“Thank you, gentlemen,” Irma said, and excused herself to the lower bedroom to check on the new guest.
A few of them returned to their plates. Another got Smithson up and walking again, though the master electrician complained that his jaw wasn’t working right and went to bed early. The rest sat down around the dining table in their shirtsleeves to smoke.
After a while, Nathan went up to his room and spread out his work on the secondary controls he’d promised Maufrais, but the air was hot and still, and he found himself squinting in the weak light of his small lamp. As he struggled with it, he heard the sounds of the household turning in. He worked on until a splinter of pain began to press its way through his skull and he had to abandon the drawings. He sat back in his chair, rubbing his face, then stood and went to the door, listening. The house was silent. As quietly as he could, he opened his door and slipped out.
The moon was not yet risen and the town was quiet and dark, with only the small lights of oil lamps inside the houses. The orange glowings of cigarettes and cigars shown on the front porches where people silently regarded him. Here and there a breeze kicked up, and he could hear the murmur of conversations. Behind a picket fence, a dog wore itself out barking.
Nathan followed the street into the town proper, passing black and silent stores.
He came once more to the elm where the children had been looking over the wreck a few days before. In the night it was a hulking black thing, its trunk thrusting upward into the darkness. He felt around its girth with his hands until he found the cuts that the car had left in it. They were dry now, the wounds stanched by the hardened sap. The crickets were singing, and the scents of summer flowers drifted in the air.
His hand went to his jacket pocket and withdrew the envelope with the newspaper clipping. It was too dark to see, but he remembered her face clearly. The newspapers had gotten their hands on the photo from her employment file. In it, her expression was serious.
Had another car come along like the first and missed the curve in the road, its headlights would have found Nathan Miller sitting at the tree’s base, his head low, the clipping that had been addressed to him in his hands. But there were no more cars that night, and he was alone and unknown, swaddled by the complete darkness.
AS A BOY, NATHAN HAD DREAMT OF BECOMING A MAN who built things, one of the shapers of the cities. He had a gift for seeing the world built up from sums and derivatives, formulae in the spans of bridges, in the flow of water through utility mains: the secret language of the physical world. After he’d finished at college he sent out letters to the big firms of New York and Chicago, seeking work, but in the end, his father had put his name forward at the local firm where he himself had risen to middle management.
With his graduation gift money, he bought a new gray wool suit and began catching the trolley downtown each morning. Hardy & Ross was old and well-reputed. Nathan’s office was on the fourth floor. He’d come in early to watch the broad plain of the Mississippi at daybreak. The city’s economy was recovering from the collapse, firms trying to find a way to rekindle the dampened fire of capitalism. Here and there, buildings were going up, but he wasn’t the one building them. It had been a coup to get a job at Hardy & Ross, but it was an old firm and it did things in the old fashion. There were rungs to the ladder that led upward, and they could not be skipped over. He languished his first year and a half drawing plans created by more senior men. He tried to distinguish himself, of course, but speaking up only got him the wrong sort of attention. He was shunted off into a department run by the chairman’s nephew, a towering, pink-eyed drunk named Graham. Around the firm, their department was called the junk yard because only the worst was sent their way, projects with no promise, projects with no budget, banal projects with no room to innovate. He spent another six months drawing wiring diagrams for streetlights, tracing out the light duty transmission lines for housing developments.
The Peregrine Park project had seemed small at first, too, another tiny municipal project with no budget in a delta town, but there had been something about it that had drawn Nathan’s interest. Maybe it was that when he spread the firm’s road atlas and searched with a fingernail for the city, he was struck by the size of the blank emptiness that surrounded its designating dot. He spent more time looking over the parameters, made the effort the following week to meet with the committee overseeing the effort for the town. Something in their need snagged his attention, drew his focus. The electrical work for the park had been fairly straightforward, but when he was done with that, he sought other pieces to complete. Graham had been particularly bad all autumn, barely showing up at the office most weeks, and it had been easy for Nathan to expand his role. He drew up the controls for a park carousel. He coordinated between labor and surrounding lumber yards to keep the deliveries arriving when they were needed. He met with the committee at luncheons to discuss parking lot configurations. Once he started, he found he couldn’t stop. Because he knew he was succeeding.
The first of the federal New Deal monies were just starting to flow down to the states that year, and the committee found that with those funds shoring up the other fronts, they were able to redirect more of their own budget into the park. The tiny project that no one at the office wanted suddenly became something mentioned in staff meetings. It garnered good press for the firm in the state papers. The firm assigned a young architect from another department, Lawrence Rydelle, to the effort. Lawrence shared Nathan’s frustration with the old way of doing things, and the two quickly became friends. Nathan set him to work designing a proper bandstand. The project grew into something larger, more significant, a showcase.
Graham began showing up clean-shaven, if not always clear-eyed. On paper, the project was making him look quite good. If he still resented Nathan—and Nathan saw no other way to interpret the hard stares his boss gave him—Graham was clever enough to accept the praise being heaped upon his department.
One afternoon Nathan and Lawrence stood over the plans at his desk.
“You’ve got a knack for this,” Lawrence said. “You and I both know you should be the one sitting in there.” He pointed to the glass window of Graham’s office, behind it his unattended desk.
“What do you want me to do about it?” Nathan asked. “Graham can have his office. I don’t care.” And he tried to pretend that he didn’t crave it.
The vice president’s secretary summoned Nathan to her desk to inform him that he was being promoted to senior draftsman. Another rung gained. His father took him to lunch, presented him with a new tie that his mother had picked out for him to commemorate the occasion. In a previous life, it would have felt like success, but the park had changed his understanding of what that word meant.
The next week Lawrence invited him for a drink and proposed the incredible: that they open their own firm. After all, the economy seemed to have hit bottom and was showing signs of turning, and weren’t audacious men defined by their very willingness to act when others withdrew? Beyond all else, they believed they had momentum on their side. Nathan’s success had made him a minor name in construction circles. Lawrence had a small inheritance from his grandmother. Captains of Industry, they toasted each other. A young man in Lawrence’s apartment building offered to make introductions around his club.
When Nathan thought back to that time in his life, two events stood out, emblematic in his mind. The first was Lawrence showing up at his desk with champagne and signed papers from the bank. But the second, the one that was burned into his memory, a foreshadowing of what was to come, was the involuntary twinge at the corner of his father’s eye when Nathan explained what they were planning to do. Still, they pressed on, and it had been like a wonderful dream for a while. But a janitor named Larson had ended all of that.
From what Nathan had gathered over the months after the fire, Larson had started working when he was just a kid to help out with rent at the tenement where his family lived. An accident when he was a boy had left him with an unbending left leg, but he was a hard worker and he earned a reputation for reliability. He was promoted to his bosses’ new commercial property