He shrugs. “I didn’t do my speech. Brats prevailed.” Then he laughs.
And she laughs. “At dinner, you said they should all have their bottom ends warmed. An idle threat, I’m sure.”
“Rumors are that at the Settlement they die of hard labor,” he says deeply.
“Your children scare you.”
He rubs his eyes. Both hands.
She says, “Your presence at the Dumond House was stunning and important and thought-provoking. It really still was on the theme of home as your essay would have been . . . only this was home versus nihility.”
“It all worked pretty slick, didn’t it?” He sighs. “Even the bananas.” He rubs one eye now with a palm, eyes burning, teeth visible again, framed in dark-and-gray beard, a third kind of smile, not easily identifiable. He has so many kinds of smiles. “I still don’t know who the mastermind was. That’s the one who needs to be locked in the stocks.”
“Your new friend Bree. I heard them talking. She’s a natural stage director.”
His face drains of color as if he were surprised. As if.
Janet giggles. Almost a Bree-giggle, then breathes, “Something will come of it. Really. Some breakthrough in the conservative camp . . . through the wives!”
He enfolds her in his arms and kisses her noisily twice, once on each ear.
She croaks, “I’ll be deaf for a week, you brute.”
It is dark. A tangle of ocean smells, both stinky and fragrant. Lots of windows down to catch the last of it, windows of all the Settlement vehicles that are revving up in the Weymouths’ circular drive of little stones, pressed deep as cobble. It’s hard not to notice how there is no one standing in the limp spread of Gordon’s truck’s low beams.
Gordon has a melancholy flash of the visit some of his family had here this past early summer. They’d arrived in only one van. For Morse’s birthday. More adults than kids that time.
Morse was still Morse. Before sunset that time he and Gordon walked along the private beach, the twins, Katy and Karma; and the poodle, Argot, so many yards ahead they were just small guttering squeaks above the big bloooooompshshsh of the waves. The kids and dog reached a wild field and merged with its shadows. The two men got into the revisionist histories of American Colonial pirates. And the not-so-becoming empire building of Abraham Lincoln and McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt. And now the United States’ 1990s covert tiptoeing to complement its overt bullying and bombs. So involved in their talk, Gordon was startled to see Argot walking by his side, eavesdropping. When finally they reached the field, the girls were eager to show them a milkweed caterpillar in his fine birthday-party stripes.
Karma introduced him (or her?) as Noof, a kiddie name that made no sense. But hurrah! A name!
Back at the Weymouth house, one of the quiet kitchen helpers had found a roomy jar for the caterpillar to ride home to Egypt in. The dark eyes of the twins were plashed with the baby pink and baby blue colors of the sunset that shot through the kitchen mullions as they watched Noof moving along on his milkweed leaf and they knew, with no explanation, that Noof had turned a page for them. In the coming days it would all be known.
And so when they were leaving that early summer night, Karma had run toward the open van door with the big jar against her heart.
And Morse stood smiling one of his almost Tyrannosaurus rex smiles, with a million teeth, and he arched his back, as if under stage lights, as the Settlement van’s headlights swept off to the left and away. And that was that.
This time all that was worthy to carry home from the beach and fields in jars was shells and one nice black cricket, for the munching yumming-it-up stage is over for future monarchs and the party stripes are gone.
The people who lived at the ocean, Janet Weymouth and her friends from somewhere, were very impressed with everything I said. They also said I did an excellent job as the monkey flying the fighter jet.
The whole time Jane Meserve did not take off those stupid sunglasses with pink heart-shaped lenses and white frames. She thinks she is very sexy and gorgeous but she never conversed. She just kept clinging to Gordie and saying, “When are we going?”
My mother says Mata Hari¶¶¶ was never that clingy.
The Record Sun’s headline is:
CONTROVERSIAL SPEAKER ST. ONGE RANTS,
THROWS 33**** GOVERNORS’ WIVES FOR A LOOP
A color photo shows Gordon in profile standing next to a table. Two seated women are looking up at him. They look stunned. He looks vicious. And big. BIG and VICIOUS.
Oh my gawd see this urgent don’t-miss-it newsy moment!! Guillaume “Gordon” St. Onge, known by many as “the Prophet,” terrorizes a roomful of upstanding persons including the wives of governors from thirty-six states. Here’s a mini clip of dozens of immaculately dressed and coiffed persons in an alcove all springing aside as the glowering giant plunges through to the exit. Hear his warty marshy bullfrog-deep voice as it croaks something to someone who didn’t skip out of the way fast enough. Fear in St. Onge’s wake is palpable. Danger is in the air.
How I’m taken for granted is a sign of my godliness, that my pull and exhalations are your true universe, heartbeat of a planet. I am the sea. All is fed because of me. All comes and goes into and out of my sweetly lathered chemistry, my pH, my open soul, my cup, my deeps.
But you, the conduit for rude change, risen on hind legs and with curious fingers, you are the dumb gear of your vaster oneness, you have crucified this rangy source in me. And so this universe of jumbo monsters and velvety clouds of the wee has already begun to blink out, one finned wriggling hungry star at a time. There will be no judgment but there will remain no sustenance. No barnacle. No snail. No fillet. No feast.
The screen is blank.
It is cool, a mistake to have set up breakfast out on the piazzas. Everyone is a little or a lot hunched in sweaters and jackets. Some shiver. The old ones in rockers and wheelchairs complain the most. Right now some are being escorted away to the Cook’s Kitchen to be close to the woodstoves. The Elder Assistance crew is, as ever, directed by young Vancy St. Onge, boxy faced, wilty-haired at times, other times with tight law-and-order spit curls. Today it’s the spit curls. Small languid piggy eyes with nearly no lashes. Prominent bottom lip. Square boxy body with stout arms and legs, and those double chins, all being even before she was pregnant. White blouse swaying and poofing in the currents of motion, like a sail. Always starting out the day fresh, white. But not after feeding eager-wide or clenched mouths various breakfast stir-abouts. And there is one fellow known for slugging and spitting who has two teenage bodyguards who call him Rocky and keep his quick bony fists in line but they are