“If I do one thing on this cruise,” she said, “I’m going to get through all these magazines.”
“No sign of Chip,” Alfred said.
Denise brought slices of tart on dessert plates to the dining table. “I’m afraid we may have seen the last of Chip today.”
“It’s very peculiar,” Enid said. “I don’t understand why he doesn’t at least call.”
“I’ve endured worse,” Alfred said.
“Dad, there’s dessert. My pastry chef made a pear tart. Do you want to have it at the table?”
“Oh, that’s much too big a piece for me,” Enid said.
“Dad?”
Alfred didn’t answer. His mouth had gone slack and sour again in the way that made Enid feel that something terrible was going to happen. He turned to the darkening, rain-spotted windows and gazed at them dully, his head hanging low.
“Dad?”
“Al? There’s dessert.”
Something seemed to melt in him. Still looking at the window, he raised his head with a tentative joy, as if he thought he recognized someone outside, someone he loved.
“Al, what is it?”
“Dad?”
“There are children,” he said, sitting up straighter. “Do you see them?” He raised a trembling index finger. “There.” His finger moved laterally, following the motion of the children he saw. “And there. And there.”
He turned to Enid and Denise as if he expected them to be overjoyed to hear this news, but Enid was not the least bit overjoyed. She was about to embark on a very elegant fall color cruise on which it would be extremely important that Alfred not make mistakes like this.
“Al, those are sunflowers,” she said, half angry, half beseeching. “You’re seeing reflections in the window.”
“Well!” He shook his head bluffly. “I thought I saw children.”
“No, sunflowers,” Enid said. “You saw sunflowers.”
After his party was voted out of power and the Russian currency crisis had finished off the Lithuanian economy, Gitanas said, he’d passed his days alone in the old offices of the VIPPPAKJRIINPB17, devoting his idle hours to constructing a Web site whose domain name, lithuania.com, he’d purchased from an East Prussian speculator for a truckload of mimeograph machines, daisy-wheel printers, 64-kilobyte Commodore computers, and other Gorbachev-era office equipment—the party’s last physical vestiges. To publicize the plight of small debtor nations, Gitanas had created a satiric Web page offering DEMOCRACY FOR PROFIT: BUY A PIECE OF EUROPEAN HISTORY and had seeded links and references in American news groups and chat rooms for investors. Visitors to the site were invited to send cash to the erstwhile VIPPPAKJRIINPB17—“one of Lithuania’s most venerable political parties,” the “cornerstone” of the country’s governing coalition for “three of the last seven years,” the leading vote-getter in the April 1993 general election, and now a “Western-leaning pro-business party” reorganized as the “Free Market Party Company.” Gitanas’s Web site promised that, as soon as the Free Market Party Company had bought enough votes to win a national election, its foreign investors would not only become “equity shareholders” in Lithuania Incorporated (a “for-profit nation state”) but would also be rewarded, in proportion to the size of their investment, with personalized memorials to their “heroic contribution” to the “market liberation” of the country. By sending just $100, for example, an American investor could have a street in Vilnius (“no less than two hundred meters in length”) named after him; for $5,000 the Free Market Party Company would hang a portrait of the investor (“minimum size 60 cm × 80 cm; includes ornate gilt frame”) in the Gallery of National Heroes at the historic
“It was a nasty little joke,” Gitanas said from the corner of the taxicab into which he’d wedged himself. “But who laughed? Nobody laughed. They just sent money. I gave an address and the cashier checks started coming in. E-mail queries by the hundred. What products would Lithuania Inc. make? Who were the officers in the Free Market Party Company and did they have a strong track record as managers? Did I have records of past earnings? Could the investor alternatively have a Lithuanian street or village named after his children or his children’s favorite Pokémon character? Everybody wanted more information. Everybody wanted brochures. And prospectuses! And stock certificates! And brokerage information! And are we listed on such and such exchange and so forth? People want to come and visit! And nobody is laughing.”
Chip was tapping on the window with a knuckle and checking out the women on Sixth Avenue. The rain was letting up, umbrellas coming down. “Are the proceeds going to you or to the Party?”
“OK, so my philosophy about that is in transition,” Gitanas said. From his briefcase he took a bottle of akvavit from which he’d already poured deal-sealing shots in Eden’s office. He rolled sideways and handed it to Chip, who took a healthy pull and gave it back.
“You were an English teacher,” Gitanas said.
“I taught college, yeah.”
“And where your people from? Scandinavia?”
“My dad’s Scandinavian,” Chip said. “My mom’s sort of mongrel Eastern European.”
“People in Vilnius will look at you and think you’re one of us.”
Chip was in a hurry to get to his apartment before his parents left. Now that he had cash in his pocket, a roll of thirty hundreds, he didn’t care so much what his parents thought of him. In fact, he seemed to recall that a few hours earlier he’d seen his father trembling and pleading in a doorway. As he drank the akvavit and checked out the women on the sidewalk, he could no longer fathom why the old man had seemed like such a killer.
It was true that Alfred believed the only thing wrong with the death penalty was that it wasn’t used often enough; true as well that the men whose gassing or electrocution he’d called for, over dinner in Chip’s childhood, were usually black men from the slums on St. Jude’s north side. (“Oh, Al,” Enid would say, because dinner was “the family meal,” and she couldn’t understand why they had to spend it talking about gas chambers and slaughter in the streets.) And one Sunday morning, after he’d stood at a window counting squirrels and assessing the damage to his oak trees and zoysia the way white men in marginal neighborhoods took stock of how many houses had been lost to “the blacks,” Alfred had performed an experiment in genocide. Incensed that the squirrels in his not-large front yard lacked the discipline to stop reproducing or pick up after themselves, he went to the basement and found a rat trap over which Enid, as he came upstairs with it, shook her head and made small negative noises. “Nineteen of them!” Alfred said. “Nineteen of them!” Emotional appeals were no match for the discipline of such an exact and scientific figure. He baited the trap with a piece of the same whole wheat bread that Chip had eaten, toasted, for breakfast. Then all five Lamberts went to church, and between the Gloria Patri and the Doxology a young male squirrel, engaging in the high-risk behavior of the economically desperate, helped itself to the bread and had its skull crushed. The family came home to find green flies feasting on the blood and brain matter and chewed whole-wheat bread that had erupted through the young squirrel’s shattered jaws. Alfred’s own mouth and chin were sewn up in the distaste that special exertions of discipline—the spanking of a child, the eating of rutabaga—always caused