“Hey,” Chris Butler pipes up. “Where were the husbands of the girl governors?”
Janet covers her mouth lest she spit out oozy roll on a graceless, fully liberated laugh.
“Prowling Wall Street,” one of her friends offers, this artsy friend with almost a crew cut, a long feminine neck, and earrings that must weigh as much as tire irons.
“Wall Street,” a large but not very old Settlement kid, pistachio-color eyes in a Passamaquoddy face, giggle-gags, “That’s like Ceiling Street!”
“No ceiling,” murmurs Janet’s other friend, she a large-boned broad-shouldered Mae West look-alike in a toned-down gray pantsuit, sitting near the boy. She leans toward his ear, “The sky is the limit.”
The nearest row of little kids along the table all nicker and snicker sagely, though they understand nothing of this joke . . . not the depths of it. Among these kids is a girl, eight or thereabouts, of Passamaquoddy looks but for, again, the green eyes; she has a fat lip, looking fatter by the minute. Yes, pain goes with the job of being a monkey MOTORIST.
More food, whole platters of baby birds.
More bread.
More wine.
And a light dessert of wee cookies and pineapple ice.
At last the table talk zeroes in on shareholder activism, both Janet’s and Morse’s passion in the last few years. “Have you read Bob Monks’s latest book, Gordon? I didn’t send it to you yet, did I?”
Gordon says, “You did and I read every word. Test me.”
This gets a laugh.
“Bob is a man of courageous integrity,” Janet almost whispers.
Gordon nods. He is pondering the stocks his mother signed over to him, the whole portfolio being only a bony malnourished wormy shadow of its former self due to his “wasting” (his mother Marian’s word) his minor wealth on Settlement life and on the hundred or more denizens there. “Losers” his mother calls them, all except Claire, the only wife she acknowledges. (And his many children? Nonexistent in her bristling gray eyes, so there’s nothing to discuss there.)
He glances up at Claire not far down along the other side of the table, her grave dark eyes behind those old-timey specs watching him steadily. She knows like no one else how far belowground Gordon’s depressions can go. Here she is dressed in her university adjunct history/archaeology teacher clothes looking quite distinguished and spiffy even as she grows more obese every minute, it seems. But most of all, to unknowing eyes (for instance new university students’), she always looks a little scary.
After the meal, Gordon and teenage Bree are alone a few moments, poking at books in a small parlor off the dining room, books with no jackets, just the naked brawn of brown, tan, blue, green, and black fabrics; you’d expect a first edition of Wealth of Nations to start shivering in order to catch your eye. Books of an age so old that some have a lot of spouting on eugenics, disguised as philosophy, though nothing of the sort has ever slunk from Weymouth lips. It’s just that Morse and Janet have always gotten all melty over striking book spines, unintermittent as bricks.
Bree glances through a book, flip flip. Mostly she inhales books. No, Bree is not yet a true Settlement resident, still a neighbor’s daughter. Her roiling long red hair hides her wrongly formed face from him. She has some sort of magical gifts and, it is this that makes Gordon St. Onge nervous, magic tricks, the only way to define her effect on him, and worst of all, her influence over most of the Settlement’s girl teens. How she often presses him to be a revolutionary leader, as if anyone could put smoke under the asses of Americans, all so schooled and TVed into blushingly low quotients on bullshit detection and high quotients on self-virtue. Or do Americans, including himself, ever so perfectly and beyond utterance or action, realize that they are in the deepest pocket of the hot gut of the oligo-spider’s intransmutably web-wrapped global edifice, too total for any of us living beings to crawl free of?
And besides his being ill-suited for the ill-fated idea of being a leader to save the day, for a world on fire as we speak, if there’s an ounce of leadership on the scene here, it is hers!! Isn’t Bree’s calligraphical and poetic The Recipe the reason he wound up here today via the Dumond House? Somewhere in this home Janet may have the stunning, stapled-together document propped under a soft rosy lamp.
Now Bree and Gordon stand side by side studying paintings, one a real van Gogh! Small. Vincent van Gogh painted in such a frenzy that probably there’s enough of his stuff for everyone on the planet to have at least one. But of course, you see them only in museums or in homes such as this.
And Bree? Genius painter in her own right? Perhaps now somewhere on her person . . . knuckle crease or behind an ear . . . is a smidgen-stain of cadmium red or titanium white. His eyes graze over her nearest hand, up the wrist, sleeve, then at the blazing wilderness of her hair, which she uses, yes, always to hide her face from him, only him.
And so Gordon touches Bree. Spread fingers push through the hair to her ear. This, which is his nature, with everyone, friend, family, or stranger. Even governors’ wives. Touch is speech. And he is a yakkety man. But Bree pulls away. Well, she giggles, then pulls away. Turns her face from him, leaves the room.
He stands alone, listening to the happy furor of his children and to Janet’s lively crew-cut long-necked artist friend, teasing Janet’s Mae West friend, who replies with some low sour-voiced remark that cracks up all those old enough to get it. And he hears tattling hoots over Argot tiptoeing by in the hallway with a box of waxed paper.
Gordon hears his wife Penny’s voice, “Usually dogs steal food.”
Janet’s voice, “Actually he isn’t stealing. He’s tidying up.”
All their banter soothes him. He roams into the hallway and over to the large parlor and sees the sky to the east looking stormy, the sea blackening, while across the room the west pours light of promising pink over the rugs and circle of good-natured couches and high-backed chairs.
A woman comes into the room. A woman he’s never seen before. Gray-haired. Wears a sweater and skirt. She tells Gordon that Morse would like it very much if he would come down to his room and read to him. “The Bible,” she says and smiles. “Now that you’re a theologian.”
Gordon knows this joke is coming from the Morse he always knew, the before-the-stroke Morse.
So he can communicate. When he wants to. And this is one of his little jokes.
But when Gordon arrives in the huge, well-lighted, yellow-walled bedroom where Morse waits in a hospital bed with a rosette-pattern comforter spread over him, there really is a Bible, a white one lying on top of the comforter, and Morse wordlessly indicates the cloth bookmarks.
Gordon doesn’t sit. He paces and reads in a booming preacherly voice from the marked pages, uncommonly favored passages of war and deceit and terror and servitude, where no one is redeemed.
Again Gordon stands alone, communing with van Gogh. And those other paintings, some by people he’s met here before. Probably somewhere in another room there’s one by Vaida with the crew cut and long neck and tire iron earrings who is here tonight. But for sure, none in this room are lighthouses, sailboats, rockbound Maine coast, no stacked lobster traps or shed walls of bright trap markers, those that so many seaside homes often have in great supply.
Janet comes to him and stands, head cocked, studying him so quietly that it is only the star of blue catching one corner of his eye that makes him turn toward her. His smile is a banner, a big forced smile showing even his twisted bottom teeth.
She says gently, “I’m worried about you.”
His smile