Union Atlantic

Chapter 10

On the last morning of leave from her job at Atlantic Securities, Evelyn Jones sat looking out across Lincoln Avenue from the window of her mother’s apartment and saw cars beginning to fill the spaces alongside the Second Baptist Church. A gray Cadillac, rented for the occasion, came to a halt at the curb and Evelyn’s aunt Verna stepped onto the sidewalk, her gloved hand floating up to make sure of her hat and veil. In her early sixties, she still had a slender, elegant figure, defiantly elegant in fact, a body she was supremely aware of and which she deployed in the world as a kind of standing rebuke to all those who had let themselves go. With her flat chest, almost concave stomach, and rounded upper back, she had the torso of a wasp, curved and rigid.

“Your sister’s here,” Evelyn said, turning back into the dimness of the apartment. Her mother sat on the couch in the old, black taffeta dress that she had worn on formal occasions as long as Evelyn could remember, its slight V-neck revealing the wrinkled flesh above her breasts. Her makeup had done an adequate job of concealing the bags under her eyes.

“You plan on being late to your son’s funeral?” Evelyn asked.

Her mother’s eyes scrunched closed and her head tilted up toward the ceiling. “You have no mercy,” she said.

Evelyn crossed to the closet and gathered their coats.

“Are we going or not?”

As they walked up the avenue, her mother took Evelyn’s arm and held it all the way to the doors of the church and then inside, down the aisle to the front pew, where Aunt Verna awaited them. The minister stepped around from the side of the casket to guide them to their place. When everyone had taken their seats again, he moved in front of the altar and welcomed everyone to the service.

As the slow, heavy rhythm of his opening prayer settled over them, Evelyn gazed at the enlarged photograph of her brother propped on the easel beside the shiny white coffin in a garland of iris and lily of the valley: Carson in his red cape and mortarboard set against the standard sky-blue background of the high-school graduation portrait, his slender face nearly lost amidst the utter conventionality of the image, the generic promise of a bright future for the picture’s captive. It was all Evelyn had been able to find in the shambles of her mother’s place. Ten years old at the least. She regretted now that she had bothered. It seemed dishonest, this picture. Her brother hadn’t died in some media-friendly accident — a bus of young people headed to a sporting event or a man trying to save a neighbor in a flood. He’d been shot in the middle of the afternoon in an apartment entryway and left to die.

The minister, who had known Carson but slightly, offered a brief eulogy employing the biographical facts with which Evelyn had furnished him. And then, as arranged, it was Aunt Verna who rose to speak.

“My nephew Carson Jones is dead,” she began, her hands held together at her chest, as though she were lecturing to a group of Sunday-school children. “Some wretched sinner killed him. People always say a part of you dies along with a loved one. They are wrong about that. Part of you doesn’t die. That would be easy. Remove the limb and go on your way. But that isn’t how love is. When a person you love dies they haunt you — no offense to the rites of burial and I’m sure Carson’s soul is up there with the angels — but the fact is their death haunts you, the waste and idiocy of it, the loving soul of that boy, the love he bore his family … that love surely does haunt you. As well it should if you’re going to walk the streets of this world with your God-given eyes open. I know I’m supposed to be up here saying something uplifting, but let’s not deceive ourselves. The world is a hungry place and it swallowed my nephew without a thought. The fact is, he was shot for money. For paper bills. That’s what he died for. It’s not what lived in the better parts of his soul, but it’s what killed him. I’m sorry to say all this, I really am, because Carson was a beautiful young man and his heart was in the right place most of the time, but for those of us who are planning to go on, and I’ll tell you ladies and gentlemen, I am one of them, we can’t pretend and I don’t think the Lord would want us to.

“The other thing I guess people always say is that a person is up in Heaven and that they’re in a better place now, and I suppose that much I agree with. Carson is in heaven, and it’s surely better than what we have down here. God bless his mother and his sister and may he rest in peace.” Unclasping her hands, she stepped off the stage and Evelyn lifted her mother’s bent form high enough to let her aunt pass back along the row to her seat.

The minister, taken aback by the tone and brevity of the family remarks, assumed his place again before the coffin and, wearing his best somber expression, led the congregation in a subdued rendition of “All to Jesus I Surrender.”

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Evelyn returned to work. She had been employed at Atlantic Securities for eight years and after three promotions was now chief settlements administrator with her own office, albeit without a window. Her job, part of the firm’s back-office operation, was to execute the delivery and receipt of assets. In order to take effect, each order that a trader shouted into a trading pit or placed with a dealer had eventually to move through the more orderly process of settlement — the actual transfer of money and instruments from one institution to another. This took place anywhere from hours to months after the initial promises had been made. Evelyn didn’t make the decisions that led to the transfers, and she bore no responsibility for the loss or gain they represented, but without her approval no money changed hands.

Her first morning back, she concentrated as best she could on her screen, drawing her eyes over the initials of counterparties and clearinghouses, tapping in payment codes, her hands moving over the keypad with unthinking speed, toggling in and out of the software’s fifty-odd forms. She found that her mind was able to float as she went, some well-grooved path in her brain slipping into the circle of automation. And she was thankful for that repetition; it was a kind of blessing, the way it allowed her to forget for spells of a few moments at a time.

As she was drawing up her final tallies for the day, her assistant, Cressida, knocked on her open door. She was a rather shy, single black woman, whom Evelyn had recruited from Boston College through the company’s minority-outreach program. Evelyn had told her any number of times there was no need to announce herself, that she should just come in and say straight up what she needed, but Cressida had persisted in her apologetics. Having known such hesitancy in herself back when she first started out, Evelyn recognized it as the first, useless defense against criticism, one that excited precisely what it sought to deflect. There were businesses where deference would get her somewhere. Banking wasn’t one of them. She wished she had it in her to drum the message home again, to set the girl straight once and for all, but she lacked the will this evening.

“It’s about the house accounts,” she said.

“You’re going to have to remind me, darling. Come on now, sit down.”

“From the Hong Kong office,” she said, perching on the chair opposite Evelyn. “The unresolved trades. I’m not sure how you want me to enter them in the log.” She looked at the paper in her hand as if ashamed of her admission.

At the college job fair, sitting across the folding table from her in the gymnasium, Cressida had worked so hard to strike a confident note, delivering her rehearsed lines about experience and interest like an actress unsure of her character’s motivation. As a recruiter, Evelyn knew she was supposed to be sorting for focus and drive, weeding out the young men and women who seemed unsure of themselves, selecting instead those model minority students who not only grasped the rules of the presentational game, suggesting their ability to pick up the rules of games to come, but also seemed to embrace them, taking a kind of hushed, understated pleasure in the well-groomed display of their credentials; those were the ones whose obedience you could count on, their fear of scarcity already marshaled into conservative ambition. Cressida had shown none of this, arriving in an ill-fitting pantsuit clearly borrowed for the day, her résumé on plain white paper, just as Evelyn’s had been at the first bank she interviewed with.

She had wondered in the year since she’d hired Cressida if sympathy were a form of nepotism, a favoring of emotional kin. With the exception of a few mistakes at the beginning, the kind anyone might make, she had performed well. It seemed to Evelyn that her vote of confidence had done what it was supposed to do, encouraging the young woman to rise to the occasion. It was just that she couldn’t dislodge the thought that she had chosen Cressida for her company as much as for her fit.

“Which trader?” she asked.

“McTeague.”

She took the account sheet from Cressida and glanced quickly at its contents. Trading floors were chaotic places and in the course of a day there were always a few botched transactions that had to be placed in house accounts to be resolved once the market closed. Some traders didn’t get around to working out these “fails” for a day or two. McTeague, however, often took weeks, carrying over millions of dollars in scrub positions. Because he had been put in charge of the back office in Hong Kong he was his own boss on accounting matters. All Evelyn could do was complain to him about his laxness, which she’d done several times to no avail. Nonetheless, the data on this sheet had to be a mistake; it showed McTeague’s house account holding an un-reported loss of three hundred and forty million dollars.

“Who gave you this?”

“Sabrina. Same as usual.”

“This came out of Fanning’s office?”

Cressida nodded.

Evelyn had never met Doug Fanning but she had been in the same room with him a couple of times at company functions and she had seen him operate. He got a lot of mileage with the staff out of his apparently casual approach to people, which, because of his unofficial status as second-in-command of the entire holding company, struck people as unusually egalitarian. He had championed, in prominent fashion, the renovation of the second floor as a free, company-wide gym, and was known for walking the halls after his workouts still in his shorts, setting the phones of the husband-hunters flashing with gossip. And yet for all his show it wasn’t the usual cocky, know-it-all, young banker’s affect that came through. There was something different about him, something Evelyn recognized: the extra effort of the uninvited. She didn’t quite trust him.

Which was why, rather than call Fanning to alert him of what she’d discovered, she instead tried Brenda Hilliard upstairs in compliance. If this was a misappropriation of funds, that department would have to be notified, regardless of who McTeague reported to. She got Brenda’s voice mail. By then it was after nine o’clock and most everyone had gone home, the whine of the vacuum cleaner starting up at the far end of the hall. She decided to send Brenda a quick e-mail, saying she needed to talk to her in the morning.

As she and Cressida left the sealed quiet of the lobby through the revolving doors and emerged onto Congress Street, the cooler night air swallowed them, carrying with it the hum and rush of the expressway. They turned onto Purchase Street, a few taxis tapping their horns for a fare, black women in business suits in this part of town apparently good enough for their services; ignoring them, they crossed the plaza in front of the Boston Fed and made their way into South Station.

Evelyn had never felt comfortable with co-workers outside the office and strangely only the more so with Cressida, to whom so much else might be said. Above all she didn’t want to disappoint the girl by seeming weak. Cressida had been the one, Evelyn felt sure, who had organized the office to send flowers to Carson’s funeral, in addition to the flowers she herself had sent.

“Have you heard anything yet?” Cressida asked, as they paused at the top of the stairs leading down to the T. “From the police, I mean.”

When was it, Evelyn wondered, that she had started to believe that she had left behind the world in which such a question might ever be asked of her? How long had that particular illusion lasted? In Roslindale, her apartment awaited her, tidy and quiet; the remote placed neatly on the coffee table, her kitchen counters wiped clean.

“They have a suspect,” she said. “Just a matter of what kind of case they can make, I guess.” She spoke more to herself than Cressida. “I should care about all that, I suppose. Revenge, or what have you. Getting him off the street. But I don’t.”

Over her assistant’s shoulder, she could see onto the station’s main concourse, where the last of the day’s travelers sat at the shiny steel tables beneath the big schedule board waiting for the commuter service west.

“If there’s anything I can do …”

Evelyn shook her head. “Go on now,” she said. “You’ll miss your train.”

Chapter 11

Later that same night, the head of data security called Doug to inform him that an e-mail had been sent to compliance referencing McTeague. Doug instructed him to erase it before it could be opened. He had just logged on to the bank’s server to pull up Evelyn Jones’s personnel file when his doorbell rang.

It would be Nate again. Over the last several weeks, he had become a regular visitor. The first time he’d appeared, at ten thirty sharp, standing on the front steps all doe-eyed and expectant, Doug had been watching a Red Sox game and he’d seen no harm in letting the kid sit on the couch beside him while he finished up his correspondence for the day. After that, Nate had turned up almost every night the Sox played, content to drink a beer and follow the score as Doug worked. When the game was over he would go on his way. Even if they didn’t say much to each other — in fact, especially if they didn’t say much — a few hours of having another person in the house felt all right. He wasn’t the kind of company you had to entertain.

Then, a week ago, while Doug was napping through the seventh-inning stretch, Nate had reached his hand over and rested it on Doug’s thigh.

A ballsy move for a kid that nervous, but then he’d had a few more beers than usual.

Years ago, down in sleeping quarters, sailors had now and then whispered come-ons or run a hand along Doug’s arm as he lay in his bunk. He’d never taken up their offers. The idea of it had done nothing for him: two guys getting each other off.

But something in the tentativeness of Nate’s gesture made him curious how it would play out and so he’d kept his eyes closed and let the kid’s hand move up over him. The mechanics were awkward at first but having someone else jack him off for a change didn’t feel half bad. Afterward, Nate had left soon enough, no reciprocation required. Which seemed reason enough to keep him around. That and his access to Charlotte Graves.

The bell rang again and Doug rose to answer it.

“You’re here,” Nate said.

“Yep,” he replied, remaining in the doorway, letting the boy wonder if he’d be let in this evening. From that first day that he’d crept into the house, something in Nate’s demeanor had goaded Doug on — his lack of defense, a vulnerability the shyest women lacked. It was a provocation of a sort, such weakness.

“Martinez is pitching,” he said, hopefully. “Are you watching?”

“I’m busy,” he said. “But go ahead. Turn it on, if you want.”

He spent the next hour reading up on Evelyn Jones. Her performance reviews were stellar. If you believed her supervisor, she was the patron saint of settlements, but given that man’s doddering liberalism Doug had no idea if he meant it or simply felt a historical obligation to praise his imagined inferiors. Doug trusted more the traders’ comments, who to a man reported that she was cleaner and faster than most anyone else who had handled their work. Around midnight, he called Sabrina and told her to do a public records search. As the game was ending, he finally closed his laptop.

Nate was sitting cross-legged beside him, the sleeves of his oxford shirt rolled up past the elbows of his slender arms.

“You’re not a baseball fan, are you?” Doug said.

“What do you mean?”

“Before you started coming over here, you didn’t follow it.”

“Sometimes I did.”

“What is your deal, anyway? Don’t you have somewhere to be? Out with your friends or something?”

Nate looked into the mouth of the bottle he’d been drinking from. “I like being here.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “I just do.”

“Well, I got to get some sleep. Time for you to go.”

“Would you mind … I mean, it’s okay if you would, but would you mind if maybe … I stayed over?”

“Where? On the couch?”

“Okay,” he said, his eyes brimming with fear and longing. “If that’s what you want.”

“Jesus. Come on, then,” Doug said, leading him up the stairs to the bedroom.

What Nate wanted, and what Doug let him do once he had turned out the light, was to lay his head down on Doug’s stomach and take his dick in his mouth. He had never really touched Nate before but he palmed the top of his head now, guiding his motion. It had been a long time since he’d been given a blow job and though the boy was no professional his eagerness helped.

Afterward, he couldn’t sleep, not with Nate in the bed beside him. He tried for a while before fetching his computer from downstairs and starting in on more work. A box in the corner of his screen showed the Nikkei continuing to drop. Eventually, after nodding off for an hour or so, he got up and showered.

When he came back into the room to dress, Nate had woken and rolled over onto his back, his face blurry with sleep, his cheek marked by the creases of the pillowcase.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Quarter to six. I’m going to work. You should get up.”

He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and sat upright in his frayed T-shirt and boxers, his fuzzy, unshaven jaw giving him even more of a grunge look than usual. He smelled of pot most nights and had that laconic, hangdog look that stoners wore.

“Don’t you have school?”

“It’s senior week,” he said, yawning.

A lifetime of doing only girls and now Doug had got himself into this. A hand job or two was one thing — a convenience — but now the kid was blowing him. The way he looked at Doug in the closet mirror was almost worshipful, his need clinging in a way that a girl wanting Doug to call her never had. He felt implicated somehow, and it galled him.

“Do you mind if I ask you something?”

“What?” Doug said.

“Have you ever done this before?”

“Done what?”

“Been with a guy.”

“I got an idea,” Doug said, pulling a tie off the rack and quickly knotting it. “Let’s skip the conversation part. Okay? Let’s keep it simple.”

___________

DOWNSTAIRS, he was about to open the front door when something caught his eye through the window.

“Unbelievable. Just look at that.”

Charlotte Graves and her two hounds were standing beside the garage, the woman leaning down to gather twigs which she deposited in a plastic shopping bag dangling from her wrist, while the dogs sniffed impatiently at the grass. In the gray dawn, the three of them looked like figures in a dream, a nightmare in fact, as if the world had been emptied by plague, leaving only these ragged scavengers.

“Feel like saying hello to your tutor?”

“No. She’s just walking them. She’ll keep moving.”

“You bet she will.”

Doug crossed the circle of the driveway before she noticed his approach. Startled, she stood sharply upright, yanking the dogs to attention. The Doberman bared his teeth and snarled.

“What do you think you’re doing here?”

“You’re up earlier than usual,” she said.

“You realize you’re trespassing. Your property is a hundred yards that way,” he said, pointing her back up the hill.

She grinned. “The interesting thing is, Mr. Fanning, not only am I not trespassing, but you are. It’s a strange bit of law, but there it is — I didn’t write it. You’ll understand soon enough. Soon enough,” she said.

“You’re mad. You’re totally mad.”

“So I’m often told. These days, even my dogs might agree with you. But they’re like you. They don’t know who they are. Or rather, they’re pretending to be people they aren’t, which I suppose amounts to the same thing.”

“Listen to me,” he said, moving a step closer, causing the mastiff to start barking, saliva dripping from his black gums.

“Samuel! Quiet!” she scolded. Amazingly enough, the animal obeyed. “They’re usually not so boisterous at this hour. That’s why I walk them early: my mind’s clearer than theirs.” A light rain had slickened the grass and was slowly dampening Doug’s jacket. “I can see things more lucidly at this time of day,” she said. “For instance, why did you build this house? To support a belief about yourself, about the life you’re living? To give that belief a concrete form in the hope the building would make it true? Isn’t that the idea? And isn’t it false? Wouldn’t you say that honesty — not of the rule-following kind but of the clear-eyed-apprehension-of-the-world sort — wouldn’t you say it requires us to give up those childish equivalencies: the doll for the person, the object for the dream? If a person couldn’t do that, it might suggest a lack of inner resources, don’t you suppose?”

“You have no idea who I am,” he said. “You think I’m like every other person in this town living in a new house, but you’re wrong. I have as little time for them as I do for you. And I’ll tell you something for free — you’re as obvious as they are. You just happened to get here first so you think that gives you some divine right to have it all to yourself.”

As he spoke, the Doberman squatted and proceeded to dump a pile of steaming shit onto the lawn.

“Oh, I do apologize. Honestly. That’s very rude of him. Bad, Wilkie! Never on the grass! I got him from the pound, you see, and he’s never taken well to instruction. It’s hopeless now, of course,” she added. “You simply can’t imagine.”

“Listen,” he said, telling himself to just let the dog shit go, just let it go, “this lawsuit of yours, you’re going to lose, so why not do us both a favor and just drop it. I didn’t come after you. But if you keep this up, I will.”

Suddenly, both dogs lunged leftward, catching Charlotte off guard and forcing her into a run as they chased after a tabby cat Doug had never seen before. Their speed was too much for her and she stumbled at the edge of the driveway, her feet slipping on the wet grass, her hand and shoulder and then thigh coming down hard onto the pavement. Freed from her grasp, the dogs dashed forward, disappearing around the corner of the house.

“Great!” he shouted. “Another fucking lawsuit!”

Miserably, he walked toward her prone figure, though by the time he reached her, she’d sat up and was brushing grass from the arm of her jacket. Rain ran off her forehead, down her nose, and into her eyes. She looked utterly lost at that moment, as helpless as a child. He was about to reach a hand down to help her up when he saw Nate jogging across the circle.

“Ms. Graves, are you okay? Are you all right?”

He knelt beside her and put his arm around her back.

“Who’s that?”

“Can you move? Can you move your legs?”

She nodded and as Doug looked on, Nate dipped his shoulder under her arm, put a hand around her waist, and raised her off the wet ground.

“She needs a doctor. We have to call an ambulance.”

“No, no,” she said. “Don’t be silly. I’m fine.” She pushed the hair out of her eyes and straightened her skirt. “Those beasts will get no dinner.”

“You need to be x-rayed.”

“Heavens, no. Once you get into one of those hospitals you never get out.” She looked shaken but appeared steady enough on her feet.

“So,” Doug said, “just to be clear, you’ve been offered medical attention and you’re declining it, correct?”

Nate glared at him but said nothing.

“All right, then. I guess Nate here will get you home.” And with that he strode off, leaving the two of them huddled together in the early-morning drizzle.

AS SOON AS Doug entered Evelyn Jones’s office an hour later, he realized he’d need a plan B. Whatever the origin of her immunity — intelligence, race, lesbianism perhaps, fact-based suspicion, some combination of these — his default MO would get him nowhere here. And yet she had to be won over. A bit of bad accounting was one thing. It could be papered over once he’d got an explanation from McTeague. But throwing the compliance department into investigative mode before he knew the facts — that wasn’t an option.

“You mind if I close the door?” he asked.

“Be my guest.”

Memos were tacked squarely to the bulletin board, binders arranged neatly beneath a row of five clocks, each labeled for the city whose time it kept. Along the front of her desk sat two small picture frames, their backings to Doug. Sabrina’s sleuthing had turned up the fact that she’d been absent for her brother’s funeral just a day or two ago.

“So,” he said, leaning back in his chair, his eyes wandering the lunar white boards of the dropped ceiling. “It looks as if Jim Lowry is moving over to community relations. Which will leave his position vacant. Is that a job that interests you?”

He allowed the silence that followed to stretch on a few moments.

“Vice president. For operations? Are you serious?”

“Yeah. I’ve been in this office two minutes, and I can tell for a fact you’d be better at the job than he is. Besides, your evaluations have it written all over them. And I know from the look on your face you know that’s true. Most of those assholes out there — they’re cattle, pension seekers, cowards. Leadership, though. That’s the question, right? The one the hiring committee would ponder judiciously before taking dead aim at mediocrity and finding the mark as sure as the men who hired them. Leadership. How fucking debased that word has become, don’t you think? Excuse my language. Seminars in swanky hotels where the lemmings take dictation from some retired guru hack. We pay for this shit too, we pay for them to fly off and learn the seven principles of how to manipulate your underlings and keep them cheerful as you do it. Millions a year.”

Evelyn Jones neither nodded nor looked away, her attention even and unremitting.

“There’s another thing we both know,” he said. “You get a big promotion and people — not to your face, of course — say, That figures. Right? African American woman, big corporation, diversity initiative. They do the cultural math and that’s what they think. Now, that would piss me off if I were you because you’re good at your job. And frankly, while I know a lot of the staff around here think of me as the friendly type, when it comes to management, I don’t give a shit who anyone is. I want the machine to work. Because the best parts of it, I built them. That’s why I want you to have Lowry’s job. And I’d make sure people understood that.”

“We’re being honest here, Mr. Fanning? Is that the idea?”

“Absolutely. But if you give me a second, I think I know what you’re thinking: ‘Last night I discover a gaping hole in one of Fanning’s trader’s scrub accounts and this morning he’s in my office offering me a vice presidency. How easy does he think I am?’ Am I in the ballpark?”

“Yes,” she said, resting back in her chair. “You are.”

“McTeague fucked up. Thanks to you, I spent last night on the phone figuring out what happened. It was a favor for a client. I’ve spoken to him about it, and it’ll be worked out. Now, just to be clear,” he said, “do I want compliance getting their nose in this? No. Do I read employee e-mail, including yours? Obviously. If you don’t already, you will once you move into operations. You’d be negligent not to.”

“So you’re asking me to keep quiet about a possible loss of three hundred million, not to mention a reporting violation?”

“You’re not keeping quiet. I’m his supervisor and I’ve been notified. What I’m saying is this is how the chairman’s office wants to handle the matter. It’s how I want to handle the matter. But part of you is still thinking, ‘He’s only here because he’s got a problem and there wouldn’t be any of this talk about a vice presidency otherwise.’ That’s not wrong, of course. It’s just not the whole picture. The situation brought you to my attention, that’s true, but the fact is I think the bank would make more money if we promoted you. And that’s what we’re here for, right? You’re not a romantic about that, I hope — our purpose?”

“I’m not an innocent,” she said. “If that’s what you mean.”

Doug leaned far enough forward to get a sidelong glance at the framed photographs. In one, a vacation shot, Evelyn and two other women smiled for the camera at an outdoor table under a parasol, a beach in the background. The one beside it appeared to be a family portrait: an older black woman in a blue dress seated in the middle, a much younger Evelyn standing over one of her shoulders, a boy of about fifteen resting his hand on the other.

“Is this your family?”

Her gaze hardened.

“No disrespect, Mr. Fanning, but I’m getting the sense that you already know more about me than I’d care to tell.”

The offer of promotion had begun as a piece of improvisational bullshit but he was beginning to think it might not be a bad idea.

“I only ask because while I never had a brother—”

“Don’t go there,” she said. “You don’t want to go there.”

“Why not? Because we don’t know each other? I’m not offering sympathy, if that’s what you think. I just know enough to know remorse can fuck with your ambition. And you shouldn’t let it.”

“You’re one hell of a condescending asshole.”

Doug smiled at the pureness of her hostility.

“When can you start?” he asked.

He thought she might leap up and swat him across the face but instead she simply shook her head in wonder.

BY THE TIME Doug headed out for his lunch meeting with Mikey, Sabrina still hadn’t been able to track down McTeague.

“Call me as soon as you hear from him,” he told her, on his way out of the office.

He walked quickly up toward the Common, where the benches were full of legislative staffers and store clerks, eating their bag lunches. The gold dome of the State House glittered in the midday sun. After Manila or Seoul or New York, Boston had always appeared quaint to Doug, an unlikely town for the business he and Holland had created. The spirit of their venture would have made more sense in boom-towns like Phoenix or Charlotte. But they had worked well with the material at hand, letting the historical distinction of the place act as a kind of ambient reassurance, a patina of solidity worth tens of millions in advertising.

In a booth at the back of the restaurant, he found Mikey muttering into the wire that dangled from his ear. He was jotting notes along the side of his Herald, the far page of which had come to rest on a half-eaten plate of manicotti from which it sponged the pasta’s thin red juice.

“You’re late and you look like hell,” he said. “Have a seat.” Pushing the wire aside, he said, “I got an investigator following this orthodontist out in Weston. Guy owes a boatload of child support. Turns out all his money’s going for OxyContin. I got to say if you met the wife you’d understand the painkillers. She’s quite a human being. Third husband, fourth investigator. I’m just waiting for my guy to tell me he got the pictures of him coming out of the pharmacy.”

He didn’t have time for this, Doug thought, checking his Black-Berry only to find the Nikkei was down another hundred points.

All day from his office window he could see into the neighboring tower, where workers clicked away at their screens, filling their filing cabinets with endless records of prices and depreciations and liabilities likely to pay, until they no longer noticed the bargain struck between meaningless days and whatever private comforts they’d found to convince themselves the meaninglessness was worth it. But it was different if those workers were your muscles and tendons and by your will you directed their exertion, regulating the blood of cash. Then you weren’t an object of the machine. You were something different: an artist of the consequential world. A shaper of fact. Not the kind of author Sabrina wanted to be — some precious observer of effete emotion — but the master of conditions others merely suffered.

That’s what he didn’t like about McTeague’s freelancing like this. Doug wasn’t in control.

“So,” Mikey said, “we got this hearing with Miss Graves on Monday. You’ll be there, right?”

“What for?”

“To give the victim a face,” he said, waving the waiter over. “We don’t want her getting a sympathy vote. Old-lady-against-faceless-enemy kinda thing. Trust me, this is what you pay me for.”

“You told me it was bullshit. Now you make it sound like a tobacco trial.”

“You’ll be in and out in half an hour.”

“I caught her trespassing this morning. Should we mention that to the judge?”

“Let her tie her own noose.”

Glancing over Mikey’s shoulder, Doug saw a guy at a table by the window, early twenties, dressed in expensively faded jeans and a sweater pre-patched at the elbows. He was leafing through a magazine, the white wires of his earphones trailing down into his pocket, a laptop open beside him. He saw these people everywhere now, these aging children who had done nothing, borne no responsibility, who in their bootless, liberal refinement would judge him and all he’d done as the enemy of the good and the just, their high-minded opinions just decoration for a different pattern of consumption: the past marketed as the future to comfort the lost. And who financed it? Who loaned them the money for these lives they couldn’t quite afford with their credit cards and their student loans? Who else but the banks? And what was he reading? GQ or Men’s Health? Some article telling him how to shave his nuts or pluck his eyebrows or sculpt his tender gut? His hair was carefully unkempt, shiny with product, a deliberately stray curl hanging down over his forehead.

“Now what do you want to eat?” Mikey said. “Pasta? Chicken Parm? What’s it gonna be.”

Last night, Nate had turned over in his sleep and nuzzled up against Doug, his arm coming to rest across his chest. For what seemed the longest time, Doug had remained still under that warm weight, wanting to shrug it off but unable to.

“I got to go,” he said, seeing McTeague’s number appear on the screen of his phone.

“What kind of a lunch is this? You just got here.”

“Call me later,” he said, heading back onto the sidewalk.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“I’m on vacation,” McTeague said. “Finally. ’Cause you know, the funny thing is, I never took any vacation, not since I got out here. And that’s the company rule — you have to take your paid vacation. Good, simple tool for risk management — make sure people take their holidays.”

“Well, your timing’s pretty shitty. Where the fuck are you?”

“Macao. You ever been? It’s like the Chinese Vegas. Casinos everywhere. Kind of butt ugly during the day but they get the fountains lit up at night. Turn on the neon, and it ain’t half bad. Some real old-time glitter. And the bird markets, you should see the bird markets. You pick one out and they’ll kill it on the spot and fry that sucker up for you.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Not really. I mean, sort of. Getting started, I guess. Or maybe I’m in the middle. They have great girls too. You should check it out when you visit. They’ll suck your cock for hours, if you want. They’re all saving up for college.”

In the background, Doug heard the screeching cheers of some Asian game show.

“Well, I’m glad you’re getting your rocks off. I spent this morning in Evelyn Jones’s office trying to explain your accounting. Is one of your hedge-fund buddies out of pocket? In which case, why didn’t you call?”

“Let me tell you, Doug. What you and me did in Osaka — that was great. That was classic. I mean, when you recognized that Japanese deputy dude — amazing. The mistress, she was kind of complicated actually. I don’t know if I ever told you. I thought she had me figured, at first. But enough booze, it doesn’t really matter what you think anymore, right? You just do what you do and it doesn’t matter what you think about it. So in the end I didn’t even have to ask her. I just mentioned the guy — this is after we’d started fucking, she’s getting another drink — and she unloads on him, goes on and on about what a creepy shit he is and then she tells me straight up. The whole story about what the government’s gonna do. You ask me, she knew exactly what she was doing — fucking him over. But what a tip? I mean Jesus. We were thirty-five percent of profits last quarter. How can you walk away from a tip that big, right?”

Doug slowed on the path back across the Common.

“What are you trying to say?”

“Listen, Doug. I swear to you. I haven’t stolen a dime. If you hadn’t respected me so much, taken me in like you did, maybe I would have, you know? But being in so close with you, a higher-up, taking me under your wing, giving me this stage to play on, ‘Don’t worry about the middlemen,’ ‘Call me direct.’ That’s what you always said.”

“So what the fuck’s the problem?”

“Doug. There are no clients. I made them up. From the beginning. All that money you’ve been funneling to cover their positions — it’s ours. And it’s still in the market.”

He came to a halt in the middle of the pavement, forcing the young couple headed toward him to part their hands as they passed.

“You’re lying,” he said.

“I was in the money. Every contract. Every position. And you wanted to pull it all back. But I kept remembering what you told me: keep your eye on the big picture, don’t let fear stop you, the models aren’t always right. It was there for the taking. And you always said the losers were the people afraid of the risk. I was in the money, Doug. It was all profit. I was getting ready to hand you a windfall bigger than you’d even imagined, wrapped up in a bow. But when the market turned I just froze. And I had to keep asking for all that cash. To post margin, to keep the positions open. And you … you kept feeding it to me.”

Doug tasted the remains of his breakfast at the back of his throat and then in his mouth and he leaned over to vomit on the grass. A shiny feathered rook looked on in perfect indifference. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“You’re lying,” he said. “Tell me you’re lying.”

Chapter 12

As Henry climbed the narrow back staircase of Charlotte’s house on the last Friday in June, and set his bag down in the room where he had spent his boyhood summers, he realized his mistake: here nothing changed. Not the ancient lumpy mattress, not the frayed satin lampshade, not the linen square on the water-stained bedside table. At the inn in town, where Betsy had always insisted they stay during their annual visit, out there in the light of day, at a restaurant or coffee shop, his sister’s predicament could be broken down, its components approached diplomatically, each of them discussed and resolved. But here? Here, Charlotte’s circularities drew energy from the very decrepitude of the place. The house was her argument, its density of association imperative to preserve. It may have belonged to others once, to his ancestors or his parents, but it was all hers now, the physical form her opinion of the world had come to take. How could he ever change her mind while living inside of it like this?

Indeed, the initial signs were not positive. The entire first afternoon, during which he’d thought they might take a walk and ease into things, Charlotte spent conducting some half-cocked tutoring session with a sunken-eyed youth, who listened in rapt attention to a lecture that jumped from William Jennings Bryan and the gold crisis to Father Coughlin and the paranoid style in American politics. Sitting in the front room trying to keep up with the day’s blizzard of e-mail, Henry marveled that a woman who’d retained this much history could nonetheless be so far gone when it came to ordering her own life.

“I didn’t know you were still taking students,” he said once the boy had left.

“I imagine,” she said, “that he doesn’t have many books in his own house. It’s so easy to assume people do. But then many don’t. And he’s lively. I thought he was one of the usual dullards at first. But he’s got promise. The world — the actual state of things — it’s broken in on him. Which is moving. You have no idea what it was like at the school toward the end. How the content remained the same while the meaning of the exercise changed so entirely. From enlightenment to the grooming of pets.”

Here was his sister’s familiar recipe: well-meaning condescension leavened by faith in meritocracy and finished off with a dose of liberal apocalypse. She was the classic mid-century Democratic idealist, who’d lived long enough to see hope’s repeated death. Raised on Adlai Stevenson, Richard Hofstadter, and redemption through rigor. It would have been easier for Henry if he hadn’t agreed with her about so much. If their father hadn’t stamped them at such an early age with a patriotism for process and an aesthetic revulsion at display of whatever kind.

Also, if he hadn’t loved her. Ineluctably. Love tinged by an envy he’d never understood.

Practicality had been their dividing line. By choice or circumstance or fate — the lines between these seemed less discreet to him the older he got — he had been the practical one, devoted to practical functions. Not a judge of acts, not even a creator of much, but a watchman, guarding the largely unseen. She had read, studied, and taught, loved a doomed man once, and through all of it somehow retained the energy for a more or less permanent outrage at the failure of the shabby world to live up to its stated principles. She followed politics assiduously, rejecting all the while its premise of compromise. If she hadn’t been so well versed in the checkered moral record of most actual martyrs, she might have allowed herself to become one, finding her single cause. As it was, she’d served and done battle with the school of a wealthy town, and apparently considered much of her effort wasted.

Henry’s plan had been to evaluate the gravity of the situation for the first day or two, allaying his sister’s usual fear that he’d jumped to conclusions, and then raise the subject of her moving on Saturday evening, think it through with her on Sunday, and, if all went well, perhaps even look at a few places early in the week, before the Fourth of July party at the Hollands’.

Instead, at breakfast on Saturday — which consisted of Orangina and stale bread — she blindsided him with the news that she had sued the town without the aid of a lawyer, claiming that Finden had violated their grandfather’s bequest of the land.

Slipping into the backyard, Henry phoned Cott Jr. to find out what in hell was going on. The man’s father had been the lawyer for the small Graves family foundation that gave to local causes, and he had inherited the job.

“I assumed you knew,” Cott Jr. said. “Norberton over at the hall told me she’d filed pro se. Quite a piece of rhetoric apparently. But she managed to use a few of the necessary phrases so they couldn’t toss it out.”

“Why wasn’t I told of this?”

“By whom?”

“By you.”

“Ah,” he said. “I’m guessing she never mentioned firing me. The truth is, Henry, the Graves Society hasn’t been a client of mine for three or four years at least. We’d always sent the check over to the Audubon but Charlotte got into some kind of policy dispute with them — beaver habitats I think it was. In any case, she instructed me to cancel the donation. I reminded her that she had to give away five percent a year to someone. And that’s when she removed my name from the checking account. She hasn’t spoken to me since.”

Thus was Saturday morning lost to a rear-guard action of intelligence gathering. Charlotte would hear nothing of withdrawing the suit and couldn’t understand why he would want to. The hearing before the judge was scheduled for Monday and she would be delighted, she said, for him to join her.

“I know these sorts of legal matters have always been your end of things. But there’s no reason to let that upset you. It’s all well in hand.”

After a lunch of cottage cheese and grapes, Henry’s phone started lighting up and soon enough he’d been dragged into a conference call with his senior staff and someone over at the State Department, who had been getting reports all morning of a possible coup in Uzbekistan. Sitting at the kitchen table, watching his sister prepare a sauté of sirloin and carrots for the dogs, he listened to his deputy describe getting a call an hour earlier from the Uzbek foreign minister, who had phoned the New York Fed to request that ninety percent of his country’s sovereign asset deposits be wired to a bank in Tashkent. The problems being that (1) no one was quite sure which side of the coup the foreign minster was on; (2) the Uzbek president was proving somewhat hard to reach; and (3) the State Department, unable to determine if this was an Islamist revolution or a pro-Western military putsch, hadn’t decided yet whether to stand by the current dictator or throw him overboard. Eighty million dollars was an unremarkable sum for a foreign-country transfer but enough to fund a small civil war and thus endanger U.S. basing rights, necessary for the resupply of forces in Afghanistan. During a pause in the proceedings, Henry’s chief counsel, Phillip Bretts, noted drolly that the man at State had been appointed only last week to the Central Asian Desk from a job at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

“Any chance of getting a bit of that meat?” Henry whispered, holding his hand over the phone just as Charlotte emptied the frying pan into the dogs’ stainless-steel bowls.

“It’s Sam who insists on the finer grade,” she observed. “Wilkie was perfectly happy with the ground chuck.”

By the end of the call, Henry was ready for a drink.

He took his Bloody Mary out onto the back terrace and tried to ignore the weeds coming up through the mortar of the brick. Despite his anger at Charlotte’s loony behavior, he had to confess that he hadn’t seen her so animated in years. Perhaps even since they were kids, now that he thought about it. Back when she’d been queen of the realm in which he’d been so happily captive. In Rye, he used to trail her for hours from the playroom into the yard and back upstairs to the inner sanctum of her bedroom, where he’d been allowed only on her capricious wish, the air there shaded in the afternoons by the giant copper beech. Even now, he could remember how the sun used to play over her dresser and the rich, red carpet and the bed where she lay reading or writing in her diary. He doubted he and Betsy had ever created a paradise such as that for their daughter, Linda. Perhaps because she was an only child. Or maybe it was just that Henry, as an adult banished from the kingdom of mystery, could never fully credit its existence for his daughter, and could only fake a belief in it for her sake in the hope that somehow, on the far side of that impenetrable divide, the garden was still damp and lush and time had yet to be invented. Impenetrable except perhaps in the most fleeting moments, together with the person you’d adventured with there once.

What was a brother supposed to do? Charlotte was happy for the moment because her outrage had found a target closer to home than the halls of Congress and she’d managed to convince herself that she had a chance to win. But none of that changed the obvious: she was barely feeding herself; the house was more of a ruin than ever; and however you wanted to describe them, her relations with the dogs had gone beyond mere eccentricity.

Sunday he drove into town to buy proper sandwiches for lunch and insisted they go out for dinner. At the restaurant he tried to make up for lost time, keeping gently at her, drawing the conversation around to the difficulties of maintaining the house on her own.

“If it would make you feel better,” she said, “you’re welcome to hire me a cleaning lady. Though she’d only be allowed in the kitchen.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Of course it isn’t. You don’t mean anything you’re saying. You want to ship me off somewhere so the idea of me here doesn’t weigh on you. It’s not like you can hide that, Henry. From your own sister. But even if I were inclined to go, which I’m not, now is the last time I’d budge. Here on the verge. I mean, just look at what’s going on. Take a step back for a moment, and look at what’s going on in this country, and I don’t mean just the criminals at the top — they’ll do their damage and stumble out eventually — I mean the last thirty years. And then tell me if you can honestly say that the intrusion of that house, the cutting down of those woods, whoever they might have belonged to once, doesn’t stand for something, for a rot more pervasive. And then tell me I’m wrong to want to take a stand. You can’t. Not without betraying language, and I think you’re better than that. I know you are. Because that really would be the end. To accede to that. To the notion that words mean nothing anymore. That they’re pure tactics. You don’t believe that.”

And on she went, speechifying, close, he had to admit, to the height of her powers.

Letting go his mission for a while, he ordered another drink and let himself enjoy her company. Most of his colleagues didn’t read much other than the Journal. Betsy had kept up with things, novels and films and biographies, but they agreed with each other about so much that at a certain point they’d stopped discussing it all. The fierceness of his sister’s opinions had never dimmed. It was the spirit of their father in her, the old man’s crusading energy, difficult at times for their mother to bear, but so obviously the thing she’d fallen in love with.

When the young couple at the adjacent table began arguing about their renovation, the husband insisting they fire the architect, whom the wife described as not only visionary but, in case he hadn’t read a magazine or newspaper in the last year, “quite fucking important,” Charlotte granted Henry a conspiratorial smile, gathering him into her fold, an invitation that in the moment he couldn’t help accepting with a roll of the eyes. Who was he kidding? His new neighbors in Rye were absolute pills. Their children were deplorable in the manner of over-bred dogs. The fellow being in banking, he had asked Henry over for a drink. Their house had struck him as the cross between a playpen and a corporate retreat center. But what could you do about it?

When the waiter asked if he’d like a third glass of wine, he said yes.

Back at the house, Charlotte made tea and they sat at the kitchen table. The table where their father had liked nothing better than to set out broken gadgets on a Saturday morning, a radio or toaster or lamp that had given up over the winter, and opening his tool kit begin to fiddle. Recalling such mornings, Henry, a bit drunk, felt a bone-tiredness, the kind he couldn’t afford to let in too often, not in a job where the travel never stopped. It was the sort of tiredness a mind allows a body only when it knows it’s home.

“So, did you manage the coup all right?” Charlotte said. “Is everyone’s money safe?”

“It’ll work out in the end. A few days of caution won’t hurt anyone.”

“Such an anonymous sort of power you wield. So far from the madding crowd. It’s always intrigued me. Thinking about the people affected by what you do. The fact that they’ll never know you. Sure, Daddy tried cases, but he met his defendants. There was a scale to the thing. It’s not a criticism. It’s just I wonder sometimes what it does to you. What it’s already done to you. The abstraction. Lives as numbers. We all do it, of course. We do it reading the paper. What does ten thousand dead in an earthquake mean? Nothing. It can’t. The knowledge just breeds impotence. But your abstractions, your interest rates, they change people’s lives. And they’ll never know who you are.”

“When things get bad enough, they tend to find out.”

“That’s not my point. I’m talking about you, Henry. I’m sure there are plenty who simply enjoy your kind of influence, the ambitious. The ones whose power makes them furious. And there are the crypto-sadists, such an underestimated lot. But you’re neither of those, however much of a fellow traveler you may have been over the years. And yet there it is — your system and other people’s pain.”

“It’s not all pain,” he said. “Money allows things.”

“Of course. It’s just a matter of to whom. But, then, that’s not your area, is it? That’s someone else’s set of choices.”

Sauntering drowsily in from the living room, the Doberman rested his head in Charlotte’s lap, and Henry watched his sister pat him gently on the head.

“You know it’s funny,” she said. “All weekend, I’ve tried to convince Wilkie here that you’re a good sport but he won’t believe me, will you Wilkie? He’s convinced you’re a member of the Klan.”

HENRY SLEPT rather poorly that night, waking more than once to what sounded like growling. The Klan? He could just see the expression on the face of the director of an assisted-living facility when Charlotte dropped a comment such as that into an interview. He got a few solid hours toward morning before his sister woke him, warning that they’d be late to court.

“We can’t take them with us,” he said, standing bleary-eyed by the rental car, as she came down the walk with Sam and Wilkie.

“Why not?”

“It’s a government facility, not a kennel.”

“Don’t be silly. The bailiff’s an old student of mine.”

The county courthouse was a Greek Revival affair whose sandstone had gone gray with soot. The main hallway, adorned with portraits of deceased superior court judges, was already bustling at eight thirty: an officer showing a line of jurors into a waiting room, lawyers hunched with clients, explaining to bewildered family members the nature of their loved one’s predicament, while on the benches nearby policemen killed time before being called to the stand.

Lo and behold, when they reached the courtroom door, a balding guard in his forties lit right up with a smile.

“Miss Graves,” he said. “How ya been? I saw the name on the sheet and I wondered if it was you.”

“I’ve been very well, thank you.”

“I saw that business in the paper a few years back about the school and all. That was no good the way they let you go.” He reached out to shake Henry’s hand. “Best teacher I ever had,” he said, his voice filled with wonder at the discovery of his own nostalgia.

“How kind of you to say. Now, Anthony, I was wondering. There is just a small favor I was going to ask. My dogs. I was hoping they could come along. Into the courtroom with us.”

“Oh, geez,” he said, clicking his tongue. “The judge. I don’t know if he’s going to like that. It’s against rules.” He considered Wilkie and Sam for a moment. “They wouldn’t happen to be medical dogs, would they? To help you get around, I mean.”

“Well … yes, now that you mention it, they do help. A great deal.”

“Charlotte,” Henry whispered, only to receive an elbow in the flank.

“I’ll tell you what, Miss Graves. You bring them in here, and I’ll just settle them down in the back row, where no one can see them. How’s that?”

“Wonderful. I knew I could rely on you.”

She and Henry took seats in the third row of the courtroom and stood when, a few minutes later, Anthony called out, “All rise, the Honorable George M. Cushman presiding.”

“You weren’t expecting that, now were you?” Charlotte whispered.

“Expecting what?”

“You remember the Cushmans. Mommy and Daddy used to have drinks with them all the time. That’s their son, George. He would come to the lake with us. Don’t you remember? Chubby George.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. This is ridiculous. You’re going to embarrass us.”

“My God,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “Will you look at that? He’s here, the bastard. With some slickster lawyer. Just look at those pinstripes. They’re an inch apart.”

Turning to look, Henry saw a man in his late thirties with tightly shorn black hair and a rather barren expression. He had that over-groomed look to him that many of the younger bankers did these days, giving them, at times, an almost feminine appearance, despite all their hours in the gymnasium. Not so his companion — a pug of a man whose pinstripe was indeed immoderately wide. He chewed gum and thumbed impatiently at the wheel of his BlackBerry.

“What business does he have here? I’m not suing him.”

“Gee, I don’t know,” Henry said. “You’re only trying to take the man’s house. He’s an interested party. He’s allowed to intervene.”

Before Charlotte’s case was finally called, they had to sit through two DUIs and a dispute between the country club and one of its junior members over a malfunctioning golf cart, reminding Henry that only the luckless, the petty, or the deranged wound up in court.

REVIEWING HIS DOCKET in chambers earlier that morning, George Cushman had a thought similar to Henry’s upon noticing that he would have to conduct the hearing on the Graves matter that day. The prospect saddened him. Though they were hardly friends, he’d known Charlotte Graves for the better part of his life and said hello to her whenever they met in town. What was more, as a member of the board of the Historical Association, he would have liked nothing better than to rule in her favor. He found houses like the one that had been thrown up on that land almost as offensive as she did. No one denied that Willard Graves had given the property to Finden for preservation or that he had specified in the bequest that should the town sell or develop it, it would revert to the estate. But the rule against perpetuities as it related to conditions broken was clear enough in this state: after thirty years the right to repossess the land was no longer valid. That term having long since expired, the town maintained, quite correctly, that its title was now absolute; it could do with the acreage as it pleased. As he would with any pro se plaintiff, Judge Cushman had done his best to tease from the mass of verbiage in Charlotte’s petition some colorable argument. But when, after six pages of single-spaced invective, she’d begun a history of her family’s donations to local charities, he’d given up the effort. He would give her her day in court and soften the blow by delaying his dismissal of her complaint by a few weeks.

Straight out of the gate, however, the problems began. When Charlotte stood from behind the plaintiff’s table she said, “Good morning, George. I did just want to say, I am so glad it’s you.”

Incredulous, the town attorney rose to object but Cushman stayed him before he could speak. The lawyer for the intervener, Fanning, however, would not be held back.

“May I approach, Your Honor?”

“No, Counselor, you may not. You will be pleased to sit down. Now, Ms. Graves,” he said, “litigants must address this court as either ‘Your Honor’ or ‘the court.’ Is that clear?”

“Of course, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean any offense. Your Honor.”

“All right, then,” he said. “Is there anything you’d like to say in addition to your submissions in this case?”

“Oh, yes, there is. You see, after I sent you the letter I found this book in the library that had what they called model pleadings, and right away I realized that I may have somewhat obscured my central contention. The way I wrote it out, I mean. This business of the thirty years. I understand that. Why we have to quiet the wishes of the dead like that I’m not so sure, but there we are. I’ll leave that for another day. But what I’m saying is slightly different. Would you mind if I read a quote?”

“Go right ahead,” Cushman said, leaning back in his chair.

“This is from a book I came across by a Professor Duckington. He writes, ‘While, in its infinite wisdom, the legislature has seen fit to extinguish the rights of individuals in possession of contingent remainders in real property, presumably in the interest of dusting titles clean of those cobwebs of the common law that were seen as an encumbrance to an efficient and reliable system of sale and purchase, the people’s representatives were sufficiently mindful of their own prerogatives, along with those of churches and charitable corporations, as to exclude themselves and the latter from the consequences of their good judgment.’”

She closed the book, returned it to the table, and smiled proudly.

“Heaven help the man’s students,” Cushman said, “but it sounds accurate enough. The rule applies to individuals. But the distinction’s not relevant in this case.”

“Oh, but it is, George,” she said. “You see, my grandfather — he was a charity.”

“Come again.”

“Willard Graves, before he died, he turned himself into a charity: the Graves Society. We’ve been puttering along ever since. My point is, if you look at the records, he didn’t give the land to Finden. The society did. So you see, the thirty-year rule — it doesn’t apply here. The conditions in the bequest are still good. Which means the land no longer belongs to Finden or to Mr. Fanning. It belongs to our family’s trust. In fact, it has ever since the town sold it. The documents are all here in my file. I believe all I need from the court is the title. And then we’ll be done.”

For the following ten seconds no one in the courtroom uttered a word. In fact, they barely moved. Like guests at a funeral who have just witnessed the lid of the coffin come open and the corpse sit up to greet them with a smile, they stared at Charlotte in awe.

Then the shouting began.

Mikey nearly fell over the front end of the jury box, where he and Doug had been instructed to sit, as he leapt up to yell, “Approach! Approach!” taking on, in panicked violation of courtroom decorum, the voice of the judge himself, whose rejoinder was hardly audible over the fuming objections of the town lawyer, who didn’t even bother addressing himself to the bench, hurling his words directly at Charlotte. By the time Judge Cushman got a hold of his gavel and began slamming it, Wilkie and Sam had scampered into the aisle and begun barking up a racket, causing everyone but an appalled Henry to turn in still greater astonishment to the sight of two drooling hounds bolting toward the front of the courtroom.

“Bailiff!” Cushman cried, standing to pound his gavel. “Bailiff!”

Order wasn’t restored for another ten minutes, as the dogs were dragged snarling from the room and the lawyers, ignoring local rules, jumped onto their cell phones to offices and aides in a desperate effort to fill in the suddenly gaping void in their understanding of a case for which they had barely bothered to prepare. After denying repeated motions for a continuance, Judge Cushman declared a recess and returned to his chambers with Charlotte’s file.

By the time he’d finished examining the documents, he’d been reminded that there were, after all, a few unique pleasures to his occupation. He could of course give the town time to regroup. But they had no good argument for why they deserved such a reprieve. The evidence Charlotte was relying on had been stored in their own basement. And as to the legal argument, she was perfectly correct. The donation of the land had come from a charity. The rule didn’t apply. He needn’t reach the question of whether the town had been willful or merely negligent in its sale. Either way, they lost.

Back on the bench, he listened with serenity to the attorneys’ pleas, objections, and even their threats of appeal and motions for recusal. When at last they had exhausted themselves, he thanked them for their advice, and then, allowing himself just this once a flash of that declamatory rhetoric that as a law student he’d dreamt of dispensing but never quite found an opportunity to employ amidst the grayness of actual litigation, he began, “As the great British prime minister William Gladstone once put it, ‘Justice delayed is justice denied.’” Announcing his finding that the papers presented left no room for doubt about Charlotte’s claim, he continued, “The court is certainly sympathetic to the plight the purchaser now finds himself in, having built a house on land it turns out that he does not own. But the right of reentry is an ancient one, predating our own Constitution. I cannot set it aside merely because it presents an inconvenience. However, now that the subject of ownership has been settled in favor of the Graves Society, my hope is the parties can arrive at a negotiated settlement. With this in mind, I suspend for sixty days the order I hereby enter granting plaintiff’s family trust title in the land.”

Looking down over his glasses at the once-again silenced courtroom, he asked, “Is there anything further in this matter?”

Chapter 13

Glenda Holland had decided it was just the thing to stay put in Finden on the Fourth of July and throw a grand party for all their friends and obligations. Jeffrey had canceled their plans for Capri, the Cape house was still under renovation, and Florida was out of the question in such ghastly weather. Besides, the Harrises were staying in town, the Finches, the Mueglers, the dreary board of the Historical Association, to which she had been dragooned into writing checks, and of course her wretched son and his prankster friends, and their parents for that matter, if they wanted to come — who was she, after all, to be embarrassed by her son’s failure to crawl from the tub of even a public school? — in addition to which there was the advantage that as long as Jeffrey invited clients and a few shelves of Union Atlantic’s management, the whole hing-ho could be charged up on the bank’s entertainment account.

It being too late for save the dates, she’d gone straight to invitations, whizzing them out FedEx and doubling up the numbers. The caterer had to be bought out of a wedding contract, the tent people bribed, and the florist threatened with boycott. But by the time the real heat commenced that weekend before the Fourth, her chief suppliers had more or less fallen into line and the phone had begun to ring off the hook.

Starting late on a midsummer party, she’d expected half her list to have other plans but it turned out people were avoiding big-city crowds this year for fear of terrorist attacks and were delighted at the invitation. The chef was talking about a fourth boar and the temp agency hired to manage the parking said the field usually occupied by the sheep Jeffrey had purchased years ago to qualify for the family-farm deduction would have to be cleared away for the overflow. It all appeared to be coming together. Everything but the fireworks.

No one could be found to do the fireworks. Local governments had the firms all tied up in annual commitments and the big corporate parties had long ago been booked. Her assistant, Lauren, had scoured New England for anyone with a match and an explosive but come up dry. Finally, only days before the event, practically on her knees in the back of a restaurant in the North End, Glenda had managed to pry a nephew off the team for the Boston Pops show for a perfectly ridiculous sum of money and a promise to allow him to indulge his creative side. By the third, the house was overrun by staff, and Glenda retreated to the chaise in her bedroom, where Lauren took all her calls, while she hunkered down with a master guest list and the table charts. Spread on the coffee table in front of her was a map of the dining tent and a basket of little white pin flags onto which Lauren wrote the names of the guests as Glenda called them out.

After resisting her plan as belated, Jeffrey, once he sensed momentum, had in typical fashion reversed course, invited everyone and their accountant, and demanded certain pairings at dinner, leaving her a phone book’s worth of Korean industrialists and German bankers, her knowledge of whose social skills was a virtual black hole.

“What on earth am I supposed to do?” she said, holding up table number twelve, trying not to move her lips and thus crack the teal mud caked to her face. “Put Sarah Finch next to some Brazilian sugarcane magnate? It’s absurd. I try to get a few friends together and this is what he does to me.”

With Jeffrey’s secretary, Martha, weighing in on his behalf via speakerphone, whole armies of financiers advanced across the map from wasteland tables doubled up by the kitchen tent to the very borders of the social center, only to be beaten back again by Glenda’s Sweet Briar classmates and a protective guard of village worthies airlifted into a kind of improvised DMZ ringing the single-digit tables of note. It was close quarters for a while, with Martha insisting the head of Credit Suisse and his wife could under no circumstances be expected to make conversation with the high-school badminton coach (“Mrs. Holland, the bank is paying for this, you realize?”), but with a few tactical retreats, Glenda was able to keep the ranker forces of tedium at bay, setting up Jeffrey at his own table with the absolute necessaries and forcing the remainder back to the periphery. By seven o’clock, once she and Lauren had tidied up the charts and sent them downstairs to the calligrapher for place cards, she was done for. A martini, a chicken Caesar, an Ambien, and two Ativan later, she was ready for a sound night’s sleep before the big day.

When, shortly after dawn the next morning, the driver delivering the mobile air-conditioning units backed his truck into the last of the six black Escalades containing EverSafe International’s full-event protection team, he found himself quickly surrounded by twenty-odd men in ill-fitting dark suits and wraparound sunglasses, wielding everything from stun guns to Glock 9s and shouting at him to get out of the vehicle, put his hands above his head, and lie facedown on the freshly sprinkled grass.

A year or so later, to the Hollands’ minor cost and irritation, they would discover through their lawyers, before settling out of court, that the driver of the truck, a Mr. Mark Bayle, was in fact a veteran of the first Gulf War whose nearly cured PTSD had been massively reactivated by that morning’s incident, causing him pain, suffering, anxiety, and eventual unemployment. At the time, however, the accident’s most immediate effect was to whip Glenda, woken by the shouting, into a kind of pre-event seizure roughly six hours ahead of schedule.

If all Jeffrey Holland had been required to explain away that morning was how he’d approved the head of corporate security’s recommendation for a complete vulnerability assessment, perimeter protection, and tactical team on his property without either noticing that he’d done it or informing his wife, he would have been in excellent shape. As it happened, however, the NASDAQ had closed at a five-year low on the Monday of that week; WorldCom had announced another exaggeration of profits, placing on life support the bank’s single largest loan recipient; and to cap it off, on the afternoon of the third, the Massachusetts and New York attorneys general had announced a joint investigation of Atlantic Securities’ favoritism in the distribution of IPO shares. In short, it wasn’t shaping up as much of a holiday for Jeffrey. By the time an outraged Glenda bolted through his study door in her nightgown shouting about the thugs in the driveway, he was already an hour into a conference call with the general counsel and half the board, trying to account for internal policies he’d never heard of, let alone read.

By one o’clock the air outside had reached ninety-eight degrees, and many in the small army assembled to feed and entertain the Hollands’ guests had begun to wilt under the pitiless sun. An assistant to the chef’s subcontractor for the wood-burning ovens had fainted at his station, knocking his head on an ice chest and requiring removal to an air-conditioned bedroom at the back of the house. Trying to manage both her boss and the party, Lauren had set Glenda up on a couch in the library, where she could receive emissaries from the feuding vendors without either standing up or entering the furnace of the outdoors until both were absolutely necessary. The band claimed the caterer had done them out of electricity and the florist warned that if the technician sent by the air-conditioning firm to replace the traumatized driver didn’t figure out how to operate the machinery soon her creations would wither and die. These, at least, were people in Glenda’s employ. The fire marshal was another matter. While he’d kindly expedited her request for a permit for the show, upon inspection and discussion with the nephew in charge he had determined that the barge from which the fireworks were to be launched was floating at an insufficient distance from the shore of the pond, which would now need to be ringed with flame-retardant tarps.

“My God,” Glenda exclaimed, sunken into the corner of the couch. “Have you no mercy? Can’t you see what’s going on out there? Flame tarps? Where in creation do you expect me to find those? Not to mention the fact that they sound hideously ugly. Couldn’t we just give it a miss?”

The man, a stolid, bearded fellow in white shirt and epaulets glanced wearily at Lauren, who started searching her phone for the town manager’s number.

“If you only knew what it took me to retain that young man. When I think of what I paid him. He could send his firstborn to college. I’m begging you,” she said, managing another sip of her drink. “We did invite you, didn’t we? You and your wife?”

Once Lauren had led the marshal from the room, Glenda decided that, all in all, the best thing might be to nap.

DOWN IN THE FIELD, a high schooler in red vest and bow tie pointed Evelyn Jones along an aisle of luxury sedans, and up against a barbed-wire fence. She applied her lipstick in the rearview mirror and then made her way through the parked cars toward a crowd of guests bottlenecked at the gate, where some kind of checkpoint had been set up.

“Glenda’s gone too far this time,” a silver-haired lady in front of her said to her husband, as security guards body-scanned each invitee with their metal-detecting wands. “Who does she think we are? Militants?”

“Believe me,” the man ahead of her said, “there are people out there planning things. This here makes a good deal of sense.” Evelyn recognized him from the newspaper: the head of State Street, lately plagued by kidnapping threats. Farther along, various bank employees and their spouses feasted their eyes on the chairman’s estate, unfazed by the precautions. She supposed she was one of the few who wondered if she’d be allowed to pass. But they did let her through and she proceeded along the path to a set of long folding tables staffed by a team of severe-looking, young blond women who wielded their pens and clipboards like guardians of an auction for qualified buyers only, ready in an instant to lose those winning, welcoming smiles and halt the riffraff in their tracks. One of them beamed an extra beam as she checked Evelyn’s name off the list and handed her a place card, her visage replete with that secret liberal pleasure of being given the chance to be kind and nondiscriminatory to a black person.

Up on the main lawn a waiter in a white jacket, sweat running down his face, offered her a glass from a tray of sparkling wines. Guests had already begun to roll up their sleeves and mop their brows with cocktail napkins. She strolled to the open end of the square formed by the back of the house and the two circus-scale tents and from there looked down the far side of the hill to a pond where several men in a rowboat were making their way toward a floating dock.

She’d known when Fanning routed her an invitation to the party not to expect barbecue in the backyard. But this was something else.

Then again, perhaps this was part of her new station. She was, after all, soon to be a vice president for operations.

Her aunt Verna had nearly fainted with joy at the news. “That’s it,” she’d said. “You go right on, you hear me? You just go right on.” Verna had always been the pragmatist in the family, the survivor. Years ago, when she was a girl, Evelyn had asked her aunt how she managed to stay so thin all these years and she could still remember her saying, “Well, Evey, I’ll tell you my little secret: there’s nothing like good, old-fashioned anger to burn those calories to the ground.”

What would Verna make of all this? Would she hesitate? Would she think it too much?

As soon as Evelyn had received the call from Fanning’s secretary last week saying he wanted to meet, she’d expected a snow job. But a doubling of her salary? A position in management? The only other black woman in the upper ranks of the company was Carolyn Greene, a light-skinned Princeton grad, whose parents had a house on the Vineyard. At Evelyn’s first minority-employee luncheon, Carolyn had asked her whose secretary she was. From the position Fanning had offered her, Evelyn could move to any bank in the country or into another line of business altogether. She could buy the house she’d long been saving for. And about one thing at least Fanning had been right: she would be better at the job than her boss.

You dream of such things with your brother fresh in the grave?

She could hear her mother’s voice. Yes, she thought. I do.

Feeling a trickle of cooler air on her feet, she moved back along the tent’s edge and passed inside. A giant chandelier had been dropped to encircle the main pole. Floral arrangements three feet high, bursting with red and blue, rose from the center of tables still being laid by a crew of waiters.

Nearby an older couple sat facing Evelyn, having taken refuge from the drinks tent opposite. He looked familiar, the gentleman, in his rumpled gray suit, his white hair neatly parted, his hands folded in his lap, a kindly look about him. Where was it, Evelyn wondered, that she had seen him before? And then she remembered. It had been back in the spring at the payment systems conference she’d attended down in Florida. He was the man from the Federal Reserve who had given the keynote address. She remembered it because such things were usually dull as all get-out. But toward the end of his review of the progress in securing commercial payments, this man had taken a step back from the specifics to describe to the audience the importance of their work, reminding them that while the business of keeping money flowing was a technical one, it supported and allowed millions of daily acts from the purchase of food to the paying of rent or salaries or medical bills. “Politicians argue over relative distributions,” he’d said. “The market fiddles with the price of goods and labor. But all of it relies on you. You’re the invisible medium. Not the hand of the market but the conduit. You touch virtually everything you see. Most of you work for private corporations. But the trust, it’s public.”

An old-schooler, she could remember thinking at the time. A man who sounded as if he meant what he said.

His wife — could that be the wife? — caught Evelyn’s eye and smiled at her in a knowing fashion, as if they had just shared in some rarefied private joke.

Before Evelyn could say hello, the gentleman volunteered an apology if they were in her seats; she assured them that they weren’t, explaining briefly about having heard him speak.

“Ah,” he said. “I hope I didn’t bore you. I can become rather self-important at times.”

“That, at least, is the truth,” the woman observed.

“This is my sister, Charlotte.”

“How do you do?”

“All right, I suppose,” she said. “Are you a banker, too?”

“I work for Atlantic Securities.”

“Well then, you’re in good hands,” Mr. Graves said, with an open-faced smile, apparently not the least imposed upon by her approach. “This is quite a gathering,” he added.

“It sure is. Not sure I really fit in,” she said, chastising herself as soon as the words left her mouth. Why should she offer such an admission?

“For which you should count yourself lucky,” Charlotte rejoined.

After Fanning’s visit, Brenda Hilliard from compliance had phoned Evelyn back to ask what the issue was that she had wanted to discuss; Evelyn had prevaricated, saying there had been a mix-up, that the problem had been resolved. She had gone along with Fanning’s scheme. That’s what she had done.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt you both,” she said. “I just wanted to say I enjoyed your talk.”

Mr. Graves smiled again. “You’re very kind to say so. Enjoy the party.”

___________

THROUGH THE FRENZY of the day’s preparations, Nate and the others had sheltered around the Hollands’ pool on the far side of the house. As usual on such idle summer afternoons, they’d gotten high and entertained themselves by playing bring-me-down, a game wherein the last things you wanted to think of while baked were hurled at you by your closest friends in an attempt to defeat your buzz. Each attack required retaliation and further bong hits, the whole disordered affair not infrequently bringing Emily to tears — of distress or drugged stupefaction one could never quite tell — while the boys more often resorted to throwing objects or shoving one another into the pool.

As surrogate families went, the four of them were tight-knit, having learned early on the value of ridicule as a means of avoiding the awkwardness of their mutual affection.

The game that day had begun with the minor stuff of yeast infections, poor hygiene, and other bodily insecurities before reaching personal matters — Emily’s retarded cousin, Hal’s inability to attract girls. And it might have ended there but for the stuff they were smoking. Having failed to graduate, Jason, on Hal’s canny advice, had thrown himself on his parents’ mercy, promised to rededicate himself to studying in the fall, and suggested that what he really needed was the chance to help others for a while. Thus it was that he’d recently returned from his week of Habitat for Humanity — in Jamaica.

What little he remembered of the experience, he recalled fondly. A nail-gun injury on the second day had put him on the sidelines of the actual construction, but he’d made the most of the company. The four jumbo tubes of Crest he’d emptied and stuffed with the finest of the local crop had sailed through customs at Logan in his toiletry bag and made it safely back to the house. Life since had taken on a new texture. Jason had hacked around on an electric guitar for years but it was only after returning from this trip, after hours of practice in the soundproofed basement, that he’d begun to realize just how outsized a talent he might be. Others had not fared so well. Interlopers to the gang of four had come, smoked, required Xanax, and fled. The first girl Hal had courted since sophomore year had wept in terror at the sight of the Hollands’ tabby cat and demanded to be driven home. When seriously gotten into, the new stuff was an all-hands-on-deck kind of experience.

And so it came to pass that in the late stages of this particular session, at the point where someone usually threw in the towel and began agitating for food, reprisals instead intensified. Nate, coming to Emily’s defense in response to the hit on her defective relative, went straight at Mrs. Holland’s alcoholism.

“Oh, that’s a good one,” Jason said, sitting with bare, rounded back at the end of the diving board. “That’s a real good one. It reminds me, I’ve been meaning to ask you, Nate, how’s the widow? Your mother, I mean. The one who’s sitting at home right now. The one who’s going to watch the fireworks alone tonight. Ever think maybe you should spend a little more time with her?”

The question stung but the line of attack had been used before, hardening him to the sharpness of it.

“Whatever,” Nate said, lying back in his deck chair. “You haven’t been able to ejaculate since you started those anti-depressants.”

Jason leapt to his feet and came around the pool to stand over Nate, his face flushed and shiny with bakeage. “You’re a liar. At least I haven’t been spending my nights on my knees sucking some stranger’s cock.”

“Jason!” Emily shouted, leaping up from her chair. “Shut the fuck up!”

In this game, surprise was the only trump and Jason had played it. Nate had thought it would be safe to share his secret with Emily, but he’d been wrong.

“Interesting,” Hal observed, crossing his legs and lighting another cigarette with which to enjoy this final round.

“I mean I knew you were queer,” Jason said, “but senior citizens? Is that some kind of fetish thing? You like Daddy?”

“You are such a royal asshole,” Emily said.

“Come on, tell us. What does the old man taste like?”

“Fuck you,” Nate said, picking up his book and towel and heading back into the house. Just inside the door of the Hollands’ solarium, he paused, listening to the whir of the engines powering the Jacuzzi and the sauna and the air conditioner, the THC in his blood still burning down the cells of his brain.

He could go home if he wanted. But things were too real there, too slow. And what use would it be heading over to Doug’s? Six nights in a row now he’d gone to the mansion at ten or ten thirty and, finding the lights out and no car in the driveway, waited by the side of the garage until eleven thirty or later. Most nights the sky had been clear, the trees on top of the hill by Ms. Graves’s house visible in black profile against a dome of pinhead stars. Sitting on the cool grass, he’d wondered what his father would have thought of him, waiting there in the dark for this man. Or what he would have thought about the things Nate had done with Doug already. It was a habit of late, this guessing at his father’s judgment of the things he did or said. Yet no matter how often he tried it, the result was always the same: it didn’t matter. Nate wanted it to, but it didn’t. Imagining his father’s reactions was just an end run against his being gone, his having chosen to go. As if an endless hypothetical could keep him alive. The fact was, if Nate wanted to sleep in Doug’s bed, no one but Doug could stop him. He was already that free.

With no idea where to go, Nate stepped into the back hall of the house. From the kitchen, a procession of waiters in black trousers and white smock shirts appeared, sliding past him, trays of wine balanced at their shoulders. One of them, a narrow-faced redhead with thyroidal eyes, spread his bulbous glance down Nate’s bare chest like a cat stalking a bird, a lubricious grin playing across his lips as he sped by, leaving Nate feeling as alone as he ever had.

IGNORING THE PARKING minders trying to wave him in, Doug sped past the entrance to the field and turned right at the intersection, and then right again, winding his way around to the far side of the property. He’d attended plenty of the Hollands’ parties over the years and was in no mood for one this evening, but his business with Jeffrey couldn’t wait any longer.

All weekend, he’d camped out in a conference room with the door locked and McTeague on speakerphone, as they worked through each fabricated transaction until by Sunday night he’d assembled the full picture: Atlantic Securities, and not its supposed clients, held thousands of futures contracts obliging it to purchase Nikkei tracking shares at a price hundreds of points higher than where the Japanese index now traded. As they presently stood, McTeague’s positions represented a loss of more than five billion dollars. With each further drop of the Nikkei, the loss grew exponentially.

For the moment, Doug had taken the only practical step: he’d kept McTeague in place and continued to funnel him enough cash to cover the margin and hold the positions open so the losses would remain, for now at least, unrealized. But he couldn’t keep Holland out of the loop any longer. For one thing, Finden Holdings was running out of money to lend Atlantic Securities and would need more from Union Atlantic as early as tomorrow. More important, they had now reached a line over which Doug had no intention of stepping alone. Setting up a single-purpose vehicle like Finden Holdings to get around regulatory limits was one thing; it skirted rules without quite violating them. But what Atlantic Securities and its parent bank would have to do now to survive was altogether different: deception of the exchange authorities and the deliberate misstatement of the company’s exposure to the shareholders and the public. Doug knew well enough how the principals defended themselves in investigations of this sort of thing. They did what Lay had done at Enron — claim ignorance of operational detail. Cutting the occasional corner might have been an implicit part of Doug’s job in special plans, but he had no intention of letting Holland play dumb on a scheme this size.

When he saw the lights of the party through the trees, he pulled to the side of the road. He hadn’t walked twenty yards along the fence when he glanced to his left and noticed a high juniper hedge, which seemed oddly familiar to him, almost as if he’d dreamt of it. Coming closer, he recognized the gap in the bushes and the white gravel drive. It was the Gammonds’ house, where his mother used to clean, where he used to pick her up in the afternoons, its brick façade smaller than he remembered it, the shutters painted white now rather than dark green. He’d never come to the Hollands’ from this direction and hadn’t known this house was so nearby.

The sight of it brought him up short. Picturing the old lady in her jade necklace, a moment he hadn’t thought of in years came back to him, an exchange they’d had the last time he’d come here.

She had asked, as usual, how school was going, but instead of giving his standard curt reply, he’d told her what he hadn’t figured out a way to tell his mother — that he was leaving, going into the navy. No one else but the recruiter had known, not even his cousin Michael. He had wanted to shock the old lady, to show her that he was more than her cleaning lady’s son. But she hadn’t been the least surprised. “Good for you,” she’d said. “My father was an admiral, commanded the Second Fleet during the war. He always had tremendous respect for the enlisted men.”

A trowel in her gloved hand, the skin of her face a fine, tan wrinkle, those heavy stones and the little silver rings that separated them hanging around her neck.

Why hadn’t she given him away, he wondered now. When his mother approached, Mrs. Gammond had said nothing, made no congratulatory comment or aside, as if she’d known the news was a secret. She’d just smiled and waved goodbye.

She had been elderly back then; by now she would be dead and gone.

Putting the matter aside, he kept walking up the street, looking for a gap in the fence. Stepping into the field, he strode through the tall grass, making for the house.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a figure moving quickly toward him in the twilight.

“Hold it there,” the man called out, “you can’t come in this side.” He hustled up to block Doug’s path, all suited six-three of him, complete with an earpiece and a flag pin on his lapel.

“Get out of my way,” Doug said.

“This is a private party, sir, if you—”

“I pay your fucking wage!” he shouted, pushing past the goon.

___________

HE FOUND HOLLAND coming down the steps of the terrace, a crystal tumbler in hand.

“We’ve got a problem,” Doug said. “We need to talk.”

“Well, gosh, thanks for the news flash. I’ve been dealing with it all morning. Bernie fucking Ebbers. How much money did we lend that guy? And now that showboat Spitzer is after us. Like we’re the first people in the world to do our clients a favor? He’s a politician for Christ’s sake, he does favors for a living. But oh no, the party in the market is over, right? And the people want their sacrificial lambs. The script’s as old as Teddy Roosevelt, and if we’re lucky it’ll be just as toothless. But they’ll want cash and that’s the one thing we don’t have right now, thanks to you.” He emptied his glass. “So yeah, you’re right, we’ve got a problem.”

“Let’s go inside.”

His shoulders slumping, Holland turned back up the steps and led Doug down the hall and into his study. Closing the door behind them, Doug leaned his back up against it.

“We’re in trouble,” he said. “More than we thought.”

As Doug explained what McTeague had done, Holland’s head moved up and back, as if tapped on the nose by a boxer. When it sunk forward again, his mouth was half open and he looked dazed.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No.”

At which point, the door handle nudged Doug in the small of his back and he stepped aside to watch Glenda enter. She wore a red silk dress with blue pearl buttons and across her chest a spray of diamonds.

The Adderall she’d taken following her nap had mixed with the drink to give her the novel sensation of being simultaneously drunk and highly efficient.

“Hello, Doug,” she said, unsteady on her feet. “How are you? I was so sorry to hear about Judge Cushman’s decision. But I’m sure you and Charlotte will work it out, won’t you? Now Jeffrey, you need to come with me. Did you notice we have three hundred guests in the yard? Come along, come with me.”

She motioned with her index finger as a parent might to a child.

“Where the fuck is Lauren?” Holland asked no one in particular, and certainly not his wife.

“She’s doing her job, dear. Now it’s time for you to do yours. Come along.”

“Jesus, Glenda,” he said. “Hold it together, would you? I’ll be there in ten minutes. Just get out there and deal with it. And for Christ’s sake stop drinking.”

Glenda turned to Doug and smiled. “So good to see you,” she said. “You really are so handsome. And my husband keeps you all to himself.” She rested her limp, sweating hand on his wrist. “Be a darling. Bring him out to the party, won’t you?”

Like a luxury car with poor turning radius, it took some effort for her to steer back through the door, which Doug closed behind her.

Across the room, Holland stood with his back to the bay window, his face drained, all his bluster gone. He could put on exasperation about WorldCom and Spitzer and all the other difficulties; he could even enjoy them, the way they lent him the air of the embattled leader, comfortable all the while in the knowledge that in the end the bank would take a few write-offs and move on. Companies with bloated stock prices could now and then go belly-up, but everyone knew the biggest banks just kept marching.

“We give McTeague to the authorities,” he said, reaching for conviction. “That’s what you do. We fire him, close out his positions, and put out a statement.”

“Are you out of your mind? We’d lose half our capital base overnight. Our customers would run for the doors. Not to mention trigger a crisis. You’re not thinking straight. We’re talking about survival. And not just for this company. You’ve got a responsibility to that.”

“Who the fuck are you to talk about responsibility?”

“Come on, Jeffrey. Is this how you’re going to play it? Throw your hands up, get some cheap ethical high, and spend the next three years in depositions?”

“Is that a threat?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. The point is, you’re letting the situation get to you. That’s not how it has to be.”

“Oh really? And what do you propose?”

Doug had never seen him so frightened. Most all of what Holland had achieved in life had flowed from the bottomless well of his self-confidence, a great, social largesse that made everyone in his orbit feel as if they’d been selected for the bright and winning team. Contemplating a failure of this magnitude undid the premise of him.

“We keep feeding him money for now,” Doug said. “We keep the positions off our books, on his phony clients. And we wait. Sell what and when we can and wait for the rest to turn around. We keep our nerve. That’s what we do.”

“That’s your plan? Double the entire bank down on a single bet and hope for the best? I expected more out of your scheming mind.”

“You have another idea?”

“Fraud. That’s your answer? You’re suggesting we commit fraud? You want me to stand up at the shareholders’ meeting and with all the other great news add that things are going fine and dandy in foreign operations?”

“It’s your call,” Doug said, wandering over to the bookcase. “We can sell. I can call Hong Kong right now. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to retire with some fraction of what you’ve got and be remembered as the guy who built a powerhouse and ran it into a ditch. And once they start digging and reporting and trying to understand what really happened — and they will — the shareholders will sue you anyway, and maybe the Feds will too. That’s one option: be the upstanding guy. But that’s not the advice you hired me to give you. I’m here because you wanted to win.”

Doug took down from the shelf a vintage leather-bound edition of de Gaulle’s memoirs only to find that the pages remained uncut.

“You know what I’ve been thinking lately?” he said.

“I shudder to think,” Holland said.

“About how things are changing. The old compact. Between government, companies, the news. The basic assumptions about how everyone behaves. Most people have some vague sense of it. They feel a kind of undertow and they’re scared by it. But they don’t see how fundamental the shift is. They don’t see it because they’re too busy surviving or lamenting whichever piece of the old assurances they happen to be losing. So they get sentimental, wishing the tide wouldn’t come in. At least that’s what the losers do. You can do that. Or you can admit what we’ve always been up to. And then you can focus on the bigger picture.”

“And what might that be?”

“Influence. Power over information. Control. Something bigger than rules or good taste. The more permanent instincts. You know what I’m talking about. You even get off on it. It’s just the appearance of it that bothers you.”

“You’re a piece of work. You really are.”

“You think you get all this for free?” Doug said, gesturing at the paintings and the antique furniture.

“Who the fuck do you think you are? Free? I was making loans before you were born.”

“Sure. And every year the interest rate got better, didn’t it? Government caps came off, and you could charge twenty-five percent on Joe Six-Pack’s credit card, and get him to pay you for the privilege of keeping his money.”

“What are you? Some kind of Socialist now?”

“I’m nothing,” Doug said. “I’m just saying, you take the advantage you can get. That’s how you got what you have.”

“Yeah, with one difference. It was legal.”

Doug smiled, leaning back against the bookcase. “That’s right,” he said. “And the governed have consented and all is well in the hearts of the people.”

Holland sank onto the bench in the window, all his fretful motion spent. As he stared over the darkened field from where Doug had come, the two of them listened to the sound of trumpets from the tent outside, their high, shiny notes rising on the night air.

EARLIER, AS CHARLOTTE and Henry had approached the gates, they’d been confronted by the expressionless faces of the guards.

Don’t be fooled, Wilkie whispered. They’re not here to protect you. And I know what you’re thinking — that it’s always a conspiracy with me. But just remember, they said I was paranoid, that I’d invented all that business of a plot against my life, but you know now how the FBI listened in on me, how they followed everything that went on in the Brotherhood, and I’m supposed to believe your white government didn’t know there were gunmen there at the hall waiting to kill me? You’ve been uppity, Charlotte. You’ve thwarted one of their kind. Now watch, he said. They will take your protectors from you.

And so they did, insisting the dogs be tied up to a tree. No animals allowed. They would be given plenty of water, they said, the more barrel-chested of the two claiming to be a lover of dogs.

You come to Sodom and leave your minister tethered at the gate? Sam asked, despairingly, his pompous head thick with sweat. God’s grace may be infinite, woman, but to think that He should give us help against sin without our asking and crying and weeping to Him for His help; to think that God should save us and we never set apart any time to work out our own salvation. What reason have we to believe such things? God is in Ill terms with you. He visits you not with His great consolations. Despite what you think of your victory, all things are against you; the things that appear for your Welfare, do but Ensnare you, do but Poison you, do but produce your further Distance from God.

God is a character, Charlotte thought, as she handed the leashes over to the men. A well-rounded character in a well-rounded book.

And she and Henry continued on up the hill, the ministers’ voices fading behind them.

Just three days earlier, after her vindication had been called out from the judge’s bench for all to hear, she had taken Henry for a walk up to the nursery to pick out saplings for planting once the mansion had been leveled. But all he could summon was a barely disguised disappointment at the result, as if returning five acres to their property and nature’s way were more burden than triumph. Sam and Wilkie, however, had been the larger disappointment. All spring she had calmed herself with the thought that once the strain of arguing her case was over, the dogs would relent. After all, it was for them, as well as herself, that she had fought so hard to beat the intrusion back.

Instead, their berating of her had grown incessant, their talk traitorous, reminding her that in siege warfare, it didn’t matter how high or thick your city walls were if the enemy’s agents were within.

And so just when she’d thought she might at last turn her eye to the future, Charlotte had found herself once more having to call up memories in defense: how quiet it had been in the woods, say, on a late afternoon in August as the thunderheads gathered and you could see up beyond the pale evergreen and birch, where against the powder-gray sky the black-and-orange wings of butterflies danced in the last shelves of light, fair creatures of an hour that she might never look upon more. — then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

“They were the same age, you know?” she said, as Henry glanced into the drinks tent.

“Who?”

“Keats and Eric. When they died. Twenty-five. Though of course Keats had written a good deal more and of much finer quality. But there we are. Correspondences — they keep you company.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No, I don’t expect you do.”

“Over here,” he said, leading them across the way into a second, quieter marquee, this one artificially cooled and full of elaborately set tables. He pulled out two chairs for them to sit.

“Why on earth did we come here?” she asked.

“You were invited, remember? By Glenda Holland.”

“Ah, yes. The woman who’s trying to pull the ladder up behind her. She thinks siding with me and the Historical Association will somehow absolve her of her wretched taste.”

“Why is that woman staring at us?”

“Which one?”

“That black woman over there,” Henry said. “In the beige dress.”

“I haven’t a clue,” Charlotte said.

Eventually, the woman approached. Apparently she’d heard Henry pronouncing on something or other down in the swamps of Florida.

Once she had left, Charlotte examined the place card in her hand. The number one was written on it in elaborate script. A very fine pen had been used to make such a mark, she thought, the ink strained through the nib to near perfection, not seeping at all into the crevices of the linen paper. A quick, sure stroke. You would have such place cards at a wedding. And tables like this. Eric’s family being Catholic, the ceremony would have been important to them. Who wouldn’t like it to look as it had for Henry that day he danced with Betsy on the parquet?

In what dim hollow of her mind, she wondered, had such fantasy never died?

Guests began filtering in for dinner. A bass drum sounded from the stage, followed by the heraldic notes of horns, as the assembled musicians struck up Fanfare for the Common Man.

“I’ve always rather liked this piece,” Henry said. “You remember Daddy used to love Copland.”

“I suppose he did.”

“With the record player in the window. Out on the porch. You remember.”

Late Sunday mornings with the newspaper and the breakfast tray and Charlotte in one of her blue cotton dresses and afterward their father would go back into his study and keep working. The never-ending work on behalf of the People. The work of justice conducted in the dependable medium of statute and brief.

The second burst of horns ceased, followed by a bar of silence and then again the low rumble of percussion.

“It’s just the right sort of optimism,” Henry said. “Confident without the swagger.”

“But isn’t it amazing,” she said, “what context does. The émigré Socialist homosexual cheering on the New Deal. And yet what becomes of Copland here? Pure bombast. Congratulations for pirates.”

“I’m just saying it’s a good bit of music.”

“Well, it’s certainly a simpler world if you can cabin things like that. One discreet experience after the next.”

“For Christ’s sake, can’t you give it a break? I didn’t have to come up here, you know. It’s not as if you enjoy my company.”

“Oh come on, Henry, there’s no need to revert. We’re not playing house. I say these things because I think you understand them and most people don’t. I’m sorry if it sounds like criticism. It’s just conversation, as far as I’m concerned. I know you want to help me. I appreciate that.”

“Then why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

“How do you mean? We won. The law did what it’s supposed to do. I would think you’d take some satisfaction in that.”

“I don’t mean about the land.” He watched a few familiar faces — the head of State Street, the head of Credit Suisse — coming through the entrance of the tent with their wives. “How am I supposed to say this? You’re my sister.”

“Ah. I see. You think I’m losing my mind.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to. You meant it.”

“You’re barely eating,” he said. “And the way you talk to those animals of yours.”

“I knew it would come to that: the old lady and her pets. But the world’s bigger than you think, Henry. It always has been.”

“Meaning what?”

“Do you imagine Betsy is entirely dead?”

“Charlotte, please. Give the woman a little respect.”

“That’s precisely what I’m doing. I’m not talking about ghosts. I’m saying she’s not entirely gone. Not in you.”

“Of course not. I have memories like everyone else. But as they used to say in college, that’s ontologically trivial. Not to mention which, she’s got nothing to do with your dogs.”

“Well, there you are. You ask me what’s going on but you don’t actually want to know. Not unless you already understand it. There’s a lot of that going around at the moment — your kind of certainty.”

“Oh, come off it. Don’t try to make this about politics.”

“Like I said, it’s a much simpler world if you can separate things out like that. History’s a bit of a problem for you on that account, but then who am I to question the wisdom of the age? You’re no doubt efficient.”

Guests assigned to the table where the two of them had perched began arriving to take their seats, smiling cautiously in Charlotte and Henry’s direction.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get this over with. Where are we sitting?”

“Table one, apparently. I suppose they’ve put me with Holland.”

“Well then. Time to dine with your captors.”

As they walked toward the center of the room, Holland waved them over.

“Henry, I want you to meet Doug Fanning, head of foreign operations and special plans. He runs everything around here. Doug, this is Henry Graves, president of the New York Fed.”

For a moment the two of them beheld each other in disbelief, Henry watching his own shock reflected in Doug’s face, whose eyes had gone wide with amazement.

“Do you know each other?”

Before either could reply, Glenda appeared with Charlotte on her arm and proceeded to nudge Henry to one side.

“My husband is such an awful dunce. Of course they know each other, dear. Doug and Charlotte are neighbors. Don’t you listen to anything I say? Now,” she said, pulling out the chair beside Doug’s. “You’re right here, Charlotte. I’ve put the two of you side by side so you can have a good long talk. If you get to know him, you’ll see Mr. Fanning is an absolute sweetheart. And the fact is, Doug, that house of yours is a bit ugly. Nothing that a good hedge wouldn’t solve.”

Before Henry could intervene, Glenda grabbed him by the arm and led him around to the other side of the circle.

THROUGH THE salad course and the first glass of wine, Doug and Charlotte sat in silence, the volume of conversation around them growing steadily louder. Having got what he needed from Holland — verbal approval at least — Doug had tried to leave but Glenda had returned to drag him and Jeffrey into the yard.

How perfect, he thought now, how absolutely perfect that Charlotte Graves’s brother should be the president of the New York Fed, elected by a club of his colleagues, half from his alma mater no doubt. What could be more establishment? It made sense of her hubris — imagining herself a guardian of good order.

Before that courtroom charade, she had been an irritant. Now she was a problem. Judge Cushman’s order couldn’t be allowed to stand. Doug had already talked to Mikey about how to proceed. According to the public record, the Graves Society was a financial mess. They would attack the charity. If they could kick the struts out from under that, her argument would crumble. But they would need documentation faster than she would ever produce it.

“So!” she said, addressing herself to the silver-dipped roses at the center of the table just after their dinner plates had arrived. “Where is it you suppose you’ll go come September? A neighboring state, perhaps?”

Emptying his second glass of wine, Doug lifted his fork from the table, wondering how quickly she would bleed out from a stab to the heart.

“You were a schoolteacher, right?”

“That’s none of your business. But yes, I was.”

“Do they have mandatory retirement these days? Or was there some other reason you had to leave?”

“It’s incredible to me, Mr. Fanning, that a person could be quite so transparent as yourself. One imagines that adulthood comes with some minimum of complexity. You had one of your minions look back over the local paper, did you? Learned of my travails? How intrepid of you. Perhaps you already know, then, that my subject is history. Most of my fellow teachers, and the textbooks for that matter, presented the material as if it were a simple record, a kind of newscast to be placed in front of the young, for what reason these days no one’s particularly sure, beyond a few nostrums about not repeating ourselves. But that’s not the tack I took. I was a little more opinionated than that. I had the temerity to suggest that certain developments in human society were better or more dangerous or more evil than others, and I’m not talking about your standard twentieth-century horrors, the ones they throw in for free. I’m talking about people like you. The despoilers. The patriots of capitalism. Given the ubiquity of your type these days, is it any surprise they forced me out?”

Doug took a breath to calm himself and said, “I’m going to take a wild guess and say that you knew the Gammonds.”

“Herb and Ginger?” she said. “Of course. They were lovely people. Have you bought their land as well, then?”

“No. When I was a kid I knew them. My mother used to clean their house.”

“Is this some kind of joke?”

“No. I grew up in Alden.”

“I see,” she said, examining his face in earnest, considering this new fact. “I know what you see when you look at me. An old whatsit crying, ‘Not in my backyard.’ That’s what you say to yourself about what I’m doing. A crone who wants her trees back. Which I do. But I have to take my stand where I can. You probably won’t believe me when I say that it’s not personal, but it isn’t. I suppose I have allowed myself to think of you as a villain, but really it’s not you I despise. For all I know you’re a Democrat. It’s just what you stand for that I can’t abide. And I’m not so naïve as to think that running you off that land will solve the bigger problem, but at least I will have done that.

“I wonder, Mr. Fanning. If you were to see a lone soldier fighting an army, what would you think of him? That he is a fool? Or that he simply believes in his cause?”

“Neither. I’d say he was going to lose.”

“Right. Because that matters more than anything to you, doesn’t it? Dominance. That’s the childish pleasure you people can’t get enough of. You get your fix dressed up in a suit, but it’s no different than a drug. You’re angry. And once the men like you start this war of theirs, people will die by the thousands to cure that feeling in them.”

“In my experience, killing doesn’t cure much.”

She raised her head, turning her ear to listen to something over the din of the party. “Do you hear that?” she asked. “Do you hear barking?”

“You need to understand something,” he said. “You haven’t won anything. You just haven’t lost yet.”

“What have they done with them?” she cried, standing abruptly from the table, straining to hear some phantom noise. “Henry,” she called out, bringing a halt to the table’s conversation, the bankers and their wives staring at her in polite alarm. “Henry, where are they?”

RELEGATED to the children’s table, Nate and the gang had waited what seemed an eternity before the fat-slathered pork and spareribs finally arrived. They set to gorging and in no time at all their plates were clean and cleared and peanut-butter parfait topped with American flags on toothpicks appeared in front of them.

“I can’t take this music anymore,” Jason said. “We need to get out of here.” He rose without pushing back his chair, causing his knees to slam against the underside of the table and spill multiple water glasses before he fell again into his seat.

Eventually, they roused themselves and headed out through the broiling kitchen tent, past a swarm of short, dark people scraping half-eaten dinners into heaping garbage pails, the taller black waiters staring blankly at the tips of their cigarettes, as the head man popped the corks of the champagne. “On the trays!” he shouted, as the four of them slipped through an opening by barrels of melting ice.

“It’s hotter than a jungle out here,” Hal said.

Spotting a guard lounging at the gate in his shirtsleeves, they tacked rightward toward the trees in front of the house. That’s when they heard growling and the rustling of chains. Jason jumped sideways, falling into a rose border.

“Dogs,” Hal said.

Walking nearer, Nate recognized Wilkie and Sam. “Weird,” he said. “They’re my tutor’s.”

“That’s deep. What do they teach you?”

Their bowls were empty and they looked up at Nate with sad, gaping eyes.

As the others drifted off, he untied their leashes and shooed the two of them up onto the terrace and into the house. Adjacent to the kitchen was a kind of cat apartment with carpeted walls, wicker bassinets, and in one corner a forest of dangling string. Way too large for this feline retreat, Wilkie and Sam knocked about like vandals in a child’s room, their bulky heads clearing windowsills of teak brushes and padded collars, Sam ripping strands of twine from the mobile with an impatient yank of his jaw.

“Chill out there,” Nate said, looking through the cabinets of tinned salmon and prescription drugs for something more substantial. Finding nothing, he opened as many tiny cans as he could into the miniature bowls before the dogs shouldered him aside to get at their supper. He fetched them water and sat for a moment on the chair in the corner, watching their glistening tongues lick the steel clean.

And then their heads were up again, eyes still brimming with hope.

“That’s it, guys. Sorry.”

They sniffed at the cat baskets, rummaging in search of their inhabitants.

“Stay here, okay? Just stay.”

He pulled the door ajar and crossed back through the kitchen, heading out into the front hall, wondering where Ms. Graves might be. Here and there on decorative chairs and benches guests had taken refuge from the heat and the crowd, an older couple dozing upright on a chaise longue, a Japanese businessman in a tight black suit tapping away at his BlackBerry, while a few feet behind him a gaunt woman in a sweat-stained silk dress ruminated on a painting over the fireplace.

Heading up the stairs, Nate paused on the first landing, from which three hallways ran off into different wings of the house, each painted a different color, one beige, one pale blue, one dark red. The others had likely retreated to the third floor, back up to Jason’s room, which could only mean more bong hits and combat, a prospect he didn’t relish just now given how forcefully his retinas continued to pulse to the beat of his heart.

Stilled there on the landing for a moment, he found himself slowly drawn to the pattern on the wallpaper of the blue hallway. Little indigo diamonds were set on an azure background and surrounded by tiny gold stars each in turn ringed in a halo of silver, the design stretching on uninterrupted by picture frames or light fixtures, as if decoration of this particular wing had gone unfinished.

Coming closer, he could see another pattern beneath, stamped in outline onto the paper itself: hexagons contained within octagons contained in circles, which were themselves woven of figure eights, each figure only an inch wide, the stamp repeated a thousand times over. Moving from background to foreground and back, his eyes roved up and down, left and right, searching in vain for a place to rest, for something to comprehend or analyze, but he could find nothing, no larger, central figure or meaning, forcing him eventually to give up and simply let the pattern enter him unconceptualized, the whole ungrasped, which strangely enough, after a few moments, produced an oddly pleasurable sensation, a kind of relief from the responsibility to understand, at which point he moved in a step closer losing all lateral perspective, as when he’d lost himself in the endless zigzag of the houndstooth check of his father’s overcoat as he was carried half asleep from the backseat of the car up to his bedroom as a boy, pressed against that endless repetition. The sudden memory of which he now condemned as sentimental. Thus covering self-pity in self-punishment, both of them equally false, both of them walls thrown up to block the view of something hopelessly vaster.

He kept on down the hall, coming to the open door of a bedroom done up in nautical style with powder-blue curtains and a navy bedspread and a replica of an old ocean liner set in a glass box on a table between the windows. At the bedside table, he picked up the cordless phone and dialed.

It rang three times, as it always did, before his mother answered, her voice rising gently on the last syllable of “Hello?”

“It’s me,” he said. “I’m over at Jason’s. I told you, right? His mother’s having this party.”

“Is she? Oh, good. Have they given you supper?”

“Yeah. They’ve got these tents set up and everything. Are you going to watch the fireworks?”

“Oh, I’ll probably put the TV on later. I suppose they’ll be starting soon. It’s a good night for them.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“That I’m not there.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m fine. I’m just catching up on the paper. There’s a wonderful piece about walruses with the most amazing pictures. Such odd-looking creatures and they sing these incredible songs to one another. I’ll cut it out for you.”

“I could come home if you want.”

“Nate, don’t be silly. I’m fine. Are you staying the night?”

“I might.”

“Well, enjoy yourself.”

“Did you put the air conditioner on?”

“Oh, no, it’s so loud. I hate the sound of it. I’ve got the windows open and there’s a bit of a breeze.”

“Mom, you should turn it on. It’s broiling.”

“It’ll cool down.”

“Well … I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“All right, then. Good night, dear.”

He put the phone back in its cradle, aware all of a sudden of the quiet.

“Nate? What are you doing here?”

He turned in wonder to see Doug already halfway into the room.

“Jason Holland,” he finally sputtered. “He’s my friend.”

“Jesus. What a mind-fuck this party is. Where the hell did Glenda put the bathrooms? I’ve been looking all over.”

“There’s one right there,” Nate said, pointing to the far end of the room.

When Doug had gone inside, Nate instinctively rose to shut the door to the hallway, his heart sprinting, imagining what would happen if Jason or one of the others were to wander in here now. Slowly, his breathing came under control. He tucked his shirt into his shorts and ran a hand through his hair, wishing he’d had the chance to shower after swimming and sweating out in the yard with the dogs. In the mirror, the fabric bunched now at his waist looked queer so he untucked his shirt again and tried pulling his shorts lower on his hips.

When Doug stepped back into the room, Nate noticed that he was pale, as if he hadn’t slept. Strangely, the exhaustion seemed to have removed from his face a layer of his usual indifference.

“So you know the Hollands?”

“Yeah,” Doug replied. “I know them.”

“I stopped by the house a few times. Have you been away?”

“I’ve been busy.”

The thrill of being alone in a room with him again seemed to make everything else fall away. What would it matter if someone did come knocking at the door? This — between them — this was about what they wanted. Not who the desire made them.

Trying to hide his erection, Nate took a seat on the edge of the bed.

Doug paused to inspect the replica of the ocean liner.

It was the SS Normandie. Just over a thousand feet, according to the brass plaque. As long as an aircraft carrier, with a draft as deep, and likely capable of a similar speed, thirty knots or so, complete with the ballrooms and the luxury suites. Such a classy, elegant profile, she had, the stuff of postcards. Capsized dockside in the Hudson, if Doug remembered correctly, and sold for scrap.

“Glenda’s crazy,” he observed. “She thinks she’s some kind of duchess.”

“Mrs. Holland? Yeah. She’s a weird cook too.”

“Let me guess. You’re high as a kite.”

“No — I mean, not really. We smoked earlier but—”

“I need a favor,” he said, examining the fine thread braided into a miniature length of rope and coiled on the ship’s foredeck. “In the old lady’s house. There are papers, records, lots of them, I’m guessing. I need as much about the case as you can get. Are you going to do that for me?”

“I thought it was over.”

“No. We’re just in a new phase.”

He came over to stand in front of Nate. A couple of weeks earlier he’d gone so far as to agree to go to a movie with the kid, even though he knew it would only feed his fantasy of the two of them as actually together. Nate had dressed up in pressed chinos and an ironed shirt; he’d even polished his shoes.

To be that innocent, he thought.

He looked up at Doug with such tender hope.

“What do you want from me?” Doug asked. “You want me to fuck you?”

Nate blushed. “Why are you being so harsh?”

“That’s what you want. Right?”

When he tried to stand up Doug put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him down again; he turned to face the wall. Looking at the kid’s profile, it occurred to Doug how easy it would be to take his head in his hands and with a quick twist of the neck, kill him.

“I swear to God,” Vrieger had said to him once, “I wish I had stabbed every one of those passengers to death. At least then I’d know what we did to them.”

“You think I’m an idiot,” Nate said. “You think just because I keep coming to your house you can say anything you want to me. I’m not as weak as you think. I’ve been through stuff.”

“Okay. Fine. But here’s the question: Are you strong enough to tell me what you want? That’s the test, in the real world. I told you what I want. I want those papers.”

He reached out and cupped the back of Nate’s skull in his hand, pressing his thumb and forefinger into the taut muscles of his neck. Slowly, reluctantly, Nate leaned forward, letting his head come to rest against Doug’s stomach.

“What if I want to tell you that I love you?”

“You don’t love me. I make you hard, that’s all. Which is fine. The rest is daydreaming. But don’t worry,” Doug said, running his hand through Nate’s hair. “I like you.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Why not?”

DAISIES AND MILKWEED and high summer grass scratched at Charlotte’s ankles and shins, catching on the hem of her dress as the crickets and frogs all about her in the field sang in endless oscillation.

They can’t have gone far, she thought, how far could the dogs have gone? Lights from the party died away at the woods’ edge.

“Samuel!” she called into the blackness, dotted here and there by fireflies. “Wilkie!”

Mosquitoes swarmed at her head and along her bare arms she could feel the tingle of gnats. The air itself seemed to sweat, the pores of every living thing opening wide, sap bleeding from the pines, the bushy arrowheads of the grass stalks bursting to seed, the whole warm earth breathing in the darkness.

Her temples still throbbed from the receding cacophony of voices and music. She’d focused as best she could talking to Fanning, as she always tried to in the presence of others, holding fast to the teleological mind, that once broad current that flowed past the lacuna of doubt and random transport. But those organizing arguments dropped away again here.

Stepping into the woods, she reached her hand out and felt the smooth bark of a birch.

“Come along,” she called out to them. “Come along.”

She could barely see her hand in front of her face, the darkness molten now like a closed eyelid’s slow swirl.

Why search? Such pedants and moralists Sam and Wilkie had become. Yet as soon as she imagined being without them the feeling of loneliness bit at her. She had been nearly cured of that disease before they had come along. She had been content in solitude. Her soul kept alive by the leaps of incandescence that now and then hallowed intervals otherwise inconsequent: the rhythm of words singing off a page, a sonata turning time into feeling, a landscape on a canvas so caught as to grant one brief respite from the fear of total neutrality. These were the body and blood of her faith in the world. What the utilitarians and the materialists and the swallowers of all the cheap scientism would never understand: that the privilege of walking by the river in nature’s company owed as much to a mind trained by poetry and painting — of Protestant plainsong or Romantic largesse — as to any quiddity of nature’s own. You walked through the painting. You saw through the poem. Imagination created experience, not matter alone.

“Wilkie!”

If they went too far they might reach the road, where they could be hit by a car or cut their paws on glass.

Somewhere in the distance, she heard a young woman’s cry. She turned, seeing nothing but darkness behind her. All of a sudden, there was a terrible beating of wings and she felt the stiff tips of feathers brush against her arm as a bird took off right beside her, a crow by the sound of the call it made as it veered up and away. She began walking more quickly, her breathing growing heavy again, the back of her dress soaked through with sweat. Roots protruding from the ground and the low branches of the pines made the going hard. Just as she saw what she thought were lights up ahead, she felt a sharp nick on her leg and shifted to her right to avoid it only to feel another stab on her wrist. Frightened, she reached her arms out in front of her, and started moving faster still.

THE GUESTS, stuffed and drunk, had at last been herded out onto the lawn for the fireworks, the flush-faced town collegians on break from summer internships grabbing their third or fourth glasses of champagne as the foreign investors trailed after them remarking to themselves that no matter how weak the dollar or poorly managed the public fisc, really you couldn’t beat the States for all the sights to see. And there, teetering on a riser overlooking the pond stood Glenda Holland soused to the gills, trying to shush the players who’d already struck up the opening largo of the 1812 Overture.

Hal, for reasons he couldn’t later recall, had been in search of twine and a shovel when, at about this time, he flipped the switch on the garage-door opener. The panicked sheep fled as if from the abattoir, waddling at a clip across the drive, bleating as they went, only to be penned again between the tents, driven into the rear of the gathering crowd, who turned in astonishment at this sudden outbreak of the agrarian. When an EverSafe Security employee drew a semiautomatic from under his jacket and held it down toward the shaggy, neglected creatures, a vegan sophomore from Vassar standing nearby cried “Terrorist!” at the top of her lungs. No sooner had she uttered the word, than champagne flutes were tossed aside and crushed under foot as the guests toward the front, blind to the nature of the threat, were sickened by the sudden knowledge that their decision to avoid city crowds had failed to deliver them from danger, and with no other direction to go they hurried down the slope into the grass, scattering toward the woods and the pond and roadway. Others closer to the incident merely returned to their tables, baffled as to the origin or meaning of the episode. For a while, mild chaos reigned, Glenda trying desperately to conscript the guards as shepherds, while some of the younger and more inebriated guests, amused at the folly, began feeding the sheep the remainders of the peanut-butter parfait. Nerves shot, the animals began shitting profusely, on the grass, on the dance floor, on the feet of exhausted partygoers, who sent up new cries, the stink thrown off by the steaming piles mixing with the stale scent of the machine-cooled tents to give what remained of the gathering the air of a barnyard in autumn or early spring.

Emerging onto the terrace, Nate encountered a ewe working a drainpipe loose with the scratching motion of her tubby white flank.

“You!” a man in a baggy gray suit called out. “Have you seen my sister?”

“Shit,” he said, recognizing Ms. Graves’s brother from one of his visits to her house. “I’ll find her.”

It seemed to take forever to wade through the milling crowd. Eventually, he managed to circle around to the parking area, where by the gate he finally saw her. She walked stooped forward and with great effort. When he reached her he saw she had bright-red scratch marks lined all up and down her arms and legs and one across the side of her neck.

“Ms. Graves, the dogs, they’re inside, they’re fine. It’s my fault. I wanted to feed them.”

Tears welled in her eyes, though her kindly, pained smile never faltered.

“These people don’t clear their underbrush,” she said. “There’s a nasty patch of briars in there. A few hours with the clippers is all I’d need.”

Lending his arm for support, he walked her slowly up the path.

“What on earth are you doing here?” she asked. “Don’t tell me these people are your friends.”

No sooner had he found a chair for Charlotte back up on the lawn than Mrs. Holland once more ascended the little riser, waving her arms and calling out to whomever remained to please, please, hurry up and watch. The bleary faces of a few stalwart celebrants turned just in time to see the barge on the pond explode in one single, hammering burst, the flames from the blast shooting twenty or thirty feet into the air before dripping back into the water like burning fuel, and so too over the dry grass, which began at once to burn.

Chapter 14

The heat kept on through July. On the Finden High playing fields, soccer-camp kids drilled from steamy morning to hazy afternoon, and the unfortunates remanded to summer school sweated it out in the same remorseless classrooms they’d tried all year to avoid. Mold flourished in unfinished basements and in the trunks of parents’ old cars littered with sodden swimsuits and damp towels smeared in suntan lotion and the remains of spilt beer. The moisture dampened even the sound of traffic, which in the normal course of events would have lessened once the semester ended, but school exchanges had been canceled in the wake of 9/11 and family vacations to Europe called off. Parents told kids to get summer jobs and pulled back from the promise of cars for college. You heard stories of people’s moms and dads being laid off from office jobs that if you’d ever bothered to contemplate seemed eternal in their boredom. The town put out the usual flags, and the flowers beneath them bloomed. And for all the worry shot down the cable wires, for all the jokes about duct tape and the town police cordoning off the baseball diamond to detonate a grade-schooler’s lost knapsack, for all the hours of news spooling tape on the dirty bomber and Saddam’s vast arsenal and the tall, smiling Satan eluding our might in the mountains of some hopelessly foreign country, the drama club still had its bake sale and the library still sold books out on the sidewalk from noon to three on weekends, and you still wished for a clarifying rain at the end of each sweltering day.

Such a rain arrived on the Friday afternoon two weeks after the party, just as Nate was getting to Ms. Graves’s house. She led him into the living room and took a seat in her usual spot on the couch. In the stifling heat, the room’s disarray was strictly oppressive, the mounds of clutter like plants rotting in a jungle. None of this would ever be cleared away, he thought, not as long as she remained rooted here.

Her voice lacked its usual force and she often paused in her meandering discourse, which contained no more breathless jeremiads. She spoke awhile of Dewey and the spread of primary education, but he could tell her thoughts were elsewhere.

“You needn’t worry,” she said after a particularly long silence, during which he’d noticed the scabs still visible on her shins. “I know you aren’t studying for your exam anymore. You’ve been good to indulge me like this. I know I’ve bored you.”

“That’s not true,” he said, gnawing at the blunt end of his pen.

She gazed past him out the window.

“I’ve been thinking of birch trees for along the riverbank. What do you think? Perhaps a mix of things would be better.”

On his way over, Nate had tried telling himself that the documents wouldn’t matter, that she had already won her suit. But the excuse seemed thin now; Doug wouldn’t want the files if he couldn’t gain something by them.

“In any case, I’ll make us some tea.”

As soon as she left the room, he began darting from one pile of paper to the next, keeping a close eye on the door. He gathered bank statements, tax records, notarized letters, and anything else from that mass of print which seemed relevant. On a stack by the fireplace he saw a manila folder labeled “Society Minutes” and he shoved it in his knapsack along with the rest. His only thought as he went about his task was a disavowed one: that losing his father permitted him this moral lapse. As if, in some grand ledger, his loss had earned him a pass or two.

Ms. Graves returned carrying a tray of tea and biscuits.

“I’ve been returning to Whitman,” she said, as she poured them each a cup. “He’s right about most things. But if you take him to heart, you can’t always read the poems in your favor. He has this way of looking back at you. Here’s one I came across this morning. ‘To a Historian.’”

She put on her reading glasses and recited the lines in a slow, reflective voice.

“‘You who celebrates bygones, / Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the races, the life that has exhibited itself, / Who have treated of man as the creature of politics, aggregates, rulers and priests, / I, habitan of the Alleghenies, treating of him as he is in himself in his own rights, / Pressing the pulse of life that has seldom exhibited itself, (the great pride of man in himself,) Chanter of Personality, outlining what is yet to be, / I project the history of the future.’

“Bracing stuff, no? The question is, can you chant personality without devolving into solipsism? Can you trust the pulse of life without becoming Mr. Fanning? Because he is the future. One way or the other. His kind of rapaciousness, it doesn’t end. It just bides its time.”

___________

LATER THAT EVENING Nate stood in the middle of Doug’s kitchen watching him spread the files across the counter. He’d gone home first to shower and change but on the walk back he’d sweated through his T-shirt again.

“Does this mean she’s going to lose?”

Doug fingered an envelope, glancing at the return address.

“She was always going to lose,” he said. “It’s just a question of when.”

“She’s not evil, you know.”

“You feel bad, huh?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

Doug flipped through another folder, ignoring Nate’s question. “This is good,” he said. “You’ve done well. There’s beer in the fridge if you want it.”

Taking one, Nate wandered down the hall, through the first empty room, and into the space where the TV stood in the corner. Here, binders and files now covered a large portion of the floor. Two laptops, their power cords running several yards to the wall sockets, were set up on the kitchen table, which had been brought in and placed beside the couch.

Doug followed him in and turned on the Sox-Yankees game.

“The fact is, she was obliged to give us copies of those papers weeks ago. That’s the law. So you can relax. It’s not on you.”

They watched as the designated hitter, Ramirez, struck a ball deep into center field, driving home the runner at third and bringing the crowd at Fenway to its feet.

It wasn’t too late to walk back into the kitchen, Nate thought, to gather those papers up and leave. “You were wrong about the baseball thing,” he said. “I did watch it before I met you.”

“You’re a weirdo.”

“Yeah. So are you.”

“Why don’t you go upstairs. Go ahead. Take your clothes off. I’ll be up in a bit.”

Nate’s heart thudded against his chest. “What if I don’t want to?”

“Suit yourself.”

The bed hadn’t been made. Nate pulled the sheets up and tucked them in, arranging the cotton blanket at the foot of the mattress and putting the pillows back in place. He wondered if he should keep the lamp on but decided not to, leaving only the light from the bathroom. He folded his trousers and put them with his shoes and belt on the floor in the corner. The nights he’d stayed over they had always been under the sheets together, Nate getting Doug off, never the other way around. He had never even been naked in front of him.

He waited there in his underwear, terrified at the thought of what kind of person he was for wanting this. He waited ten minutes and then another ten. He could hear the television still on downstairs, switched to a different station.

Eyes closed, trying to forget everything — his life and the world outside this house — he sensed that for all the highs he’d experienced while stoned in the back of Jason’s car or tripping by the lake, for all the cares that such forcings of the brain had displaced, none would free him from himself as this might.

To be pressed down into the bed by Doug’s full weight, the last remnant of the minding self rubbed into oblivion. To be taken over and used up and made to go away. A body as strong as Doug’s could do that to you.

At last the sound of the TV ceased and a few moments later Doug came through the bedroom door. He walked to the window and leaned against the sill.

“You’re not taking your shirt off?” he asked.

“I don’t look like you. I’m not muscular.”

“That’s fine. You’re more like a girl that way.”

“Is that how you think of me?”

“I’m just saying, you’re fine. Go on. Take your shirt off. And the boxers.”

Nate pulled his T-shirt over his head and laid it on the bed beside him and then he slipped his shorts off, his throat tightening, just a thread of air reaching his lungs.

Pushing his shoes off and unbuttoning his shirt, Doug approached the bed.

“My God, you’re young,” he said, taking Nate’s chin in his hand. “You really are.”

Withdrawing from his touch, Nate lay back on the bed, covering himself with one hand.

“I’ve never done this,” he whispered.

Making no reply, Doug picked Nate up by the rib cage and turned him over onto his stomach.

“Just close your eyes,” he said, shifting onto the bed. And then Nate felt Doug’s knees pressing against the inside of his own, spreading his legs apart. He’d been self-conscious about his body for so long, for so many years, and yet he’d still never known the sensation could be this intense, as if, perversely, by enacting the fantasy of self-forgetting the self only grew stronger and more ineluctable than ever. He heard the drawer of the bedside table open and close.

“Here. Up on your knees.”

Doug’s hands grasped him at the waist, pulling him backward. He turned his head to look up at him but again Doug told him to close his eyes. A thick warmth pressed up against his ass and then, after a moment of struggle, he felt a sudden, sharp ring of pain coil up through his body and into his head, making the blood beat at his temples and forcing him to gasp for breath.

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to rape you.”

That he would lose control of his bowels seemed certain but when that sensation ended he found himself able to breathe again, breathing and sweating, still in great pain but a pain that moved too fast along the tips of his nerves to make him want to stop.

He felt Doug’s pelvis flat against him and the muscles of his back and neck released and he let go, the vigilant self finally fading as the thrusting began, the shock of it driven into him over and over.

From the base of his spine some liquid locked deep against the bone released and burst up into his skull, heating his brain to the edge of fainting. Leaning down on his forearms, his forehead to the mattress, he held on for another few seconds and then came without touching himself, his head jerking sharply backward, his shoulders contracting down his back.

A few strokes later Doug pulled out of him and rolled flat on the bed.

Nate stood and headed quickly for the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

“You all right?” Doug called out a few minutes later.

“Yeah,” he said, leaning against the tiled wall of the shower, the old dread of discovery and the basic penal shame washing back over him with the scalding water.