Affliction (18 page)

It was at this point in his evening, in bed, his home cleaned, a dinner cooked and eaten, relaxed and content and physically comfortable—relatively little toothache pain—that he suddenly sat up straight in the darkness and clapped his hands loudly against one another, as if applauding his own performance. He turned the light back on and picked up the telephone and dialed his brother Rolfe's number. Rolfe would
understand, and he might have some useful information as well. Rolfe was a little weird, but he was plenty smart, and he was logical.

But, as we know, Wade's conversation with his younger brother did not go quite as he hoped. Two or three minutes into it, Wade was once again going on about Lillian and Jill, the kind of story that always left him angry and exhausted. And his tooth was raging again. He finally hung up the phone and snapped off the bedside light.

In seconds, he was asleep and dreaming.

Hours later, Wade dreamed this: There is a baby in his arms, swaddled like Jesus, only it is not Jesus, it is a girl baby, but not Jill, either, thank God, because it is blue with the cold, and it may be dead.
Oh no, do not let it be dead!
he pleads, and he examines the tiny puckered face and discovers first with relief and then with irritation that it is a doll, one of those lifelike dolls, with its face all screwed up as if about to cry, and as Wade comes up from under the water to the hole in the ice, he breaks the surface and thrusts the doll out ahead of him and throws the thing right at his Pop, who is fooled and thinks it is a real baby; Pop sticks out his drunken hands to catch it, his pale eyes wide open with fear that he will drop it, but by the time Wade has climbed out of the freezing water to stand dripping in his underwear on the ice, Pop has discovered that it is only a doll Wade has brought him; he shoves it back at him and stalks off, heading for the distant shore, where Wade can see the trailer park and Pop's old red Ford pickup next to the blue trailer at the end. Wade looks down at the thing in his arms and wonders whose baby is this, when he realizes suddenly that it is Jack Hewitt's baby. A son! Imagine that! Jack had a son! God damn! Wade observes that there are no women in this dream and that the girl babies are dolls. There must be something wrong with that. Men do not have babies, women do. But what about men?

What do men do?
he cries, and he woke up, tears streaming down his face in the darkness of his trailer, his body as much as his mind cold to the bone, the toothache gone.

 

Early the next morning, but not too early, for he did not want to have to wake them, especially this morning, Wade drove out to Lake Agaway on the north side of town. He figured he
would have to say something nice about Twombley, express his condolences to the next of kin, that sort of thing, and then get down to business with the son-in-law. Asa Brown and Gordon LaRiviere be damned: it wasn't their job to protect the children; it was his.

He passed Wickham's, noted that the parking lot was almost filled and that most of the cars were out-of-state. There was that stupid sign,
HOME MADE COOKING
, pale pink in the bright morning light. A few cars had the bodies of shot deer tied to roofs and fenders, and Wade decided that he would stop for breakfast later, after he had paid his visit to Mel Gordon, when there would be only a few people still at the restaurant and he could talk to Margie and make his important phone calls. That was how he thought of them—important. This morning at eight, Wade Whitehouse was a man with several important tasks, legal matters, by God, and he wanted Margie to see him, a competent man, engaged in completing them.

He would have liked to take her out to Twombley's place on Lake Agaway, so she could see him deal with Twombley's son-in-law, and he had almost called her when he first got out of bed, but he remembered that Margie worked Saturday mornings. That was okay; she would get off at noon and could ride down to Concord with him this afternoon to see the lawyer. Maybe she could even be with him when he talked to the lawyer. Although that might not look so good, he thought. Well, she could wait in a restaurant or do some shopping, and he could tell her all about it afterwards.

A quarter mile past Merritt's Shell Station, at the old mill, where there was a cluster of shanties huddled together as if for warmth, Wade turned left onto the winding narrow dirt road that led down to Lake Agaway. The sky was bright blue and cloudless, and patches of blinding sunlight flashed over the hood and windshield as he passed between stands of tall spruce and pine—trees that should have been cut and sold.

Wade made the observation every time he drove this road: these tall lovely blue-black trees should be lumbered on a regular rotating basis, and would be, too, if rich people did not own the land and did not prefer the decorative use of the trees to any other. It pissed him off.

The lake itself is not especially large, maybe two miles long and a half mile wide, and you cannot see it from the road, even though it lies only a few hundred yards off to your right
and slightly downhill. It is a picturesque deep-water lake nestled between two ridges, with a north-looking glimpse of Franconia Notch and a south-looking view of Saddleback and Parker Mountain. Nice.

Five families own all the shoreline and acreage between the two ridges, summer people from Massachusetts—a physician, two manufacturers, one of whom was supposed to have invented the salt-and-pepper packets used on airplanes, a judge recently appointed to the Supreme Court and now spending most of his time in Washington, and Evan Twombley, the union official. The five families who preceded this five entered long ago into polite but legally precise association with one another to keep the land from being subdivided and to keep the five properties from ever being purchased by Jews or blacks—an agreement appended to the deed and called a covenant, as if made between Christians and a conservationist Protestant God who, only three years before, when Twombley bought his place from the last of the original five, had decided finally to recognize Catholics. Then, predictably, a problem arose. Though it was Evan Twombley, as the first Catholic so recognized, who had signed the deed with the covenant attached, it troubled folks that his son-in-law, Mel Gordon, once people got sight of him, was thought to be Jewish. It was too late by then, of course, to do anything—one could not withdraw the covenant—but as long as the place did not pass to the son-in-law, no one would worry. They did enjoy talking about it, however, giving themselves little frissons of anxiety.

By this morning, the other four families in the Lake Aga-way Residents Association, as it was called, had learned of the death of their weekend neighbor Evan Twombley in a tragic hunting accident yesterday in Lawford, New Hampshire. One of them had a satellite dish and had heard it mentioned last night on the eleven o'clock news on Channel 4, and it was in both the Boston papers, sold at Golden's store, this morning. Well. A shame.

Perhaps Twombley's daughter and son-in-law would want to sell the place, which would be the preferred course of action, needless to say. If his daughter alone inherited it (a strong likelihood, thank heavens), no one would especially mind or object, so long as she did not turn around and put the deed in both her and her husband's names. The daughter was certainly not Jewish, and the children therefore could not be, since
everyone knew that to be Jewish you needed a Jewish mother.

It was still possible, of course, that the Jew Mel Gordon would jointly inherit the property. If that happened, one could only hope that on reading the deed, the fellow would come to the restrictive clause at the end and would decide to say nothing about it, would go right ahead and simply sign the deed and let it go at that, quite as if he were not Jewish or black. Damn. If this Gordon fellow
had
been black, none of this would have happened, would it? Anyhow, his agreeing to the restrictive clause in the deed might turn out to be somewhat embarrassing for the Association, mightn't it? After all, you did not have to come right out and say it, and no one would be rude or crude enough to ask him, but everyone in the Association and everyone in town as well thought Mel Gordon was Jewish, which meant, of course, that he
was
Jewish. People are not wrong about these things. On the other hand, it was not clear that he was
not
Jewish, either, especially if he himself was unwilling to say so one way or the other. It didn't really matter, though, did it? Times change, don't they? This is surely not the sort of problem our parents had to face.

 

Wade pulled into the neatly plowed driveway and followed it down to the three-bay garage and parked. He got out of his car slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, and strolled around to the wide porch that faces the lake. The house is a large two-story wood-frame house covered with cedar shakes, built three years ago to look a hundred years old, as if indeed it were inherited.

LaRiviere had scoffed at the idea of spending so much to make a place look old. “If you're going to spend a quarter of a million bucks on a summer place, it ought to look like something brand spanking new, for Christ's sake.”

But Wade liked the way it looked, and he believed that if he had the money, he would want his summer place to resemble this one, a house where several generations of smart successful kindhearted people had come to relax and be together with their children and parents and grown brothers and sisters, a place with a wide porch facing the lake, lots of old-fashioned wicker rockers on the porch where you sat in the twilight and told stories of favorite summers past, old silvery
cedar shingles, two chimneys made of local stone, a steep-pitched roof with wide overhangs that slid the snow off the house to the ground before it either accumulated so much weight that it broke through or got held up by ice at the gutters and started lifting roof shingles and doing water damage when spring came.

He knocked on the glass pane of the storm door with what he felt was authority, and the inner door was opened at once.

A blond boy about eight years old with a large tousled head and thin stalklike neck pushed the aluminum-and-glass storm door open about six inches and with great seriousness examined Wade. The boy wore flannel pajamas with action pictures of Spider-Man printed on them. In one hand he held a bowl of pastel-colored cereal and milk that was slopping onto the floor; with the other he held on to the door.

“Your daddy home?” Wade asked.

The boy studied Wade's face and said nothing.

“Is your daddy here, son? I got to talk with your daddy.”

As if dismissing him, the boy turned away and let go of the storm door, and the breeze off the lake shoved it closed in Wade's face. He could see into the living room, for the child had left the inner door wide open. Wade watched him trot to a television set in the far corner, where he plopped down on the carpeted floor and resumed watching cartoons and began to spoon the pastel-colored cereal into his mouth.

The living room was huge, open to the eaves, with a head-high stone fireplace at either end. A staircase led up to a deck, where several closed doors indicated bedrooms. Downstairs, there was a grand piano in a bay window, which instantly impressed Wade: he had never seen a grand piano inside a house before. When he thought about it, he realized that he had never seen a grand piano anywhere. Not in person.

He knocked on the glass again, but the boy continued to eat cereal and stare at cartoons as if Wade were not there. Finally, Wade drew the door open and stepped inside and closed the inner door behind him. “C'mon, son,” he said. “Go and get your daddy for me.”

“Sh-h-h!” the boy said, without looking at him. Then Wade saw that there was a second, smaller boy lying flat on the floor a few feet beyond him, his head propped up on tiny fists. He was blonder than his brother and wore underpants and a
tee shirt and seemed to be shivering from the cold. He peeked over his brother's shoulder and scowled at Wade and said, “Sh-h-h, will ya?”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Wade murmured, and he started to leave, when he heard a woman's voice above and behind him.

“Who are you?” It was a light tentative voice, the opposite of the boys' voices and the snarls emitted by the bare-chested muscular characters on the television screen; Wade turned and looked up and saw a thin silvery-blond woman standing just beyond the balustrade of the deck above him; he felt for a second that he was in a play, like
Romeo and Juliet
, and the next line was his and he did not know what it was.

He felt his face redden, and he took off his watch cap and held it in front of his crotch with both hands. The woman's face was long and bony but very delicate-looking, as if the bones underneath were fragile and her pale skin exceedingly thin. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and her shoulder-length blond hair was uncombed. She wore no makeup but was wrapped in a dark-green velour robe that made her face and thin hands and wrists seem to be covered with white powder. Wade had seen her numerous times before, of course, but she had always been tanned, wearing jeans and fancy sweaters, and in winter she wore ski togs. Usually he had observed her at a distance, in town or at the post office. When Twombley was building the house and Wade was out here drilling the wells, she had come up from Massachusetts twice with her husband and sons, but they had strolled through the half-constructed buildings and down by the lake without stopping to speak to him. This was the first time he had seen her up close, and it seemed to him that he was seeing her under disarmingly intimate circumstances.

He stammered, “I was … I'm Wade Whitehouse. I was wondering, is your husband here? I was wondering that.”

“He's asleep. We were up very late,” she said, as if she wished that she, too, were asleep.

“Well, yes, I'm … I want to say that I'm real sorry about your father, Mrs. Twombley.”

“Gordon,” she corrected him. “Thank you.”

“Gordon. Sorry. Mrs. Gordon. Jesus, I'm sorry about that. Mrs. Gordon, right.”