth: God, Wilderness, and the Massachusetts Bay Company and for two articles on wampum, beaver pelts, and inflationary spirals, all written in fluid prose and published very respectably.

It was mainly Melanie who kept Bob in line. For all that he enjoyed teasing her and baiting her, he lived in fear of losing her respect. She probably hadn’t set foot on campus a dozen times in twenty-five years, so he was free to make a fool of himself there, but elsewhere he was careful to preserve his dignity. For Melanie he would slick back his hair and put on one of his ancient suits and ride with her downtown to the symphony or opera and nap in his seat until it was time to go home. He endured countless dinners with her college friends, all of whose husbands seemed to be past or current members of the Stock Exchange and still could get nothing better than a laugh out of him when the conversation turned to politics. For months at a time, when Melanie was in rehearsal or performance at the Theatrical Society, Bob cooked dinners for Louis and Eileen. Melanie shouted at him and shouted at the children; he covered his ears with his hands and smiled as if she were onstage and doing very well; she shouted all the louder, and he went upstairs and she followed, shouting; but the next time she saw the children she was flustered and sometimes blushed. The children never consciously recognized the obvious fact, which was that the man in their house was wildly in love with the woman and the woman less than perfectly immune to the man, but undoubtedly they got the basic idea. Eileen felt pity and affection for their father. Louis felt morbid embarrassment.

Dusk was falling on Monday by the time Louis returned to Wesley Avenue from an all-day walk to Lake Forest. He’d located the bland, wide house that Renée had grown up in. He’d eaten two large orders of french fries along the way. Now the wind and the light had died, and Wesley Avenue was so deserted — the whole neighborhood so obviously empty of watchful human beings — that it seemed the day might as well have never happened, or at best should have gone in the record books with an asterisk. In the sky above Dewey School, alma mater of the Holland kids, the orange trail of a bottle rocket faded and there was a white flash. Humidity fattened the report.

Louis entered the stuffy house and drank two glasses of iced tea. He peeled off his T-shirt, wrung it out, and put a fresh one on. With each step he took up the stairs to the third floor, the temperature rose by a degree and the smell of old timber and warm plaster intensified. Bob’s door, ajar, let out just enough light to illuminate the yellowed quotation that was taped to it:

For I ask, What would a Man value Ten Thousand or a Hundred Thousand Acres of excellent Land, ready cultivated, and well stocked too with Cattle, in the middle of the in-land Parts of America, where he had no hopes of Commerce with other Parts of the World, to draw Money to him by the Sale of the Product? It would not be worth the inclosing, and we should see him give up again to the wild Common of Nature, whatever was more than would supply the Conveniences of Life to be had there for him and his Family.

— JOHN LOCKE

Not noticing any fresh smoke, Louis tapped on the door and pushed it open. His father was sitting in front of the window, rubbing the fur on Drake’s head and looking into the blades of the box fan blowing air at him. Half the bare floor was hidden by staggering piles of photocopies flagged with sheets of self-adhesive notepaper. On the wall above his Macintosh hung a black-and-white photograph of Eileen. She was about four years old, short-haired and elfin and huge-eyed, and she wore a chain of daisies in her hair.

“Look,” Louis said. “You don’t have to say anything. I just want to say I’m doing my best. I don’t want to hear how bad I am. It’s not really very helpful for me right now. You know, because I already feel like about the biggest jerk on the planet.”

Drake gave him a sated look, tinged with jealousy. Bob spoke to the fan. “I never said you were bad. I of all people have no right to say that. You don’t even know the high regard I have for you.”

Louis winced. “You don’t have to say that either, I mean, let’s quit while we’re ahead.”

“And I suppose my high regard gives rise to unreasonable expectations. I’d hoped that even though you’re upset with your mother, you still might be able to understand what’s going on with her, if I could talk to you. You can’t blame me for trying. I can’t just stand aside while this folly of your grandfather’s destroys the family. I have to do something.”

“Uh huh. Like what.”

“Like tell you that we love you.”

Louis might not have heard him. He turned to a shelf and touched the spines of the library books on it. Then he made a fist and punched the spines. With bent fingers he pulled at his arms and chest as though he were covered with corruption. “Don’t say that!” His voice was a strangled shriek, like no sound he’d ever made. “Don’t say that!”

His father spun his swivel chair around, Drake leaping free of his lap and bolting from the room. “Lou—”

“Fuck love. Fuck love.” Louis butted his head against the doorframe. He stumbled out the door and slumped on the landing, holding his head and feeling torn between what he was feeling and what he knew to be a still-optional ability to control himself. He opened his eyes and experienced a moment of clear emptiness, a simultaneous zeroing of all the waves in his brain. Then his father knelt and put his arms around him, and his eyes burned and terrible clots of sharp-edged hurt rose from his chest. He was crying, and there was no longer any way back to the self-respect and pride he’d felt before he started crying. He cried because the thought of stopping and seeing that this self that he had liked so much had been crying in his father’s arms was unbearable. It seemed as if there were a specific organ in his brain which under extreme stimulus produced a sensation of love, more intense than any orgasm, but more dangerous too, because it was even less discriminate. A person could find himself loving enemies and homeless beggars and ridiculous parents, people from whom it had been so easy to live at a distance and towards whom, if in a moment of weakness he allowed himself to love them, he then acquired an eternal responsibility.

For no apparent reason, Bob took his arms away from Louis. There was a damned look in his eyes. He went down to the kitchen, cracked the metal seal on a Johnnie Walker bottle, and tilted it back. He had to fellate the bottle, sticking the neck well into his mouth, to keep the plastic spout from dribbling whiskey down his chin. The cats tried to climb his legs, coveting the bottle. He filled their water dish. He could hear his son sobbing two floors above him.

Upstairs, he found him leaning crookedly against the newel post with his glasses off, his eyes small and red, the neck of his T-shirt stretched. He squinted stupidly at his father, who was standing in front of the light.

“You feeling a little better?” Bob kicked him playfully, with one foot and then the other.

“What are you kicking me for? Don’t kick me.”

I’m sorry.

Louis sighed. He felt deadened, as if some long-accumulated strain or poison had been released from his system. That his thinking was in ruins didn’t really bother him. “There’s something I wanted to say.”

“Anything you want.”

“Right. Thanks.” Louis sniffed back a large volume of mucus. “It’s about Mom’s company, Sweeting-Aldren. I just wanted to say they’re causing the earthquakes.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they’re literally causing the earthquakes in Boston. This woman I’ve been living with— This woman I was living with— This woman who I just did a really nasty thing to. ” Louis looked straight ahead, tears pooling again in his eyes. “She’s a seismologist. She’s the most wonderful person, who I just really fucked over. Who I just basically lost. I don’t even know why it happened. I mean, I know why, it’s because she’s a lot older than me — it’s because I loved her so much. Dad. Because I loved her so much. And this other person who’s just my age, who I used to be—. This person came in from Houston.”

He looked sorrowfully at his father. Then he squeezed his eyes shut, his face crumpling up.

Bob crouched in front of him. “Call her.”

He shook his head. “It’s complicated. You can’t get her on the phone, and I don’t even know if I want to. I don’t think I can.” He slid sideways, afraid Bob was going to touch him again. “I don’t want to talk about this. I just had one thing to say, which was the company’s causing the earthquakes, and somehow I’m going to stick it to them, and I know Mom has a lot of stock, and I wasn’t going to tell you, but now I have, and you can tell her if you want. That’s all.”

“Causing. You said causing.”

“Yeah.”

“Is she sure?”

“Yeah.”

Then Bob had to know everything. As busy as a boxer’s manager, he brought Louis toilet paper to blow his nose with, took him to the kitchen and sat him down with ice water and Johnnie Walker, and showered him with questions. Trying to explain it without Renée’s help, Louis thought the whole theory sounded fuzzy and unlikely, but Bob was laughing as he chopped up vegetables and beef and stir-fried them, rating every logical step with a “Good!” or an “Excellent!” One could only admire how methodically he set about mastering the argument. At the table, with each bite of food he picked up in his chopsticks (Louis used a fork), he fitted another fact into place.

“Nobody suspects the company,” he said over a piece of carrot, “because the earthquakes are so deep.”

“Right.”

“And the earthquakes in Ipswich are unrelated.” A strip of beef now. “They’re the cover.”

“Right.”

“Just as in New Jersey, when the wind blows out to sea, all the companies double their emissions because no one can catch them at it. The Ipswich earthquakes are the wind blowing east.”

“Right.”

“Marvelous! Terrific!” A snow pea pod. “And how does she prove there’s a deep hole?”

Louis wished his father wouldn’t insist on considering this “her” theory. “She’s — we’ve — been looking for pictures or something. But otherwise, it’s just the two articles.”

From his soy-stained plate, Bob picked up a broccoli floret and held it at eye level, revolving it like a thought and frowning. “There’s a problem there,” he said. “If she can’t prove for certain that the hole was drilled.”

“We’re working on it.”

“No no no. There’s a problem.” Bob turned and frowned at the door to the basement. After a moment he stood up and went downstairs. He returned with an Atlantic Monthly.

“Eat, eat,” he said, sitting down. He wiped dust off the magazine and showed Louis the cover: the origin of petroleum. February 1986. “Your mother subscribes,” he said. “And I read.”

Louis eyed the magazine uneasily. The cover story was about the scientist Renée had mentioned, the one named Gold, who believed that petroleum originated deep inside the planet. It said something unflattering about Louis’s love of truth that he was afraid to open the magazine — afraid to risk seeing Renée’s theory contradicted. If she had to be wrong, he was happier not knowing it.

Bob took the magazine and paged through the cover story, running his finger down the columns. When he came to the end, he shook his head.

“Nix about Sweeting-Aldren. Which, believe me, I would have noticed when I read it. But — and really, I don’t want you to think I personally am not persuaded, because I am, because I know these people and it makes a lot of sense. But the impression you get from this article is that you don’t just drill the hole anywhere. There has to be a very special geology to collect the petroleum that’s coming up. I’m more than willing to believe the company sank a well to pump waste into, but I don’t think they’d go down any twenty thousand feet if five thousand would do. And unfortunately it sounds like your friend’s theory doesn’t hold up unless the hole is very deep. If the geology was correct in western Massachusetts, any hole that’s there should be deep. But if it’s in Peabody it can only be shallow.”

Louis was sure that Renée would have had an answer to this. “I guess they thought maybe they’d get oil anyway.”

“Come on, Lou.” Bob leaned forward challengingly. “It has to make sense in the details. If you send me this stuff as a paper to review, I’m going to jump all over you. Oil’s cheap in ’69. Deep holes are tremendously expensive. A shallow hole will do the trick for waste disposal. Your friend’s theory requires the hole to be deep. The Atlantic — which admittedly is not the Bible, but nevertheless — The Atlantic tells me the theory of deep petroleum wasn’t developed until the late seventies. It’s based on space probes from the early seventies. Even if somebody had a theory in 1969—when nobody cared about oil anyway, and Sweeting-Aldren by the way had earnings of better than four bucks a share annually — it must have been based on bad evidence.”

“Well, that’s what Renée said. It was a bad paper, but it still sort of anticipated the theory later on.”

“But a bad paper is a bad paper. How’s the company going to know the theory has a future?”

Louis squirmed like a failing student. “I don’t know. But everything else makes sense.”

“Do you remember the author’s name? It wasn’t Gold, was it?”

“Oh, please.” He pushed away his plate. “I know who Gold is. This was some guy named Krasner. Somebody who, he stopped publishing and we have no idea where he went.” He looked at hit father. “What’s wrong?”

Bob had risen from his chair. He was staring at the liquor cabinet, gravitating towards it. He was suddenly very pale.

“What’s wrong?”

Bob turned around as if responding to the sound of his voice, not the content. He looked at him vacantly. “Krasner.”

“You’re kidding. You’re going to tell me you know him.”

“Her.”

“Her?” A seed of fear sprouted in Louis’s stomach.

“Anna Krasner. A girlfriend of your grandfather’s.”

“How do you know that?”

Bob answered slowly, speaking to himself. “Because old Jack made sure I knew. There wasn’t a possession he had that he didn’t make sure I knew was his.”

“When was this?”

“Sixty-nine.”

“Was he married? I mean, to Rita?”

Bob shook his head. “Not yet. Not for another three years.” He was reading messages on the wall that Louis couldn’t see — worrisome messages, bitter messages. Then, abruptly, he came to himself and sat down. “You feeling OK?”

“Yeah, fine, drunk,” Louis said.

“I think I can find her for you, if you want.”

“That would be great.”

“You don’t remember Jack very well, do you?”

“Zero memories.”

“He was not your ordinary. not your ordinary human being. For example, Anna was a very pretty woman, about forty-five years his junior. When we found out he’d remarried, I was sure it was going to be her. But it turns out to be Rita, who everyone agreed was not a particularly attractive woman. Not to say an outright fright, although that was my opinion. We’d met her when she was at the girlfriend stage, when she was his secretary, but that was years earlier. I’d assumed she was long gone from the picture. And there are a lot of men where you wouldn’t have been surprised, but not Jack. He cared about how a woman looked, that and how old she was, more than anything.”

“Uh huh.”

A moth beat against the screen in the back door, unable to follow the smell of prairie that was creeping inside. Some small animal made the tall grass crackle. The cats crossed the kitchen, single file, and pressed their whiskers against the screen. Bob asked what Louis and Renée had planned to do with their information.

“I guess make sure the company pays,” Louis said. “We disagreed about the timing.”

“You’ll want to let your mother know in advance.”

“All right.”

“Had you thought of that?”

“I tried not to.”

Bob nodded. “That’s something else that was peculiar about Jack. Why he put all his money in Sweeting-Aldren stock. Because it wasn’t as if he earned it all in stock and then failed to spread it out. The records show a well-balanced portfolio until the early seventies, when he made his new will — I suppose after he’d married Rita. Then he retired from the company and systematically bought stock in it until that’s all there was. A piece of folly that’s already cost your mother a lot of money.”

“Boo hoo.”

“What we can’t figure out is why Jack did it. He was a company man, that’s where he made his fortune, and I don’t know how many times he told me it was the best-run corporation in the country. However many times I saw him in my life. A dozen times. But he loved money as much as he loved women, and he was anything but stupid. I simply can’t see him making emotional decisions. There must have been some greed involved, somewhere that I can’t see. This Canadian a while back, Campeau, the one who owned department stores. He sank all his money in his own company, and all his kids’ money too, to the tune of about five hundred million. Next thing he knew, the shares were nearly worthless. If you’re greedy, and you believe in yourself, I suppose you think, why put any money at all in things that won’t pay the maximum return?”

“Yeah, why not,” Louis said.

“Well. I’ll tell you why not. Because he bought shares at any price and any ratio. Every time something of his matured, he converted it to Sweeting-Aldren common, no matter what the price, and this was after he’d retired. Wouldn’t you call that a little irrational?”

“Sure, maybe, if I understood stocks.”

Bob leaned forward suddenly, resting his elbows on his knees, and focused his reddened, enthusiastic eyes on Louis.

“Jack’s girlfriend,” he said, “is a company chemist. The company drills a disposal well three or four times deeper than it has to be. The chemist disappears. Jack marries a fright. He converts all his assets to company stock at any cost. When he dies he leaves them in a trust fund for the fright. You don’t see anything there?” If the question had been put to Louis by anyone else, or at any other time in the last ten years, he would only have been irritated, figuring that if a person had something to say they should just go ahead and say it. What he felt now, though, was embarrassment for not seeing what his father saw. He was embarrassed to have to shake his head.

“No,” he said. “You have to tell me.”

13

The Countrey, according to the first Englishmen to see it, more resembled a boundless green Parke than a Wildernesse. From the rocky shores inland as farre as a man could journey in a week, there stretched a Forrest suche as teemed with Dere, and Elke, and Beares, and Foxes; with Quailes and ruffed Grouse and wilde Turkies so innocent and Plentiful that a man could cast aside his Musket and hunt them with bare hands. There were majestical Pines and Hickeries and Chesnuts and Oakes, towering to heighths beyond the ken of any European, and so widely spaced (as severall Travellers noted), that an Armie could march through with ease. Beneath the trees and in the Intervalls, were found neither Brambles nor wooddy Undergrowth, but a low, softe Carpet of sweete Grasses and Hearbes that the Dere and Elke did much affect.

At the dawn of the seventeenth Century of our Lord, the land by Masathulets Bay had been relieved of its trees, by Indians in need of fire-woode. Lush Medowes and shrubby Hills stretched westward from the mouth of the River Charles as farre as the eye could see. Duske might fall at mid-day when a million of wilde Pidgeons filled the sky, and in the spawning Season the waters of fresh Streames congealed into Silver, with Smelts and Sturgions and Basses and Alewives swimming up-stream in suche Multitudes, that it seemed a man might step across them like a Bridge. Oysters in the Bay had foot-long Shells and could not be eaten in one bite. The soyle in many places was black and rich as Caveare.

Although the first Englishmen to settle in this Parke did nearly starve, yet the Indian men were observed to live more like unto Kings—working little and wanting little, and hunting and fishing at theyre Leisure. It was the Indians who, once or twice in a yeare, set the Fires that spred quickly and harmlessly over vast tracts of Forrest, therebye consuming Briers and much useless Woode, killing Fleas and Mice, and permitting of the growth of sweete Herbage. By the time God created the Sun & the Moone & the Planets, these Indians had called this Land theyre own for three thousand of years; and after another six thousand of years it was yet more like a Garden, than on the day when the first Human Beeing trod upon it.

In spring and summer, the Indian Women laboured to plant Maze in mounds, and tended it along with Squashes, Pumpkins, Melons, Tabacco, and the Beanes that climed the corne-stalks. Theyre hap-hazard fields were Nurseries for theyre children too. The men paddled to sea in hollow tree trunks, pursuing Seales and Walrosses, and fishing for codde-fish, and harpooning Porpisces and Whales. If theyre tree trunks sank, as was like to happen, they would swim for two hours to reach shore. Everywhere they chanced to look upon the Land, were Blueberries, Strawberries, Goosberries, Rasberries, Cranberries and Currans. Women and children gathered them, and captured the Birds, which came to feed. They trapped Hares and Porpentines and other small beests. Most of the Maze and Beanes which they harvested, was put away for winter, whilst the rest was eaten, along with Chesnuts and Acomes and Ground-nuts and Scallops and Clammes and Crabs and Mussles and Pumpkins, at Revels suche as lasted many weeks. Then, the Dere and Beares beeing fattest, the men went on hunting trips deep into the woods. Women dragged carcases back to the camps, and made Cloathes of the skins, and processed the Meat. When the men had luck, they ate ten Meales a day, sleeping in between them. When they were out of luck, they went hungrie for the nonce; for, the next summer always brought Abundance.

Wars and Abstinence from carnall Relations, maintained a balance between Population, and what goods the land could produce. A field beeing exhausted, the Indians farmed elsewhere. Fleas becoming intolerable, the Indians moved theyre Villages. They had no use for Propertie as could not be easily transported, or easily abandoned and refashioned. And, forasmuch as they lived in a World where there was either much food or little food, and otherwise had enough Cloathes and Firewoode and Tabacco and Women to satisfy theyre needs, so they were never in a hurry. Whatever could be put off until to-morrow, was put off. There were no Rats in theyre World, no Cock-roaches, no Stinging Nettles, no Pigs or Cows, no Firearms, no Meazels, no Chicken Pox, no Small Pox, no Influenza, no Plague, no French Pox, no Typhus, no Malaria; nor Yellow Fever; nor Consumption.

On the minus side — as Bob himself was always quick to grant — the Indians didn’t have those wonderful Greek black olives. They didn’t have blue cheese, or cardamoms, or the wines of Bordeaux, or violins. They had no conception of butter. Their imaginations were unenriched by Chinese porcelain, Persian illuminated manuscripts, or the idea of a midnight sleigh ride in the Russian winter. Was it perhaps worth the price of the Black Death to know that Jupiter had moons? Would a person trade The Iliad and The Odyssey for contentment and freedom from the flu? Make do without metal cookware and, with it, world history?

You might as well ask whether, if she could, a person would choose never to have been born; and whether, for that matter, North America’s older sister Europe herself might rather have remained in fetal Stone Age darkness.

So the world of the Indians had been sleeping, alive but unborn, until the Europeans came, and the few missionaries and colonists compassionate enough to wonder why such a world had to suffer the pain of awakening to consciousness — and why they themselves had to be the instruments of this awakening — must have answered with conviction: because God wills it. For these Europeans of conscience, the conviction must have been a comfort.

For the rest it was expediency. “Fill the earth and subdue it,” God had commanded in Genesis. His Englishmen came to Massachusetts and, seeing that the natives had disobeyed the commandment — the place was all trees and no fences! no churches! no barns! — felt justified in tricking them and blackmailing them and massacring them. English pigs ate their clam beds and the crops in their unfenced fields; English guns slaughtered fowl and deer. English chicken pox, English smallpox, English typhus killed entire Indian villages, leaving bodies strewn on the ground outside dwellings. They were branches falling in the forest, these seventy-year-old men and thirty-year-old women and three-year-old girls, with no one to hear them. In the space of a generation, more than 80 percent of the Indians in New England died of European diseases. Vermont was essentially depopulated.

“God,” said John Winthrop, “hath hereby cleared our title to this place.”

Felt hats and fur clothing being the fashion in the Old World, the Indians who survived the epidemics were able to trade beaver skins for things like copper kettles and iron fishhooks that made their lives easier. Before long, though, they had plenty of kettles and fishhooks, and so they began to beat the kettles into jewelry. And when copper jewelry became so common that it lost its cachet, the Englishmen conquered the Pequots of Connecticut and exacted a tribute of wampum — polished beads made out of whelk and quahog shells — and flooded the fur market with this currency. Wampum being scarce and portable and ornamental, like gold, there was at first no limit to the prestige an Indian could gam by its accumulation. But with fewer and fewer Indians in circulation and more and more wampum, inflation inevitably set in. Soon enough every last beaver in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island was exterminated, and the least consequential Indian wore necklaces of wampum formerly fit for chiefs, and the English traders were paid in pounds sterling for the furs they shipped overseas. Every market has its winners and losers; sadly for the Indians, the sterling turned out to be a better investment than the wampum. And in the course of attaching abstract sterling prices to abstract parcels of real estate, the smartest of the Englishmen learned to live off the land with even less labor than the king-like Indians had: by buying low and selling high.

“A major question about the seventeenth century,” Bob said, “is whether the economy was subsistence-oriented, or whether there was already a capitalist mentality, and if there was capitalism, then how sophisticated was it. Real-estate speculation is a good indicator of sophistication, and there was some intriguing material there in Ipswich. Your mother was less than keen on my staying in Jack’s house, but I thought it was just her paranoia. I was still a young bastard. Even now I have no objection to drinking single-malt scotch at a corporate officer’s expense. They’re not magicians, you know — that scotch doesn’t flow from stone. Politically, of course, Jack and I were about as opposed as two people could have been—”

“This was—?”

“November ’69. I was on sabbatical. Sweeting-Aldren was shipping twenty million bucks a month worth of defoliants straight to Vietnam, also spot sales of napalm. As a direct result of which, its general counsel and senior vice president had been able to buy a million bucks’ worth of Revolutionary Era history on Argilla Road. Every morning for a week I walked up the road into Ipswich, a town granted its charter in 1630 by an imperialist-expansionist English crown, a town whose most valuable commodity by far is its own history, a town that prides itself on having been an early center of freedom of conscience and the Tax Revolution of the eighties, that is, the 1680s. While back here my students were freely expressing their consciences in protesting a war of imperialism in Southeast Asia, for which effrontery I don’t believe they enjoyed universal popular support in Ipswich, certainly not on Argilla Road. And not in the Salem courthouse either. Every day for another five days I went there and read the records of a thousand deeds. Deeds: What a word! The fact that the mighty deeds of our forefathers are recorded as the purchase of such and such triangular piece of pasture for three yearling oxen, and the sale of said piece of pasture nine months later for twelve pounds, six shillings. Such were their heroic deeds.”

“But Krasner. She was living with him?”

“No no no. If she’d moved in, it would have been the end of her. It would have made her family.”

“What was she like?”

Bob poured scotch into his tumbler. He tilted the bottle again and poured a smaller splash, and then a very small splash, as if honoring some precise limit. He took a deep breath and turned his head and gazed at the screen door, like a plaintiff recalling his assailant.

“Loud, vulgar, beautiful,” he said. “She had a big Slavic mouth, and a Slavic tilt to her eyes, long auburn hair, maybe a trace of a Slavic accent — at least she liked to drop her definite articles. She was perfect for his purposes. She had bad enough taste and bad enough manners that she’d stretch out on his lap and hang from his neck, just so there was no mistaking their relationship. Then she’d snap her fingers in his face so I could see that she had spirit. Like a half-broken horse or some other cliché that makes men of a certain bent go wild. She had one of those cello voices that make you sure the woman’s entire body is capable of tremendous resonance, under the right circumstances. A cello body too, not skinny — a body to die for. She was the kind of woman who could smoke a cigar with a smile on her face. An object whose pleasure it was to be an object. But even so, there was something strange going on between them, something particularly unloving, that I saw with my very own eyes. She’d sit at the table and stare at him and say, So when are you going to make me vice president? And he’d say, Whenever you want, and she’d say: Tomorrow. He’d shrug and say, Sure, tomorrow, but she’d keep right on staring at him, with her cigar-smoking smile, about fifty teeth showing in two curving rows, and say, Tomorrow? Good! Tomorrow you make me vice president. You’re going to do it tomorrow first thing. You said you would, right? Or are you a liar? I hope you’re not a liar. Bob, you heard him. He says he’s making me vice president tomorrow.”

“But she was a chemist?”

Bob held his tumbler to the light. He seemed oblivious to Louis’s presence. “Every couple of years I get a student like her. You’re almost certain they don’t understand the material, but they’re so full of confidence, and animal energy, and this idea that history is a jungle that they’re wily enough and seductive enough and important enough to survive in, that they really do survive. A dubious article on petroleum is just the kind of work that Anna would have somehow gotten published. The work may be bad, but there’s a vitality in the author that makes it hard to turn it down.”

From the darkness outside the screen door came tearing sounds, accompanied by the faint growling of a cat intent on business. A small animal was being dismembered.

By the late eighteenth century, a person traveling the 240 miles from Boston to New York passed through no more than twenty miles of wooded country. Visitors from Europe commented on how scarce and stunted the trees in America were. They thought the soil must be sterile. They marveled at how the Americans wasted wood for the sake of short-term profit or convenience. At sawmills only the tallest and most perfectly formed trees were milled into lumber; all the less perfect trees had been torched or left to rot. Families built large, poorly insulated houses of wood or of wood-fired brick (the kind of houses, Bob said, that even now charmed visitors to Ipswich) and from October through April they kept fires roaring in every room.

As soon as a white American acquired land from the Indians, he tried to profit from it quickly, cutting the trees for timber or burning them for ashes if local ash demand was great enough. Otherwise he could save labor by simply killing the trees and letting decay bring them down. Crops planted on formerly forested land grew well for a few years, but without trees to capture nutrients, and with a farmer’s endeavors confined within immutable property lines, the soil soon became useless. It was a myth, Bob said, that the Indians had fertilized exhausted land with fish. The way to make a garden last ten thousand years is to rotate crops from field to field. It was the white Americans who sowed alewives with their seeds, and whose fields stank so much that travelers would vomit by the roadside.

Barred from roaming freely, cattle grazed the land more closely than wild animals had. They trampled the soil, squeezing the air out, diminishing water retention. Cape Cod had had no sand dunes when the Europeans came. The dunes developed after cows killed the native grasses and the topsoil blew away.

Lowlands, kept dry for millennia by trees that evaporated rain from their leaves, turned into bogs as soon as they were cleared; mosquitoes, malaria, and thorns moved in. On higher ground, without the shade of trees, a blanket of snow melted quickly and the ground froze deeper, retaining less water when the spring rains came. Flooding became common. Unchecked by tree roots and fallen leaves, the rain stripped the land of nutrients. Raging streams dumped topsoil into bays and harbors. Spawning fish ran into dams and mud-choked water. But in summer and fall, without forests to regulate the flow of water, all the streams became dry gullies, and the naked land baked in the sun.

So it happened that the country whose abundance had sustained the Indians and astonished the Europeans had in less than 150 years become a land of evil-smelling swamps, of howling winds, of failing farms and treeless vistas, of hot summers and bitterly cold winters, of eroded plains and choked harbors. A time-lapse movie of New England would have shown the wealth of the land melting away, the forests shriveling up, the bare soil spreading, the whole fabric of life rotting and unraveling, and you might have concluded that all that wealth had simply vanished — had gone up in smoke or out in sewage or across the sea in ships.

If you’d looked very closely, though, you would have seen that the wealth had merely been transformed and concentrated. All the beavers that had ever drawn breath in Franklin County, Massachusetts, had been transmuted into one solid-silver tea service in a parlor on Myrtle Street in Boston. The towering white pines from ten thousand square miles of Commonwealth had together built one block of brick town houses on Beacon Hill, with high windows and a fleet of carriages, chandeliers from Paris and settees upholstered in Chinese silk, all of it occupying less than an acre. A plot of land that had once supported five Indians in comfort was condensed into a gold ring on the finger of Isaiah Dennis, the great-uncle of Melanie Holland’s grandfather.

And when New England had been fully drained — when its original abundance had shrunk into a handful of neighborhoods so compact that a god could have hidden them from sight with his fingertips — then the poor English farmers who had become poor American farmers flocked to the cities and became poor workers in the foundries and cotton mills that the holders of concentrated wealth were building to increase their income. Now a time-lapse movie would have shown an exfoliation of red brick, the damming of new streams, the disemboweling of the barren land for the clay and iron ore within it, the blackening of the air, the confluence of freighters from Charleston carrying cotton, the spread of worker housing, the spread of iron, the tides of excrement and urine, the slaughter of the last wild birds that anyone would dream of eating, the smoke of trains bringing meat from Chicago to feed the workers, the weeding over of farmland, the final death of barns and farmhouses at the hands of the newly opened Middle West, but most of all: a general increase in wealth. Melanie’s great-grandfather Samuel Dennis and his industrialist and banker accomplices had learned to burn not just the trees of their own age but the trees of the Carboniferous as well, now available as coal. They’d learned to exploit the wealth not only of their own home soil but of the cottonland of Mississippi and the cornland of Illinois. “Because after all,” Bob said, “any wealth gained by a person beyond what he can produce by his own labor must have come at the expense of nature or at the expense of another person. Look around. Look at our house, our car, our bank accounts, our clothes, our eating habits, our appliances. Could the physical labor of one family and its immediate ancestors and their one billionth of the country’s renewable resources have produced all this? It takes a long time to build a house from nothing; it takes a lot of calories to transport yourself from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Even if you’re not rich, you’re living in the red. Indebted to Malaysian textile workers and Korean circuit assemblers and Haitian sugarcane cutters who live six to a room. Indebted to a bank, indebted to the earth from which you’ve withdrawn oil and coal and natural gas that no one can ever put back. Indebted to the hundred square yards of landfill that will bear the burden of your own personal waste for ten thousand years. Indebted to the air and water, indebted by proxy to Japanese and German bond investors. Indebted to the great-grandchildren who’ll be paying for your conveniences when you’re dead: who’ll be living six to a room, contemplating their skin cancers, and knowing, like you don’t, how long it takes to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh when you’re living in the black.”

Melanie’s grandfather, Samuel Dennis III, had a Marlborough Street town house, a summer house east of Ipswich, a Dusenberg Roadster and some garden-variety debts, and he was skippering a family of six daughters, only one of them married, when a devil of the period moved him to install a stock ticker in his office on Liberty Square.

For decades the office had been little more than a place to smoke cigars and write checks to the nephews and nieces whose trusts Dennis executed. It was the terminus of various income streams rising in the mill towns north of Boston — streams that by 1920 were showing a propensity to silt up and run dry — and was the depot of old, old dollars: dollars with beaver blood on them (and mink blood and cod blood), dollars that smelled of black pepper and Jamaican rum, piney dollars from clear-cut Dennis landholdings, rusty war dollars, dollars damp and sour with the sweat of female loom operators, odd dollars of obscure provenance which at some point had decided to come along for the ride, all the dollars encrusted with long-compounded interest and no dollar, no matter how musty, any less a dollar than all the rest. Certainly a democratic nation’s stock market made no distinction between old wealth and new.

Family oral history had it, Bob said, that Dennis was very slow to realize when his speculations ruined him. For several weeks, one winter in the late twenties, he came home to Marlborough Street wearing expressions of deeper and deeper puzzlement. And then one night he died.

His body had hardly reached room temperature when his family discovered they were broke. There were even liens, or so they later maintained, on the china and linens. Daughters and widow alike faced the prospect of becoming the wards of moralizing aunts and uncles, and yet (or so they later maintained) it wasn’t themselves they felt sorry for, it was their house on Marlborough Street and their house in Ipswich. Who could ever groom and pamper those houses as the Dennises had done?

The female Dennises were on the brink of despair when their lawyer informed them that Sam Dennis, a month before he died, had quietly transferred the deed to the house on Marlborough Street to his married daughter, Edith — or rather, to be totally precise, to Edith’s husband, John Kernaghan. Though stripped of its furnishings, the beloved house was saved.

In later years no one could say exactly how Kernaghan had acquired the house. It was possible that he himself had warned the patriarch of impending disaster and helped him out. But “fond” though the Dennises were of the younger man, they were reluctant to give him so much credit. Ever since Edith married him, said family oral history, the Dennis girls had been giggling and shaking their heads good-naturedly about the figure cut by this dark, taciturn, somewhat diminutive young attorney who hailed from the obscurity of Maine’s woods and who was so awed by the grand Dennises that he escorted Edith home only on holidays, hardly opening his mouth even then. But somehow this same Jack Kernaghan — with the loving guidance and support of the fallen patriarch, of course — had rescued the brick shell of the Dennis grandeur, and he went on to support his mother-in-law and five sisters-in-law through the nadir of the Great Depression. He was an odd bird, said family oral history. He was such a workaholic that he never once took a week’s vacation before he’d put the last of his sisters-in-law through private school. Knowing the importance of a summer house to the Dennises’ mental health, he rented them a place in Newport for six weeks every summer, but he didn’t much care for the water himself, and so he stayed in Boston, working. He could afford to hire a housekeeper for his mother-in-law, but he himself (no doubt because he came from Maine’s woods) was such a fan of fresh air that he walked nearly a mile to work every day. Everybody knew he always owned exactly three suits, a ratty one, an everyday one, and a good one. Altogether an odd, odd man, said family oral history, but he had done the Dennises a marvelous service, and they were grateful, yes: grateful.

“And he resented the hell out of them,” Louis said.

“No. Certainly not by the time I got to know him. I think he had too much contempt for the Dennises to resent them as equals. He was simply bitter cold. To your mother, to your Aunt Heidi, to your grandmother, in fact to everyone in the family except me. The first time we met was right before Edith finally divorced him. He asked me what I did. I said I was a student. He asked me what I planned to do with my degree, and when I told him I was going to teach, he threw back his head and laughed and walked out of the room laughing. I thought that was the end of that. But then a few years later he showed up at our wedding, uninvited, with Rita on his arm, and he was laughing as if he’d been laughing ever since I saw him walk out of the room, and your mother said it was the first time he’d kissed her in almost twenty years. It was pretty awkward for me, because half the people at the reception were looking daggers at him, and he made it clear that the reason he’d come was that he liked me: me personally. He patronized me, he asked me about my teaching and laughed at my answers, but there was something genuine going on — I could feel it. It was like he was drunk, almost like he was infatuated with me and he should have known better but he couldn’t help himself.

“We started getting Christmas cards from him. A case of Dom Pérignon every year on December 22. He came to Chicago on business and took me to lunch and then out for more drinks and a walk in Lincoln Park. He asked me, Was I taking care of his little girl? (She wasn’t little and she wasn’t his; which was why he laughed. She dreaded him and warned me about him and refused to speak to me because I was too good-natured and too much of a young bastard to send his champagne back and say no to his invitations.) — Did I have tenure yet? I did? Well, that was great, it meant I could preach revolution eight days a week and never know financial insecurity until the revolution actually came, and even then I’d have it made as the Commissar of Marxist History. And he meant it: he thought it was great. It’s very weird, Lou, to be around a man to whom you obviously matter in some obscure but major way. Whom you somehow render almost silly with confused emotions. He made me promise to take care of his little girl, and be sure and come out and visit us. And we did go out, because your mother couldn’t stop me. You don’t remember it, but you were in Ipswich in the summer of ’69, you and Eileen and even your mother for a little while, she was mainly seeing friends in Boston—”

“Were there horses?”

“Horses? Maybe, across the road. But anyway, when I came back in November the red carpet was rolled out for me. There was a man from Sweeting-Aldren waiting in a company car when I flew in, and lunch for Jack and me on Argilla Road — oysters, lobsters, champagne. I wanted to get to work in the afternoon, but he told me, You’ve got tenure, what do you need to work for? Not quite mocking me. More like suggesting to me a way of thinking that he’s not sure I’m smart enough to learn. He showed me his new wine cellar, his new car, his new color TV set in a hardwood console. He drove me to the beach, which he might as well have owned, because it was empty in both directions, and he sat on the hood of his Jaguar and blew cigarette smoke at the ocean, and the waves were collapsing slavishly at his feet. He took me down to the marina and showed me his new boat, which he’d christened Willing Thing. Painted on the bow! Willing Thing! He drove me to a house on a hill, a rambling Victorian affair out closer to Cape Ann. He parked across the mouth of the driveway, got out of the car with his back to me, and I realized he was pissing in the white gravel. He pisses out half a bottle of Dom Pérignon, a little murky gray river flowing down between his feet. He hops to settle his thing back in his underwear and tells me that this was the house he’d really wanted but the current owners wouldn’t sell. He stands there in the driveway looking up the hill. He says he guesses that Melanie’s told me her grandpa got wiped out in the crash of ’29. I say, Yep, that’s what she told me. He says, Damn right, the only thing is that it was spring of ’28. Every market bloated, everybody getting richer, nobody getting poorer. He says, It took a rare kind of man to go all-out bankrupt in the spring of ’28. He says that a friend of his dropped by his office in the winter of ’27-’28 and mentioned that Sam Dennis had put his houses up for surety on loans to cover his stock-market losses. ‘And Bob,’ he says, ‘even then the man couldn’t see what was coming. I shouted at that asshole from three in the afternoon until ten at night before he let me have the town house. It was already under liens that cost me my own house and every dollar I could borrow on my word to get free of. Three weeks later he was dead. And that family still thought money grew like moss in bank vaults. They would have been out on the street like a bunch of zoo animals staring at the fucking traffic, Bob, if it wasn’t for me. They were so criminally dim-witted you can’t believe it, and they never even knew it, because of me. Believe it: I was that family’s knight in shining armor.’

“I ask him, ‘Why?’

“He gets back in the car. He says, ‘Because I was afraid of God.’

“‘Yeah, I bet.’

“‘I was afraid of God. Believe it, Bob. I was afraid of the old man in flowing robes.’

“We were back on Route 133 and we saw a girl hitchhiking, long hair, tasseled leather jacket, guitar. Jack slows the car down and pulls even with her. She’s picking up her guitar when he steps on the gas and pulls away. I thought this was just some meanness of his, teasing hitchhikers, but he was shaking his head. ‘Flat,’ he says, and I say, ‘What?’ —‘Nothing in her shirt,’ he says. And we drive along, and after a while he says, ‘There’s not a one of them that won’t get in the car.’ And we go back to Argilla Road for Beluga caviar, pheasant, and truffles, everything selected for maximum expense. Anna comes over from Peabody after work, he’s said in advance that there’s somebody he wants me to meet—”

“Really sorry here,” Louis said. “But I don’t see how you could have spent five minutes with this guy.”

“How I could not hate him? Of course I hated him. At night I wondered if I was going to end up killing him, in the name of the people. But to be with him was a different story. There was a magnetism. He dressed like the English landed gentry; I remember one maroon velvet smoking jacket in particular. He was sixty-nine years old, but his skin was still tight and unspotted. He was hard and shiny and elegant, like death, and I’m afraid there’s nobody alive who can’t find something to enjoy there — in the shining killer, the way he stands apart from the bodies piling up in Southeast Asia. All that carnage can be as sexy from a distance as it’s sickening at close range. And when you were with Jack Kernaghan, you felt that that distance was absolutely maintained. You were at an endless masque of the red death, up in that castle on the hill. He was my proof that there really was something there — there in the boardrooms, there in the M-I complex — that unquestionably deserved our hatred. You know how easily we’re led astray by our idealism: how easy it is to think that intellectual honesty demands that you forgive those guys, and see them as human beings like yourself, as pawns in the grip of history. Jack was a gorgeous proof of the contrary. He was willful. He luxuriated in being a jerk. And I deliberately provoked him, see, because I was a young bastard just like you, and he couldn’t hurt me. Or so I thought.”

Jack said his father was a schoolteacher, “a ridiculous old fart,” which you took to mean an upright and selfless man who taught his children what was right and what was wrong. Assume that the young Jack bought it. Assume that he was awed by his father’s rectitude. Assume that when he left home for college at sixteen he believed that by living right he would earn a trip to heaven, and by living wrong he’d go straight to the pools of sulfur. Assume he took the Host on Sundays and believed it was his Savior’s body, and loved his Savior as his father did.

He worked summers for a law firm in Orono. He found himself accepted into the law school at Harvard, and, excelling there, he joined a partnership in Boston and continued to take the Host on Sundays. With so much credit on both his heavenly and his earthly balance sheets, he must have been stunned by the vehemence with which the family of his intended wife rejected him. Mr. Dennis, having five more daughters after Edith to get rid of, was halfhearted in his opposition, but Mrs. Dennis made up for this by finding every conceivable aspect of Kernaghan’s person inappropriate, not just that he was Catholic, not just that he came from a poor family in “the woods of Maine,” not just that he’d deceived them all by courting Edith outside her own home, but that he was dark-haired and short. She confided to Edith that she’d had to choke back a laugh the first time she saw her with Kernaghan. It was like a freak show! It was inconceivable! A giantess and a dwarf! A duchess and her tailor! (In fact it was a matter of an inch and a half.) She expressed her firm intention to boycott the nuptials, and immediately severed relations with the family at whose house the lovebirds had become acquainted.

That they married anyway, knowing it would set back any social ambitions that either might have harbored, would indicate that there really was love between them. Could Kernaghan have come to hate Edith so passionately without the knowledge that he’d loved her, once? A man hates in his wife those traits that he hates in her family; he hates the proof of how deeply the traits are rooted, how ineluctable heredity. Living for four years in near-total estrangement from the Dennises, and so seldom having the mother or sisters handy to compare with Edith, Kernaghan could only see her in her singularity, her prettiness, her passion for him. What’s more, he must have formed a similarly hopeful image of her family.

Because how else to explain the colossal good turn he did the Dennises? How else to explain why he nearly ruined himself financially to buy their house, and then undertook to support the very women who’d considered him such dirt that they’d skipped his wedding? If he’d wanted revenge in 1928, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to sit back and laugh at their ruin. Any person of ordinary moral strength would have considered him well within his rights.

He must still have been trying to win their love. He’d seen so little of them in the previous four years that he actually believed that if he saved them they would love him or at the very least respect him. (Because, again, after all, he could never have hated them so intensely later on if they hadn’t mattered to him, once.)

In their new life, the Dennises were, by necessity, civil to their benefactor. Four years earlier Kernaghan would gladly have settled for civility. But now — considering the risks he’d run in saving them, considering the major expenditure of selflessness — he required more. Now the time had come when they must love him. A better person than he would not have expected less.

But of course the Dennises couldn’t love him. Even if he hadn’t seen them at their lowest, even if he hadn’t had the temerity to rescue them, they were too in love with their own Brahmin selves and too secure in their sheer feminine quantity to need anything from him but money. Requests for school tuition, for clothing, for summer vacations, for trousseaus were communicated to Kernaghan through Edith, who tried for a while to mediate between her family and the commander of their occupied house, but who, inevitably, now that they all lived together, defected to the Dennis side. There were so many of them and only one of him. The women had all day to infect Edith with their pretensions and prejudices and artificial wants. Kernaghan’s children had seven mothers and one father; the father was the little man who worked sixty hours a week to make the household run.

Still he led an upright life. Melanie could remember a time when he had come straight home from work every night and read to her and her brother Frank (Frank the only male besides his father in a house of nine females), had drunk brandy and smoked cigarettes in his study, shined his own shoes and brushed his own coat before he went to bed. She remembered him returning from his separate church on Sunday, later than the rest of the family, so that even Sunday was like a pleasure boat that he always came too late to catch. He walked beside it on the shore, minding his own business unless a child happened to step off the boat and disturb him in his reading of the newspapers that had accumulated since the previous Sunday. She claimed to remember a warmth, from the time when she was little. Maybe he already hated his wife and in-laws, but something kept him in their service, and it almost had to have been his fear of hell. He as good as admitted it to you: he’d been trying, in 1928 and for ten years after, to win the favor not only of the Dennises but of God as well, and though he was clearly failing with the Dennises he still hoped he might succeed with God.

Then God killed Frank.

It happened during one of the Augusts when the family was doing its bathing-in-the-moming-tea-parties-in-the-aftemoon thing outside Newport and Kernaghan was drafting wills and covenants in Boston, and bacterial meningitis could carry off an unlucky boy in ninety-six hours. Melanie remembered Jack’s state when he arrived in Newport. No sorrow visible, only rage. Rage at his wife and mother-in-law and daughter and youngest sister-in-law for not taking Frank’s fever seriously, for not calling him (Jack) sooner, for following the doctor’s orders, for leaving Frank in the care of the backwoods Newport hospital, for letting Frank die, for killing Frank, for murdering Frank with their stupidity, for being Dennises, for making a hell out of his life. Melanie, six, was rushed from the house as if her father’s rage had physically endangered her. It was a shock that no one recovered from, a shock that set Jack ringing like a bell, like a planet struck by a meteor and still vibrating thirty years later, so that he’d tell you, over foie gras in his house in Ipswich:

“That family showed me what this country would be like if it was run by women. It’s simple — you spend somebody else’s money. Let’s spend a hundred billion on the poor, let’s spend a hundred billion on the Negroes. All the sentiments are very fine, but where’s that money going to come from? Industry’s what puts bread on their table, and you’re lucky if they even see you as a necessary evil. They look at you, they look at industry as if you’re dirt, beneath contempt, they smile behind their hands at you. Their whole future could be dying, and they wouldn’t even know it until the ax hit them too.”

He never mentioned Frank’s name in Bob’s hearing, but he loved to talk about what he did to the Dennis women the year he “came to his senses.” How the kitchen began to smell like a landfill after he dismissed the housekeeper and the women waited, as days turned to weeks, for someone, anyone besides them, to wash the pots and take the trash out. How they found a Negro girl willing to work in exchange for meals and extra groceries, and how he then cut the grocery allowance in half (eating magnificent lunches himself and bringing his little girl, Melanie, elaborate and nutritious treats), and corrupted the Negro girl with candy and whiskey and cigarettes and screwed her in the pantry. How he let two sisters-in-law start a new fall semester at Smith and sent a letter after them, informing the college that he had no intention of paying their bill. How he did the same thing to his mother-in-law, quietly cutting off her credit at Jordan Marsh and Steams, setting up scenes where personnel humiliated her. How he canceled another sister-in-law’s wedding on short notice, informing her that her intended was a weakling. And how, for himself, in the space of a year, he bought twenty suits, a hundred shirts, diamond cuff links, Italian shoes. How he entertained cheap women, a new one every week, at the Ritz-Carlton and the Statler and other venues where an audience of the Dennises’ friends was guaranteed. How he made the Dennis women pay.

The same year Frank died, a mustached entrepreneur named Alfred Sweeting was acquiring land in Peabody to build the first commercial-scale nitrate plant in New England. In a process developed by the Germans, the nitrogen and oxygen and hydrogen of clean air and clean water were transformed into ammonium nitrate for high explosives. Production began in 1938, and in 1942 Sweeting merged with J. R. Aldren Pigments, his industrial next-door neighbor in Peabody, a maker of dyes and paints that was seeking improved contacts with the military. For three and a half years, battleships painted with Aldren’s grays and B-17s camouflaged in Aldren’s browns and olive drab pounded Fascists with endless charges of Sweeting nitrates.

The Sweeting/Aldren merger had been brokered by Troob, Smith, Kernaghan & Lee; and Kernaghan, a specialist in corporate law, became the company’s counsel in every sense of the word. He oversaw the acquisition of the patents and the small single-product companies that enabled Sweeting-Aldren, when the war ended, to retool and diversify. Eulogists at his funeral in 1982 would credit him with having influenced the company to expand early and vigorously in the direction of pesticides — a decision which, given the fifties mania for good-looking apples and tomatoes and for suppressing all infestations of indoor vermin and outdoor weeds however faintly reminiscent of Communists, was the single most profitable in the company’s history. By 1949 Kernaghan and a staff of four at Troob, Smith were working exclusively on patent, liability, and contract law for Sweeting-Aldren, and he was buying discounted shares of common stock at a pace that resulted in his election to the board in 1953. He would later tell Bob that in 1956, the last year of his marriage and his last year in private practice, he had thirty-one different women on more than 220 separate occasions and personally pulled down $184,000 in fees, after taxes, from Sweeting-Aldren. A 1957 advertisement in Fortune boasted that in the previous year, according to reliable scientific estimates, Sweeting-Aldren’s Green Garden™ and Saf-tee-tox™ product lines had killed 21 billion caterpillars, 26.5 billion cockroaches, 37 billion mosquitoes, 46.5 billion aphids, and 60 billion miscellaneous harmful household and economic pests in the United States alone. Lined up hind legs to feelers, pests killed by the Green Garden™ and Saf-tee-tox™ product lines would circle the earth at the equator twenty-four times.

Kernaghan was fifty-six years old when he joined Sweeting-Aldren as senior vice president. Those were golden hours for the patriarchy, when every executive in America wore pants with a zipper down the front, and every one of them had a secretary who wore a skirt with a zipper down the side and who, though often more intelligent, was always physically weaker than her boss (her delicate wrists arched over the IBM keyboard), and who sat on a little chair designed to reveal as much as possible of her figure from the greatest number of angles, and who wore a wife’s makeup and cheerful smile and obeyed her man’s orders and spoke in whispers, and the power of so many million heterosexual pairings harnessed by industry made the United States, in the space of a few years, the greatest economic force in the history of the world. Kernaghan’s secretary at Sweeting-Aldren was a veteran named Rita Damiano, a two-time divorcée twenty-odd years his junior. Neither tall nor young nor pretty, Rita hardly corresponded to the ideal woman of Kernaghan’s cheap and single-purpose imagination. Nonetheless she was his regular escort for better than three years, and eventually he even married her, so she must have had him figured out. Must have known that a Catholic manque such as he needed sex to be dirty. Must have known how to scale the affair, keep him off guard, make him commit himself, string out the liberties she allowed him, be coldly disgusted by anal sex on Easter, begging for more of it on Arbor Day, and tight-assed and ultra-efficient the next morning as she served coffee to Aldren Sr. and Sweeting, who with their eyes drew dubious lines between her and Kernaghan, as if to say, “Any interest there?” and Kernaghan coolly shaking his head no. She played a strange, transparent role, letting him know that she thought he was an old lecher and that she tolerated his intimacies only because she wanted money. Because with a man like him, it was wiser not to pretend. It was wiser to be a whore, to be enslaved solely by the promise of his money. She went to Bob and Melanie’s wedding and snubbed Kernaghan’s former in-laws before they could snub her. She drank with him. She sneered at marriage, sneered at pleasure, and by and by Kernaghan became fond of her, and began to cheat on her with the very bimbos whose hypocrisy they’d ridiculed together, and had her transferred to another executive, and that was the end of Rita, at least for the moment.

Meanwhile, thanks again to Kernaghan’s strategic intuitions, the company’s investments in new process technology were paying off. Initially derided by analysts as a high-risk gamble, Sweeting-Aldren’s M Line, a closed-system continuous process capable of producing one hundred tons of any of several chlorinated hydrocarbons per day, was operating at capacity, the U.S. armed forces having discovered hundreds of thousands of square miles of Southeast Asian jungle in urgent need of defoliation. It took the rest of the industry four years to catch up with demand, and in the interim Sweeting-Aldren never saw earnings growth of less than 35 percent annually. Its new G Line, producing spandex for a nation whose appetite for revealing swimsuits, lightweight bras and other clingy items had become insatiable, was going great guns as well. It was Kernaghan who’d persuaded Aldren Sr. to double the G Line’s capacity in 1956, when it was on the drawing board, Kernaghan whose elegant fingers tested the spandex virtues of countless articles of feminine apparel between 1958 and 1969, during which decade the extra G Line capacity earned the company $30 million, minimum, after taxes, all because of him. Add to this the brisk wartime sales of paint and high explosives, the budding market for Sweeting-Aldren’s new Warning Orange pigments, and steady returns on all its more mundane products, and it began to seem a wonder that Kernaghan came out of the sixties worth only six or seven million.

But the company was conservatively managed — looking to the future, holding the line on debt, funneling hefty sums into research and development. The young Anna Krasner, owner of an M.S. in physical chemistry from RPI, was one beneficiary of their scattershot hiring. Kernaghan later said he’d already picked her out in the parking-lot crowd on her first day of work. But neither of them liked to talk about those early days; they became silent and looked a little ill when the subject arose; and Bob found this curious, at least in Kernaghan’s case, because a victorious male so often enjoys reminding his lover how she couldn’t stand the sight of him at first. Maybe the sting of her rejection was still too fresh in his mind, or maybe he wasn’t so sure he was victorious, or maybe he was uneasy about the price he’d had to pay to change her mind.

In any case, Rita would have been watching. She would have known, firsthand or through the grapevine, that Kernaghan was smitten with the pretty new chemist in Research and that the chemist was flamboyantly crushing his initiatives, sticking the long-stemmed roses in Erlenmeyer flasks with reagent-grade sulfuric acid, feeding the Swiss chocolate truffles to albino rats. On an errand for her new boss, Rita drops into Kernaghan’s office and says, “Didn’t you know? You reach an age where you’re only hideous to a thing like her. Where she looks at you and all she can think is prostate problems.”

Let loose in her own lab with a fat budget, Anna takes the company at its word when it tells her no idea is too wacky to pursue. She reads some imaginative accounts of the origin of the solar system, cooks water and ammonia and free-state carbon in a high-pressure oven, and strikes oil. She happens to be the kind of person who’ll face hungry lions in a coliseum before she’ll admit she’s mistaken. She believes there’s a zillion gallons of oil and a godzillion cubic meters of natural gas inside the earth, beginning at a depth of about four miles, and no anvil-headed senior research chemist with a crew cut and stinky breath is going to tell her it isn’t so. She goes straight to the nearest vice president, young Mr. Tabscott, and says, “We drill for oil in Berkshires!”

Mr. Tabscott, more susceptible to good looks than the anvilheaded senior research chemist, says, “We’ll take this under serious advisement, Anna, but maybe in the meantime you should reinvest your energies in some totally new direction, give yourself a well-deserved rest from this very interesting and speculative research you’ve done.”

He’s still chuckling and shaking his head when the single-minded Anna begins to write the paper that eventually appears in the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, and Jack Kernaghan gets wind of her difficulties. He steals into her lab, looks over her shoulder at the orthographic atrocities she’s committing in her notebook, and says, “You’re pretty stupid if you think we’re going to drill a four-mile hole through granite for you.”

She doesn’t look up. “They’ll do it.”

“Not a chance, girlie.”

“No?” She raises her eyes from the notebook to the periodic chart in front of her. She flares her nostrils. “Then it’s because you stopped them. And if they do drill, it’s because they like me better than you.”

He considers the flasks holding his blackened roses and their exploded stems. “Tabscott was just humoring you,” he says. “He’s going to let this thing die. When he does, you go and see him and ask him if I had anything to do with it. And then before you do anything rash, you come and see me.”

Anna tosses her lovely hair from one shoulder to the other and goes on writing. But it happens just as Kernaghan said it would. Various sober scientists are consulted and agree that her theory is 99.9-percent-probably hogwash, Tabscott tells her the company won’t spend $5 million on a one-in-a-thousand chance, and Anna says, “I quit! This is good theory.”

“We’d like to have you stay on, Anna. But if, ah, you insist. ”

Kernaghan finds her in her lab, angrily emptying her desk. “Scholarly journals accept my paper,” she says. “And you won’t drill!”

“Five-million-dollar checks don’t grow on trees.”

“La, la, who cares? My pearls aren’t worthy of you.”

“Be reasonable,” he says. “You’ve got vanishingly minimal academic credentials, and you’re never going to work for anybody as flush as we are. Anywhere else you go they’re going to make you study vulcanized rubber. Stay with us, play your cards right, you might just get your hole drilled.”

She snorts. “You are a swine.”

He laughs agreeably, leaves her office, goes and confers with Aldren Sr. and Tabscott.

“Oh, sure, Jack,” they say, “we’re going to spend five mill to help you get in Krasner’s skirt.”

“Gentlemen,” grinning, “I resent the imputation. The fact is, it’s an interesting theory. And the fact is also, if she’s right about the gas and oil in the Berkshires, there’s probably gas and oil right under our feet here in Peabody. More important, though, I sense a wind shift, and I ask you, have I been right about wind shifts in the past? Possibly even so right that five million dollars seems a paltry sum? I see a problem with our waste stream, say in the next three or four years. A new problem, a regulatory problem. I’m thinking of the M Line, the dioxins, in particular. It won’t surprise me if M Line disposal costs triple in the next five years.”

“Matter of opinion, Jack.”

“We’re going to drill this hole. I don’t rule out coming up with commercial quantities of gas and oil, maybe even at ordinary depths. But if we don’t, and if we’ve drilled it here, you know what we get as a consolation prize? An injection well. One that goes so far below the water table that we can direct the waste stream down it from now till kingdom come and still be good neighbors.”

“Legality?”

“I know of no statute,” he says smoothly, “that would interfere.”

So a feasibility study is performed. The more management thinks about Kernaghan’s plan, the more it likes it. Certain workers on the M Line are developing chloracne, a disfiguring and irreversible rotting of the skin caused by exposure to dioxins, and there are disquieting reports coming out of Vietnam about soldiers using Sweeting-Aldren herbicides and turning up with tender livers and intestinal sarcomas and other, more nameless dreads. Half the guinea pigs in a delivery truck unwisely parked for an hour by the M Line’s evaporation pond go into convulsions; the other half are dead. Since the only way to reduce dioxins in the waste stream is to double the reaction temperature, the cost of electricity to pump the waste underground begins to seem reasonable. And when management looks at the effluents from all its other process lines, and feels the winds of regulation and public opinion shifting, the decision is clinched.

Kernaghan pays another visit to Anna, who has been cooking up ever more nasty-smelling synthetic crude in her oven; she looks like a Swiss chambermaid in her white chemist’s apron. He shows her the rental contract for equipment to drill a five-mile-deep hole — the work orders, the authorizations for energy use. She shrugs. “What took you so long?”

“You’re in charge of the drilling. We’re adding ten K to your salary.”

“La, la, la.”

“You have exclusive publication rights. Exclusive rights to the core samples from the deepest hole in eastern North America.”

“Of course. I thank you, Mr. Jack Kernaghan. Really. Was there something else?”

He smiles, unsurprised. “I don’t think you understand that I spent twenty-five years’ worth of leverage to get you this piece of paper. Twenty-five years’ worth of service to the company.”

“This is boring.”

“Boring?” He holds up the rental contract and begins to tear it down the middle.

She can’t stop herself from grabbing his hand. She says, “You think you can buy me.”

“Say I’m proving my love.”

“You tear up rental contract to prove your love?”

“If there’s no hope for my love?”

She takes the contract and reads it carefully. “My Berkshires. What happened to my Berkshires?”

“I did my best.”

She has a beaker of synthetic crude on her desk. She dips a Pyrex stirring rod in it, dribbling the black, viscous stuff from the tip. She lets herself fall backward and her chair catches her, rolling into a wall with the impact. “You want to drill my hole? Good! You want to touch me? Good! You can touch me. But you’ll never touch me.”

“We’ll see about that.”

She stands up and walks in a circle around him, her mouth open as wide as she can stretch it, saying, “La, la, la, la, la.” She laughs. He seizes her, works one knee between her legs, turns on the urgency that has served him so well in the past.

“So, OK,” pulling away from him, “walking filth has smart knees.”

He stands, panting, maddened. “Don’t think I wouldn’t kill you.”

“La, la, la,” tongue wagging. “You’ll never touch me!”

Which was how things stood in the fall of ’69. Bob Holland of course couldn’t understand why Anna had only two modes with Kernaghan — the contemptuous and the vampish — and why Kernaghan would put up with even a minute of being ignored by her as she plied Bob with throaty questions about his work. The “lovers” exchanged brief, cutting phrases and then held long competitions for Bob’s regard which Anna invariably won, Kernaghan receding into his chair to stare at her, his eyes a pair of hate beams, minute after minute, while Bob talked about the country’s history and Anna talked about her personal history, in Paris as a baby, in upstate New York as a girl and adolescent. She turned her face away from the cigarette she held vertically at mouth level, narrowing her eyes and twisting her lips as she blew the smoke straight up. She told Bob that she was like him in loving knowledge for its own sake, that the corporate mind was grotesque and soulless, that she would quit her job in a flash if she weren’t allowed to pursue knowledge with total freedom. She said young people had life and energy and ideals. Old men were drained of their juices and loved money more than beauty, more than anything. And Kernaghan was a sly enough dissembler that when he abruptly left the dinner table, as though hating Anna for flirting — as though powerless to stop her — Bob believed that he was being a bad guest and hastened after his father-in-law, unwilling to be the instrument with which she tormented him. When he turned around, Anna had her silver fox on and her car keys in her hand.

An hour later, when he was in his room typing up notes, he heard her cries, loud enough to have awakened him if he’d been sleeping. He hadn’t heard her car return.

In the morning he found them smoking breakfast ciggies in the east room, thick as thieves, holding hands. They looked at him as if he were the devil they’d been speaking of.

It being a Sunday, all the archives closed, they took him for a drive. Armed guards waved the car through the gates of Sweeting-Aldren’s main installation, and Kernaghan drove the avenues winding among the various process lines at screeching speeds.

“You’re giving me a headache,” Anna said.

“I’m showing Bob what it’s all about.”

The three of them put on hard hats and toured the process structure on the brand-new AB Line, into the maws of which went ethylene and chlorine and out of the anus of which came white prills of polyvinyl chloride. The structure was an orgy of metal forms, twenty cottage-sized modules straddling and abutting and embracing one another tightly, each with its own voice of thermodynamic ecstasy and all with their fat appendages rammed deep into steel-collared orifices; but a rigid orgy, full of power and purpose, never ending. In these plants, chemists transformed the verbs of their imaginations into the nouns of their achievement by adding — er or — or or — r. There were 5,000-gallon double-arm mixers, paddle blenders with carbon-steel shredder blades, a triple-wall main reactor built like Charles Atlas, an 80-ton two-stage chiller, a jacketed continuous turbulizer, a shuddering particulate-transfer screw feeder, nozzle concentrators, triple-effect evaporators, intensifier bars, a 400-cubic-foot cone dryer, a cylindrical concrete priller, a heat exchanger with stainless tubes and a carbon-steel shell, a 6,250-square-foot vertical condenser, a twin-cone classifier, and a dozen centrifugal compressors. The scary thing was smelling so many smells that reminded you of nothing in the world. They were like alien ideas impinging directly on your consciousness, unmediated by a flavor. This was how it would feel when space invaders came and took control of your brain, some insidious something neither spirit nor flesh filling your sinuses and clouding your eyes.

Bob realized he was alone. A mantle of rain was descending on Peabody, closing up the vistas between the surrounding process structures, quarantining the place. Kernaghan and Anna were leaning against a front fender of his car. They exchanged glances. Finally Anna said, “Jack and I were wondering if you had any pot.”

“Pot.”

“Marijuana.”

Bob laughed. It happened that he did, back on Argilla Road. In those days, an ounce would last him months.

Riding northward along the coast, Anna’s hand resting on his shoulder, the impact of those ketones and esters still fresh in his brain, he saw the stone fences wandering through the tangled, scrubby woods and had to force himself not to picture the early settlers in a landscape that looked just like this. He knew it wasn’t until well into the eighteenth century that erosion and repeated plowing had begun to fill the fields with glacial boulders, and that the farmers, running out of wood, had turned to stones to build their fences. And it wasn’t until the Erie Canal and the railroads had opened up the heartland that farming in New England was finally abandoned, its fields reclaimed by trunk and thorn. The sterile waters and monotonous forests of skinny, crownless trees were no more a picture of the nineteenth century than of the seventeenth century; were as alien as the esters in his nose, as her hand on his shoulder, her fingernails on his neck, her fingertips on his earlobe.

He was a boy from the woods himself, from the still-virgin forest of western Oregon. It had only been a year ago, right before his most recent visit to his mother, that Weyerhaeuser had clear-cut the hillside behind her house, reaping a one-time-only profit, and left the land to decay into the river like a shaved, dead wolf. The next time he was home he would see it after “reforestation”: the varied, misty forest of Sitka spruce and hemlock and cedar and northern redwood supplanted by weeds and slash and identical Douglas firs shooting up at geometrical intervals from the loose, bulldozed earth. The same wave of profit-taking that had crashed onto Cape Ann in 1630 was even now rolling out over the Pacific Coast, carrying with it the last of the continent’s virginity.

Anna handled a joint like a cigarette, tapping the ash loose with a long red nail, expelling the smoke through her nose, perching on the edge of the sofa with her legs crossed at the knee. Kernaghan couldn’t keep his face straight. He seemed more interested in simply holding a joint, enjoying its illegality and symbolism, than in taking hits. As it filled with smoke, the living room altered as if a reel were ending in a cheap theater, frames, entire actions dropping out, voices and faces in and out of sync, bright dots and dark squiggles, the room jumping and then taking on the orange tones of the new projector’s bulb; Bob saw that until now the world on the spherical screen around him had been projected by a light with too much blue in it. The gray light in the windows looked like sunshine. The three stoned people crowded around the refrigerator and lifted pieces of aluminum foil, seeing what the cook had left. In the hallway Anna pressed her stomach into Bob’s, kissed him, unbuttoned his shirt, and backed up the hallway bending over with her palms beckoning as if he were a pet she wanted to jump into her arms.

In Beverly, on a no-account street, he followed her into her ordinary little house. The dust ruffles on the overstuffed furniture, the family photographs with their cheap gilded frames, the tawdriness, the poor taste, made him wild about her and as certain of conquest as he was of her La-Z-Boy’s softness when he sank into its arms. She was selecting LPs from a brass stand reminiscent of a dish rack. Kernaghan, who’d been left in the car, was giggling in the bushes, spying through the window, rain snaking down the glaze of his baldness.

They didn’t see him again, but he must have been in the back seat as they returned to Argilla Road, he must have followed them inside, tittering like a leprechaun, and he may even have been watching in the living room the entire time, maybe in the corner where twenty years later Rita would split her head open. Watching Anna load the record changer with Frank Sinatra albums, watching her remove her paisley blouse and Silera bra, watching the white flesh of her midriff bunch into folds as she bent forward to pull her high-heeled boots off and slip her yellow spandex miniskirt and white underpants down her legs. Watching the rippling and rounding of the muscles in Bob’s shoulders, the tensing of his youthful buttocks, the action of his hips. Hearing the smack of her heavy breasts against the flatness of his chest, watching fast breath dry the saliva in the corners of her mouth, hearing him cry out, hearing her tell him, “He can only do it. with Dom Pérignon bottles!” Watching him raise her hips from the carpet and replow the warm, moist, trembling earth. Watching the in and out, seeing their chests heave and their mouths angle to cover one another as if they were two half-drowned swimmers in mutual resuscitation, watching the jiggling of her flesh, the sway of his, watching him sprawl across her forking legs, watching him gulp air red-faced and obliviously, until finally he had watched enough and could totter across the room and touch Bob’s shoulder.

“Bob, Bob, Bob!” he said, eyes half-shut with mirth. Bob saw his penis, swollen and perpendicular, a pinkish black instrument.

“Oh my God!” Anna screamed with laughter. “Oh my God!”

Bob could hear her giggling, squealing, shrieking while he put his overcoat and boots on. He stumbled into the rain, across the lawn and through the sterile, altered woods. He smelled woodsmoke and wet leaves, heard the wind being combed by a thousand narrow tree trunks, water from branches slapping the slick leaves on the ground. It was almost Thanksgiving. The dusk and the wet smells and wet sounds were the ones that had once made him shiver when he stepped outside his house for firewood, and made him hurry back inside where it was warm and he could forget the keening wind mourning the dead past of the land, dragging over the hard rooftops, jealous of the life inside. So deep in the stunted woods that the dark bulk of Kernaghan’s house might simply have been night on the horizon, he sank to his knees in the leaves and stayed until the rain had stopped, and his head had cleared, and the sky froze into glittering crystals in the shape of Orion and Perseus, and he’d heard the starter of Anna’s car.

You bought her a condominium?

I helped her with a loan.

Oh, Melanie.

Bob, it was an excellent time for her to buy.

She looks up to you. She takes her lead from you. You know, you don’t have to give her everything she wants. You could give her some guidance instead.

The money is mine to do what I want with.

I’m saying if you wonder why Lou got so mad at you, it’s not too hard to figure out. Just think about how it looks to him, why don’t you. Just think about it.

Give me some credit I have every intention of being fair to him in the long run. But if you could hear the way he harps on the money. It’s impossible to have a rational discussion with him. He’s just like you. He’s even worse. I told you, he ruined a sofa. He kicked a Waterford bowl into the fireplace.

Well, good for him.

He has no conception of what I’m going through.

He understands that Eileen takes and takes and takes from you, and he gets nothing.

Bob, you cannot compare the two.

Obviously he thinks you can.

I don’t understand it. Ever since this whole thing started he’s been terrible. I just would not have expected this of him. He’s been storing up resentment.

You should call him and apologize.

Oh, now, really. For what? What do I apologize for? I’m the one with the problem! I’m the one who’s caught in the middle!

You should call him and apologize. It’s what you should do, and if you can’t do it, then you can’t complain, either, and you can’t complain if I take matters into my own hands.

Well, go right ahead. You always know what the right thing to do is. You’ve never, ever, faced a situation where you weren’t sure what to do. Everything’s always been very clear for you. Everything’s simple and nice. You wanted me, you married me. You live your politically correct life, and leave everything else to me, which is what you married me for.

I married you because I loved you.

I know that, Bob. I know that. Don’t tell me—

And I still love you.

DON’T TELL ME THAT.

A long silence.

Give it away, Bob said finally.

Give what.

The money.

I will. I’ll give — a lot. I’ll give — half! But I have to have it first.

Give it all and you’ll be happy. Set aside a little for the kids, and a little for yourself. Set aside a million and give the rest away. You’ll be happy.

I can’t, Bob. I can’t.

All the while, a hole is being drilled into the earth in Peabody at a cost in labor, equipment, and energy of maybe five thousand dollars a day. Anna tags the core samples as they come up and stores them in a refrigerated building to retard oxidation. She has her own padlock on the building. She couldn’t tell schist from feldspar if her life depended on it, but the samples will be hers alone to study and exploit, and her only thought is deeper, deeper, deeper. She still thinks there’s oil or at least methane down there. But delays and costly breakdowns are becoming frequent as the drill bit chews past the one-mile mark. Competitors with new plants are eating into Sweeting-Aldren’s war profits. With the hole now well below the water table, plenty deep for waste disposal, management decides it’s time to eliminate further funding. Kernaghan, however, knows that Anna will leave the company if the drilling stops too soon. He threatens and deceives and cajoles Aldren Sr. into funding the drilling at least through the end of 1970.

Rita can’t figure it out. A number as hot and proud as Anna? With an impotent goat? Obviously Kernaghan has found a way to buy the girl. But the months go by and Anna isn’t promoted, she doesn’t move out of her dowdy pillbox in Beverly, she drives the same old Ford. Certain heavy pieces of jewelry are suspicious, but Rita is sure the girl’s too shrewd to have sold herself for some earrings and a diamond pendant.

“She hates the guy,” Anna’s fellow researchers confide when Rita asks.

“But she sleeps with him.”

“He has Power over her,” they say mysteriously, meaning they have no idea.

Rita visits Anna herself.

“I love him passionately,” Anna says, laughing in Rita’s face; Kernaghan has told her all about Rita. “And he’s crazy about me.”

“So why don’t you marry him?”

“What do I care about marriage? He wants a woman who sneezes at money.”

Talking to Anna fans the embers of Rita’s jealousy, turns the warm glow into a white, directed flame. She begins to wonder about the big derrick called the F2 Line, which management has surrounded with a high, opaque fence and which Anna visits daily. Rita begins to snoop, to listen in on occupied telephone lines, to open forbidden drawers, to watch for keys to unattended file cabinets. The more she finds out, the easier it is to read between the lines of memos and decipher her bosses’ winks and decode the remarks they make in hallways. She pieces together the details of Anna’s “research initiative.”

It’s midwinter, the hole now eighteen thousand feet deep, when Rita comes to Anna’s office with two copies of a confidential memo. She gives one to the girl. “Recognize this?”

Anna, bored: “What if I do?”

Rita hands her the other, which is identical to the first — copies to be sent to and destroyed by various executives and Anna Krasner, Research Scientist — except that the words “deep exploratory well” on the copy Anna received are replaced by the words “deep waste disposal well.”

Anna shrugs. “So?”

“Well, my dear, it doesn’t look like lover boy drilled your hole because he loves you. He drilled it to pump waste down. Seems to me that he got you awfully cheap. Wouldn’t you say? Buying you with somebody else’s money? As far as he’s concerned, your dream’s just a giant sewer.”

Anna shrugs again. But a week later she fails to report to work, and a janitor discovers that her desk is bare. She simply vanishes into the greater world that Boston sometimes forgets lies all around it. And Kernaghan has only guesses about why she’s left him. He may suspect Rita, but when he comes to see her, she, being far from through with her revenge, is careful not to gloat.

The company wastes no time in taking down the drilling derrick and putting in a pumping station. In the wake of Earth Day, Congress and Nixon are moving towards agreement on creating an environmental-protection administration and enacting Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Kernaghan suggests that the pumping program be kept quiet, since (a) they’ve been drilling without a license, and (b) given the current ecological hysteria, the public might be alarmed if it learned that highly toxic chemicals are being pumped into the earth, no matter how safe the process is in reality. The chain of command terminating in the actual pumping is carefully broken up, so that only the top executives know the real story, and loopholes of deniability are left for all but one of them. The various plant managers and workers involved in the waste stream are told the fluids pumped at F2 are being stored temporarily in an underground tank, or told the fluids are harmless.

On the day before Kernaghan’s seventy-second birthday, the day of his retirement, when the company’s waste disposal program for the future is firmly in place, Rita appears at his door. She’s been following the conspiracy as it develops, documenting every stage. She’s the secretary of one of the executives involved — maybe even Aldren Sr. She’s come to Kernaghan for blackmail.

“No way,” Louis said. “You don’t blackmail somebody into marrying you. You don’t want to be married to a guy that hates you.”

“Who said anything about marriage? She’s trying to blackmail him, period. She wants all that money he never paid her for her favors. She shows him a list of the documents she has, and she says, Give me X amount of money or else you guys are going to jail. Remember we’re talking about a woman who later defrauded her local bank. And when he sees how serious she is, he starts to weep, genuinely, because he’s tired, and he’s lost Anna, and he’s afraid. He says, Please, Rita, I’m an old man, the best days of my life were spent with you, let’s be friends.”

“But she’s suspicious.”

“Of course she’s suspicious. But it’s hard to see straight when you’ve got all the power. He’s on his knees saying marry me. He’s laughing, he’s crying, he’s insane. He’s utterly in her power, and she’s a woman. She can’t quite bring herself to stick the knife in.”

“Yeah, but wait a second, you can’t tell me the most important thing for him was what the woman looked like, and how old she was, and then say, Oh, but he made an exception for ugly old Rita. If money’s what she wants, I mean not marriage, why doesn’t he buy her off?”

“Because he loves money just as much! He weighs the problem and decides to marry her. If he marries her, she’s silenced and it doesn’t cost him anything. He keeps the money, and he can still chase all the women he wants. Plus marrying her guarantees her silence over the long term. So it’s the right decision. They get married, and immediately he starts converting his entire portfolio to Sweeting-Aldren stock, to make sure that Rita’s stuck with it. When he dies, his will puts Rita’s allowance from the trust fund at the mercy of company dividends: if she attacks the company, it cuts into her allowance. He probably makes sure that at least Aldren knows this. And so then she’s really stuck. In a sense she’s inherited his entire fortune — obviously she insisted on a pre-nuptial agreement to that effect — but he doesn’t let her get control of it. That’s why there’s the otherwise insane stipulation that the trustees must leave the assets invested in Sweeting-Aldren. It’s not because he’s such a gung-ho company man, he’s too smart for that. It’s because he’s getting his revenge on Rita.”

“And Mom’s the one who pays for it.”

“It’s usually the women who pay for it, one way or another.”

Kernaghan had a heart attack in his sleep in 1982. He’d lived eighty years in good health, smoked cigarettes for sixty, and died without pain or terror. Once he was dead and Rita had discovered the mean trick he’d played her with his will, she made a slave of his spirit. He had to knock on tables for her, spell out optimistic messages about the other world with a gliding upturned tumbler, and, most demeaning of all, inhabit the bodies of animals. One week she would look into the eyes of a neighbor’s retriever and patronize her silly husband; the next week Jack would be a blue jay hanging around outside the kitchen windows. “Up to his same old tricks,” she’d say complacently. Her Haitian maid, for one, believed that Rita had been shoved from that barstool because Jack’s spirit couldn’t take the abuse anymore.

A less imaginative woman than Rita, a woman who didn’t require a giant pyramid on the roof and an authentic Egyptian mummy in the basement, could have lived very comfortably on the dividends from her Sweeting-Aldren stock. The chemical industry suffered some declines in the seventies and early eighties, but Sweeting-Aldren suffered less than the rest. Not only did it not have to spend tens of millions on pollution control and waste recovery, but it was able to pass some of those savings on to its customers, and so consistently undersell its east coast competition. The pump at F2 ran so smoothly that the old generation of executives forgot about it and the new generation never learned. It was like the national economy, which began to roar again in the mid-eighties. The country borrowed three trillion dollars to buy some weapons and fund a giant leap forward in lifestyle for the wealthy. When the economy grew, so the argument went, tax revenues would increase and the debt would be paid off. But year after year the national debt continued to increase.

Nature issued her first warning in 1987. Beneath Peabody, in Sweeting-Aldren’s own back yard, the earth begins to shake. It’s no accident. It has always only been a matter of time. Dimly Mr. X, the one executive officially responsible for waste disposal, the one executive who wasn’t granted deniability when the thing was set up in ’72, recalls the concept of induced seismicity. The tremors continue. A worried Mr. X goes to his boss, Aldren Jr., and says the pumping must stop.

Aldren Jr., steely cold, says: “What pumping?”

“Sandy, the pumping at F2. Our primary waste stream?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Aldren Jr. “Common knowledge this company incinerates and recycles all its waste.”

“Joking aside, Sandy, we’re causing a fucking swarm of earthquakes two miles from here.”

With exquisite timing, their office trembles and they hear a distant boom, as from an artillery range.

“I’ve trusted you, X,” says Aldren Jr. “You’ve been world-class, straight tens across the board. And now you’re indicating to me that our disposal costs are going to triple? I don’t think I’m going to remain president if that happens. And I have a personal stake in remaining president. It’s a very meaningful position to me, self-esteem-wise.”

“I’m indicating we’re looking at a little backup in the waste stream. A little temporary quasi hitch. So that we might be well advised to short-term invest in better incineration and recycling. Either that or consider some major holding-tank-type construction.”

Aldren Jr. shakes his head very slowly. “I’m hearing figures,” he says, “in the tens of millions. I’m hearing crippling long-term capital investments here. Here when I can already feel the Spaniards breathing down my neck. Can smell the goddamn garlic, X! You know what they’re doing with their waste? They’re pissing it straight into the ocean at Cadiz. Their tankers fill their guts with it, sail to the mid-Atlantic, and blow it out their asses. The worst of it they put in plastic drums and ship to Gabon, and fucking Cameroon. That’s what I’m competing with. Barely competing with. Fighting tooth and nail to compete with. You hear what I’m saying? I’m saying the old ejectorama for me, the dole and heavy fines and potential time in Allenwood for you.”

Mr. X hears him. He puts a stop to the pumping. With the minuscule waste-processing budget at his disposal, he builds a cluster of huge, flimsy holding tanks on some company land near Lynnfield and stockpiles the most dangerous of his effluents there. The rest of the waste he lets trickle into the sea and air, relying on the company’s good relationship with the EPA to keep him from getting caught. For several years, like a nation trying to be kind of halfway responsible, he holds the line on pumping; and for several years, like the national debt, the stockpile of effluents grows and grows. But finally there’s a natural outbreak of seismicity in nearby Ipswich, and Mr. X’s prudence loses to his fear: he gives the order to resume pumping. Just another half a decade without a seismic disaster, and he’ll be able to retire on a full pension, summer on Nantucket, winter in Boca Raton, play eighteen holes in the morning and have his first Manhattan on the dot of five. Only five more little years! There will be no turning back now. He’s going to cross his fingers, shut his eyes, and pray: Lord, let it fall on someone else’s shoulders.

In the white light of morning, or rather early afternoon, Bob put the empty whiskey bottle in the recycling carton for Clear Glass, between Soft Plastic and Aluminum, and poured orange juice on a bowl of Cheerios. Bees were pollinating purple thistle outside the window. The cats were cooling in the basement. Upstairs a door opened, and soon Louis appeared, scowling at the light. He had red pillow marks on his face — sleep’s tantalizing glyphs, which every morning signified nothing in a different way. “Did you call her?”

Bob didn’t answer. He kept his head down, spooning up Cheerios, while Louis searched the refrigerator, drank some fizzless cherry-flavored seltzer, and then stood with his arms crossed like a parent whose patience had run out. “You want me to call her?”

“Can I finish my breakfast?”

Louis stood a while longer, arms still crossed. He left the room in unrelenting silence.

Bob pushed his cereal bowl away. He began to call all the Krasners in Albany, relying on the kindness of directory assistance. His fourth try connected him to a deep female voice with a Russian accent which he knew was Anna’s mother’s before he even asked.

“No. No,” she said. “She’s not here. She’s overseas.”

“Does she have a telephone number?”

“What do you want. Tell me.”

Bob gave her a scaled-back version of the truth.

“She knows nothing about Sweeting-Aldren,” said Madame Krasner. “Nothing. I’m not going to give you number.”

“Would you give her mine?”

“Who are you. Tell me. Who are you. What do you want, really.”

“I was a good friend of hers.”

“Eh. She has so many good friends. She lives in London. She has wonderful husband. Three children. What do you want, that she doesn’t have. No. No. I’m not going to tell you her number. You try someone else.”

“Would you give her my number?”

“She lives in London. Her number is not listed. I’m very sorry.” Bob pulled on his hair. Then Madame Krasner gave him Anna’s number. “Very expensive to call,” she said. “Not like calling here. Very expensive. You see, she has money. Oh, does she have money. What can you give, that she doesn’t have?”

It was dinnertime in London. Through the dining-room windows, Bob could see Louis standing in the pine trees, the bright sun making shadows of the eyes behind his glasses. The red of Melanie’s lipstick was in the pinpricks in the mouthpiece of the telephone. He dialed Anna’s number, and after three rings Anna herself answered. He said his name. She said:

“Who?”

“Bob Holland.”

“. Oh, yes, Bob, how are you?”

“Anna, listen, I’m trying to find out if Sweeting-Aldren drilled a very deep well in Peabody in 1970. Do you happen to remember?”

The hissing silence on the line was unbroken for so long that he began to think there was no one there. Ghostly tone sequences chattered beneath the hiss. On some continent or other, a phone rang once, twice. Then he heard a burst of male and female laughter, a sociable tumult somewhere very close to where Anna was standing. “I’m sorry, Bob,” she said. “What is it that you wanted to know?”

He repeated his question. Again there was a silence, and again a burst of laughter. “I. don’t really know, Bob. I. can’t answer that,” Anna said.

“What do you mean you can’t answer that? Do you think there might have been a well?”

“Bob, we have some guests over. I’m very sorry.”

“I’ve seen your paper,” he said. “You know there was a well. They’ve been pumping waste into it and causing earthquakes. You have to tell me what you know. I won’t use your name, but you have to tell me.”

“Bob, I really have to get off the phone now.”

“A simple yes or no. Was there a well?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why won’t you answer me? Would you rather talk to the press? Or the police?”

The hissing on the line had ceased; he was speaking to a dead phone. He dialed again.

“Anna—”

“Bob, I’m busy and I don’t want to talk to you.” Her voice was hard, controlled, angry. “It’s better if you don’t call me.”

“A yes or a no. Please.”

“I’m sorry, Bob. I have to go.”

“Anna—”

“Goodbye, Bob.”