Then the scary speaker walks toward other tables of upturned faces, rubbing his hands together, smiling sheepishly at three women all dressed in varying shades of rose. He does something boyish and playful with his shoulders, setting off that Tinker Bell tinkle that is his bunch of keys. A trickle of sweat looking more like a small jewel makes its secret path down under the ear of one of the governors’ wives. This, even though the room is cool.
One of the committee hosts near the doorway, talking partly to himself, partly to the fellow beside him, says, “Well, well, well . . . this is certainly a mess.”
“As if we needed this today,” says the other.
Gordon St. Onge steps to a table, presses his knee and thigh against it as he gazes into the eyes of the governor’s wife who wears the red dress, which burns like fire in the center of this room of dark woodwork and stone, window light and soft lamps, coffee, and pastel cakes. The woman might be afraid of being made to look silly by this lower-class creature and then she feels it on her shoulder. His audacious hand. She still doesn’t raise her eyes to his whiskery face but looking across the great parlor space filled with faces, she smiles a good-sport smile.
The speaker leans low, almost grazing the woman’s face with his dark graying beard . . . he’s that close . . . and whispers, “You got an aspirin you can spare?”
The words “No, I don’t,” flutter out of her mouth with a laugh. She seems apologetic.
He straightens to his full towering self, squinting from the brightness of the great arched windows, and turns to another table. Here a coffee-color dress and its dignified wearer, a round-faced graying blonde in her late fifties, pearls, brown eyes, her hand beside her pretty teacup . . . saucer . . . little squeezed tea bag there. The speaker touches her shoulder because he, Gordon St. Onge, is a toucher. No one is out of bounds. A camera flash goes off from near the entrance and the speaker turns abruptly away, lowering one side of his face against his shoulder, as upper-class criminals being led (rarely) from court in handcuffs usually do. And then he makes a sudden move, which causes the security people (probably, yes, FBI) to visibly jerk a foot or elbow.
But Gordon is almost merged with the lectern, and the stapled speech crackles in his hand as he strains to see its words without his reading glasses. “My home. Our home. Our treasured round planetary rock. Our existence. In the hands of monkeys. I ask you to hearken to and fear this.” Done.
Then he is pushing his way through the men in black and the scrambling photographers, camera light bursting behind him, and, yes, there is applause, not a standing ovation but a nice trickle, a reflexive civilized little clapping.
Now he is out into the late-day sun, and that gray-green vertiginous smell of high tide, down down down his boots go along the stony winding path, past the parked bus, past some wild rose dangly with hips, stops to paw through his shirt pocket up under his sweater vest, his pants pockets . . . sort of frantic . . . then you see he is crunching hard on aspirin straight from a bottle, like a drink of cheap wine, because the pain of caring too much is a beastly thing.
It is the home of rich people. A place so serene, so old, stone and shingles and arched windows, leaping tides and high rock with pools and periwinkles, beaches, reeds, fields, and there along the lane, trees huge enough to have scowls and to touch lofty sylvan fingertips from one side of the lane to the other. Not a lot different from the Dumond House, where the governors’ wives were entertained earlier today.
Feet don’t make much racket. People here turn doorknobs in ways that cause doors to seem ghostishly mechanized. With some rich people, it isn’t just the stuff they own but also that uncanny silky lack of sound to their rooms and halls, to their infinite elbow room, their invisibility when they so desire, that which makes their daily lives particular to them. Where is the clatter? Where are the squeaks? Where are the bumped knees? None of that. Just an airy escape dream, one of those where having open arms is all it takes to fly.
A pony-sized but light-stepping French poodle is pleased to meet Jane Meserve, who is still wearing her heart-shaped secret agent glasses in case there is some deception needing special and high-powered vision in shades of pink. Meanwhile, the dog apparently has known the seven-year-old twins Katy and Karma St. Onge in past visits. He sits before each one and offers a gracious but quickie high five.
With all the papier-mâché heads and bananas and cardboard signs back in their satchels, tucked into car trunks and truck beds, the two dozen tykes and teens milling about in the Weymouth rooms are just ordinary-seeming American youngsters, except for, perhaps, that weedy, fruity, algae smell of Settlement soaps and salves. Among the startled haut monde at the Dumond House today there is the impression that all of these kids have been sired by Gordon St. Onge. This is not true. And yet this is not the only uh-oh and gasp and freighted falsehood that will follow him to his grave.
Janet explains the poodle’s name. Argot. “In old France, it was the language of thieves. And the land of thieves. Their part of town.”
Argot, maybe not really as big as a pony, but big as a collie, stands among all the visitors, his humanlike eyes moving from one face to another as each one speaks. All over him, his tremolite-gray puffs, so often and lovingly brushed, a dog so clean and airy it is as though you only imagine him.
Chris Butler, the teenager with the skin affliction, has open sores today, even on his lips. A lifelong torment. But also Chris is a pianist with the gentlest touch upon the keys so that the melodies flow skinless, bodiless in a majesty larger than the one thin sore patchy-haired teenager who straddles that piano stool. He is Beauty is, as beauty does, as they say. He is not a child of Gordon’s but is. Because Gordon St. Onge possesses all who come to him for the sanctuary of his granite-cored hills, and his many halls and rooms, which are never hushy.
Chris smiles quirkily and wonders, “Does Argot steal?”
Janet laughs her velvet laugh but doesn’t take Chris’s wrist, though she does lean quite close and her breath is a shimmer of mint. “He did when he was a boy.”
Claire snorts over this.
“Please, all sit, if you’d like, and have something.” Janet names wines that sound no different from the language of thieves.
The twin girls, Katy who looks most like Leona, and Karma who has inherited the intensity of Gordon’s eyes, tell of a desire to go out on the beach, and so Argot accompanies them, as well as a young woman named Eva who is in the Weymouths’ employ and very, very reticent but smiley.
Of course, at least eight other youngsters troop after, Argot glancing back over his shoulder to graciously acknowledge them with two precise wags of his stick-shift, ball-ended, four-on-the-floor sort of tail.
Gordon doesn’t sit. He’s restless. He gazes out the broad windows. At the ocean. As if he had just today discovered it and is bewitched. He stands there close to the glass with the solid peachy-blue light of the Atlantic’s high tide and the sky cast over his face and sweater vest and shirtsleeves and on his fingers that wrap around the stem of the glass that is filled with something dark red and virile-looking.
A woman who resembles Janet but is no relation quietly wheels Janet’s husband in. Morse Weymouth. A man who once would, with his gray, sometimes baleful eyes, look into your eyes in a direct way. His questions were direct. That short, broad-chested, fierce man. Gone! His nonprofit environmental lobbying organization, he was its father and its stoutest funder. The project has had only small victories but Weymouth money, money so old it may have once been backed by the king of England’s corporations, will never run out and so the little organization is still alive even as the man is dying.
Morse Weymouth. Since his stroke, his mouth hangs open and he breathes noisily. He leans to one side. Or is it that he sags? Or is it more like sinking?