Beyond Midnight (47 page)

"
Mmm,
"
said Nat between slugs of beer. He burped, groaned, and said,
"
God, I
'
m gonna be sick as a dog tonight. I haven
'
t eaten food like this since I was a kid.
"

She gave him a skeptical look.
"
I suppose you eat beansprout sandwiches at your desk?
"

He surprised her by saying,
"
Or a salad. Something healthy, anyway. Workaholics die young, and I
'
ve got a lot to live for: Katie
—
and more, maybe, someday.
"

Helen felt an entirely inappropriate wave of heat wash over her. He could
'
ve been talking about anyone or anything; but she chose to believe he was hinting about her.

Careful, stupid,
she warned herself.
Women make mistakes at moments like these.

"
Well, junk food or not,
"
she let herself say,
"
I still think this was a good idea.
"

"
Here
'
s another one,
"
he said suddenly.
"
Will you go with Katie and me on a nature walk next Saturday evening? Katie wants to learn about owls. She
'
s fixated on the subject, ever since that owl showed up in the yard.
"

"
It
'
s still there?
"
Helen was surprised to realize that she was troubled by the fact.

He shrugged.
"
It seems determined,
"
he said, tossing a piece of French fry to the ground. The sparrows ignored it.
"
Our neighbors came back for the summer and cleaned out the seed from their potting shed, so the mice are gone; but the owl
'
s hanging around anyway. God only knows what it eats. Katie, by the way, is turning out to be a ruthless little bugger. She wants me to buy mice at the pet store to feed it. She says if I can
'
t find mice, maybe hamsters will do.
"

He crushed the last of his hot dog roll into crumbs and threw them all out at once. Sparrow pandemonium.
"
Looks just like the commodities pit,
"
Nat said with a snort.

He turned back to Helen. His look was tentative, almost defensive.
"
So? How about it? Saturday at eight?
"
Taking a cue from her, he added,
"
Very low impact on your day.
"

Nothing that involved him was low impact, but Helen said,
"
I could do that.
"

"
Good. We
'
ll come get you half an hour before,
"
he said, quietly pleased.

The mood between them turned quiet. He finished his Coors, then bent the can over on itself, and then again. Helen wondered briefly, wildly, whether they
'
d run out of things to talk about. But that wasn
'
t it. He simply wasn
'
t bothered by what radio and TV people called
"
dead air.
"

She remembered Gwen
'
s reading of him: a shy man who only acted at flirting. If Gwen was right, then at that moment Helen had every right to feel flattered—because there was neither banter nor flirting coming from him. Just pensive silence, pierced by the chirps of brawling sparrows.

"
You
'
re not much of a people person, are you?
"
she ventured.

"
I work at it,
"
he said briefly. He pitched the crushed can into a nearby trash bin. It bounced on the edge, then fell in.
"
But I was an only child, raised in a marriage of convenience. I
'
m not that great at baring my soul.
"

And that, at bottom, was what this date was supposed to be about: baring his soul.

She tried another approach.
"
How did you end up in the stock market, anyway?
"

He laughed softly.
"
Funny you should ask. I
'
ve thought about that a lot, lately. I search my childhood—what I remember of it—for a defining moment. And all I can come up with is one. One lousy epiphany in forty years.
"

Helen had the sense that they had begun to tiptoe to
gether into a dusty corner of his soul. She stayed very still, like a hiker who
'
s stumbled onto a fox at dawn, as she waited for him to continue.

"
I was five, maybe six,
"
he said, letting his gaze settle on a powerboat that had begun to back out of a nearby slip.
"
I was summoned to
the bedside of my great-great-
grandfather, Joseph Bentley Byrne, who was near death. Since I hadn
'
t been allowed to see him for a week, I knew something big was up.

"
His bedroom, once the master, is now Katie
'
s. I remember his bed: massive, carved, ornate. Like many of the furnishings, it came over from
China
on one of the family
'
s ships during the early eighteen hundreds. Above the bed, where Catholics hang crucifixes, there hung a portrait of Houqua, the senior hong merchant in
Canton
and—if you remember your
Salem
history—the richest man in
China
back then.
"

"
The portrait that
'
s now in the hail,
"
she said, recalling the gaunt, balding man with the droopy Mandarin mustache.

"
Yeah. Houqua was a real hero in my family,
"
Nat said. Helen couldn
'
t quite tell how he meant that, so she waited for him to go on.

"
The thing is, by the time my great-great-grandfather Joseph was born,
Salem
was through as a seaport. His— my—ancestors had been adroit at moving their ships from the
China
trade to the more profitable
India
trade; surviving Jefferson
'
s embargo in 1807 and then moving into the Baltic trade; surviving the war of 1812 and then moving into new markets in South America and
Zanzibar
.

"
But ultimately, they blew it. The railroad went to
Boston
and
New York
, empowering them as key ports. The Erie Canal gave
New York
an even bigger boost. But
Salem
? No railroad, no canals, and worse than that, the silting of the harbor made
Salem
unnavigable for larger ships.

"
But Joseph stayed here anyway. He
'
d made a promise to his dying father that he
'
d stick with
Salem
, and he did, struggling to make a profit in coastal shipping with smaller vessels.
"

Nat got up from the bench, took a step or two, and pitched the brown paper bag into the trash can. He scanned the harbor, much as his ancestors must have done. But there were no lofty clipper ships, no majestic Indiamen to be seen—only small and rather precious powerboats that slept six and huddled in the harbor if the wind blew over ten knots.

To the southeast lay Derby Wharf, once the heartbeat of it all, once thick with stores and warehouses and crammed with wooden ships with lofty masts and tangles of rigging, and brawny men—boys, really, some no older than Russ— who thought nothing of spending months at a time on the killer sea, then braving pirates, shoals, and disease at their destination, only to return, if they were lucky, over the killer sea again.

All that was gone now. What remained of
Derby
Wharf
was a long spit of grass-covered dirt, and the ghosts of all the rest.

Nat turned his back on the scene and said,
"
I had the history down cold when I was five; the saga of maritime trade was a big, big deal in my family. Which is why, when I was summoned to Joseph
'
s deathbed, I took his last words to me so seriously. As I say, it was the one true epiphany of my life.
"

Helen waited.

He smiled, apparently impressed with her patience.
"
My grandfather was a hundred and three. There wasn
'
t much left of him by then: skin, bones, a few white hairs. To me his agedness made him look all the more formidable. I knew that old Houqua had been a very important, very wise man; but my great-great-grandfather was even skinnier,
even grayer, even more used up with wisdom.

"
I remember him calling me closer, crooking his index finger, twice, in slow motion. I remember walking up to the bed as solemnly as I could, just the way I had the week before when I was ring boy at a wedding. Joseph was propped up on three fat pillows, I suppose to make it easier for him to breathe. He spoke just four words to me
...
four words
...
but they were the last he ever uttered on earth.
"

A small, bleak smile deadened the lines of Nat
'
s face.
"'
Go where money is,
'
he told me.
"

"
Ah-h,
"
said Helen. It explained so much.

Hands in his pockets, Nat sat back down on the bench and stretched his legs in front of him. Lost in thought, he stayed that way for a long moment, then said,
"
Actually, since he wasn
'
t wearing his teeth, the words came out
'
Go where money ish.
'

Helen didn
'
t know whether to laugh or cry. She said,
"
So you went to
Boston
.
"

"
That
'
s where money ish.
"

"
And instead of tea and silk and pepper, you trade shares. Instead of clipper ships, you move around on 747s. The tradition goes on.
"

After another long moment Nat said,
"
I used to wonder: why did Joseph target me, and not my father? But my father had always been perfectly content to live off the interest; if he had to, the principal. I expect the puritanical Joseph at some point washed his hands of him.
"

"
What about your grandfather and great-grandfather? Why didn
'
t Joseph put the money curse on them?
"

Nat shrugged.
"
I never knew either of them. One died in a riding accident; the other got tripped up in the Depression. I don
'
t think either one ever had the ability to make real money.
"

"
But you do,
"
she conceded, trying not to sigh.

"
It
'
s a knack,
"
he said with laughable understatement.

"
How ironic,
"
she mused.
"
You
'
re being driven by ghosts of your past, while I
'
m being prodded by—
"

She pulled back suddenly from the confession. It would
'
ve been so easy to blurt out something about the bizarre events that had been plaguing her, but what would that prove? That
her
ghost was better than
his
ghost?

No. He was opening up to her at last. No.

"
I never thought of it before, but a talent like yours must be a huge responsibility,
"
she said, completely without irony.

"
Lena
—
"

Helen looked at him, surprised to hear the name. He said,
"
I overheard your aunt call you that. Do you mind?
"