And so he does not speak and he refuses to look at anything above table legs or knees.
This is the first time Gordon has seen Morse this way. He steps from the window. He doesn’t push a brotherly hand-and-wrist-grip on either of Morse’s limp hands. He doesn’t fake a cheery, “Howzit going, Morse?” He just goes and sits on the little footstool close to Morse’s feet as if he were a big loyal dog. He aligns his wineglass bottom with a fuzzy coaster on the nearest low table and sighs terribly.
Janet makes no comment, just turns and smiles sorrowfully at Claire and Bree and Beth and Geraldine. Claire’s eyes inside her steel-rimmed specs are always without twinkles, now truly just two black starless nights.
And Bree? Brianna Vandermast? Neighbor of the Settlement but she is also of the Settlement, fifteen years old, almost six feet tall, august among the other teens that she usually hangs out with, her admirers. Strident ripples of red-orange hair and, oh, those eyes, each honey-gold-green eye lovely but for the strained and awful distance between. That face startles persons beholding her for the first time. She is watching Gordon as he sits so helplessly near the once powerful Morse Weymouth. Yes, Morse is now just a sort of likeness of roadkill and wouldn’t such cruelty cause Gordon’s reason to be to accelerate? But the buttons and switches that usually set him into obsessive and thunderous motion over the sight of suffering seem to all be busted.
Through the open French doors to a sunroom, the sea can be heard best, its mighty FLOMP! and broken-glass-like hiss.
Now Bree answers Janet’s many probing and heartfelt questions.
Janet asks, “Don’t I know you? From The Recipe?” This is a reference to that lyrical political outpouring of calligraphy from this girl’s pen, which once photocopied, with a dandy orange top page, Gordon had mailed to many. And maybe Janet was one of the only ones who read it.
The girl answers huskily, “Yes, The Recipe for Revolution. We wrote it together.” Her cursed eyes again slide onto Gordon, still motionless on the footstool, then back to Janet’s face, that face, how it emanates both kindness and mischief shamelessly synchronized.
Gordon’s hands rest now, one on each of his knees, till he finally reaches for his wine.
Morse Weymouth’s hair is thickly gray on the sides, thin on top. His orange-sherbet-colored button-up camp shirt. Big square pockets on the chest. Nothing in the pockets. No glasses on his face. He always wore glasses. Never contacts. No laserings. No vanity with him. But seems now there’s nothing he wants to see. He shows absolutely no reaction to Gordon’s nearness. Makes no sound but his bestial breathing. That in and out wide-awake snore.
Gordon glances at Claire and then to Bree who is now carefully listening to Janet tell about how when she was about Bree’s age, she was so shy she passed up the chance of getting to know Tommy Dorsey‡‡‡ when he visited her father in Connecticut. Dorsey and some band members “stayed THREE DAYS at my family’s home and I managed not to run into him the whole time, except at dinner, where I made not a peep. Normally if there was just our family, I talked and . . . oh, I had such a giggle . . . quite strident . . . and when that happened, my mother would have to discreetly pat my hand, which meant Shut up.” Her voice softens as secrets must be ever soft, “There were half-hour stretches where I hid behind shrubs and trees outside, rather than meet Mr. Dorsey on the paths or the lawn. I’d see him and his friends out in the garden . . . was there a tulip tall enough to hide behind?” Janet giggles. “Not for someone as shy as me.”
And the girl Bree with the devilish red hair and far-apart eyes giggles. Bree doesn’t know who Tommy Dorsey is or was, but giggles among gigglers are hazardously infectious.
The waves beyond the windows flomp! and hiss. And the scent of the sea is a kind of whammy on the souls of the mountain-loving Settlementers.
Eventually Bree goes outside to smoke. How boyish her smoking mannerisms are, due to her years of working in the woods with her father’s logging crew. Tanned, trim-waisted, with ripped-short fingernails, no jewelry or floral hair doodads. Tomboy. But the sly fire in some of her sidelong gazes always gives her away as “boy crazy.”
Gordon can hear through the sunporch doors and screens Bree chattering with his daughter Whitney, also age fifteen, who doesn’t smoke; and Bonnie Loo, his wife, who does. Bree is talking a blue streak! Small talk and jokey anecdotes, all that easy human back-and-forth spilling from Bree’s lips as with Bonnie Loo’s, between their sharp poofs of smoke out there on the flagstones beyond the sunporch. Bree has never talked like this with Gordon St. Onge. Not in that careless chiming way. To him she has related her radical ideas cautiously . . . and The Recipe . . . low and rimey . . . yes, cold . . . yes, withholding. But with Whitney and Bonnie Loo and Janet, with everybody but Gordon, Bree izzzzz warm. Deep, deep, deep, deep down he knows why it is so.
Bonnie Loo, in her black dress and her brassy blond-orange-streaked dark hair scrambling around fountainlike from its tortoiseshell clip, is returning from another set of rooms with Janet and says, “He’s not a theologian. He just—”
Janet’s laugh, like thick carpet, like silent doorknobs, like sea-struck light through clean glass, rushes to each person’s hearing. “My mother always advised, “‘Lie all you want as long as it’s not for yourself.’”
And then from his stool at Morse’s feet Gordon hears Claire telling Janet, “I rode from Egypt with Gordon in his truck . . . and Chris was with us. The others were all in the other cars. We had no idea there was a hijacking of Gordon’s speech in the works. I’m not sure how I feel about it.”
Janet says, “The talk I expected him to do was more of an essay, sweet and earnest, lightly edifying. So maybe . . . the children know Gordon’s heart better than he does. And better than I do.”
Claire says nothing.
Janet adds, “Anthropocentrism is dangerous and needs some second thought.”
Claire says flatly, “It seemed to be a subject over the heads of the audience.”
Janet whispers, “Well, you see, it was about theology. A theological critique. Christianity, which has so shaped the West, is anthropocentric. It’s very large . . . this . . . thing the children did. Seems to be the very thing Gordon has concerned himself with in many a discussion at our dinner table here. I don’t believe anything was hijacked today. It was . . . scintillating . . . and right out of Gordon’s soul.”
Claire says nothing.
More drinks.
And then the kids come roaring in from outside with sherbet containers filled with wet jarringly pungent shells.
More drinks are offered to Gordon, Claire, Bonnie Loo, Penny St. Onge, and the other St. Onge wives on hand. And Aurel.§§§ And even Bree and Butch and Whitney and other teens. Laughingly refused by all.
A late dinner. Two of Janet’s closest friends join them. Both introduced as artists. The Settlementers have met one of them before. The food appears on the table in a stealthy way. Gordon’s loud eating sounds catch a few looks. Morse Weymouth is not at this meal. Janet explains that Morse doesn’t want anyone, even her, to see him being fed.
The chatter along the great table is, of course, of the afternoon and Gordon’s “lecture” and how it was received.
“It was received enthusiastically!” Janet almost crows.
Gordon’s smile is just a tired scrawl, one darkly bearded cheek bulging with marinated squab. He hasn’t swallowed yet as he asks, “Was I there?”
His daughter Whitney, fifteen (not as pretty as her mother, Penny, it is often remarked, too much of Gordon’s bungled expressions minus just the Tourette’s-esque eye-cheek flinch), divulges, “Yes, we messed with