Death in the Polka Dot Shoes (3 page)

I began to fear that the psychological distance between Washington, where I had lived for more than ten years now, and Parkers is much greater than the geography suggests. When you drive to Parkers, the land begins to flatten out as you get closer to the Chesapeake Bay. There aren't any housing developments torn into the side of the road with brick entrance markers, only wood frame homes of varying sizes, sometimes adorned with brick or stone, but always carrying that unmistakable design of the amateur owner architect who has added a room or two. They telescope down in size the closer you get to Parkers, and you realize this is a place nobody goes through. It's not on the way to anywhere. You have to seek it out, or know someone who lives there or at least used to.

The combination gas station and liquor store is the first commercial landmark that welcomes you to town with a handmade sign that says, “ATM Inside.” There are a half dozen bank branches tucked away in the corner of roadside buildings constructed for real estate offices and insurance agencies. But the gas station and liquor store comprise the economic center of the community. There is no town center in a traditional sense with community square, grocery store, hardware store, stoplight and main street. There is no main street, unless you call the road along Jenkins Creek the main one, which might be reasonable to assume because the Bayfront Inn and nearby turkey shooting range are along that road. Behind the Inn is a string of houses facing twenty different directions, indicating the randomness of local zoning requirements.

The houses are tied to the Creek by boat slips that can be rented for nearly two hundred a month and represent the retirement nest egg for most of the families in residence. As long as the slips are filled, life is good in Parkers.

But there is a hard edge to Parkers. Many of the small homes along the road have discarded refrigerators and cloth covered recliners in the yard with rusted old cars that hadn't passed an emission inspection test in years. Yards are filled with boats in every stage of repair, with peeling paint, and gray motors hanging precariously from the stern. They are most often parked beside a garage, which has long since lost its door and allows even a drive-by visitor to see the crab traps and lawn mowers stacked inside. The only new element in most of these yards is the hand painted sign for SARP, “Stop All Resorts Please,” a protest group of mostly waterfront landowners who want to keep the resorts and any other development out. The SARP message is to keep Parkers in its present state of natural beauty, a somewhat obscure concept to those who use refrigerators as doorstops. Yet they are the first to accept yard signs to save the environment.

The Bayfront was rocking but my mood was too blue for the music so I didn't stop. The
Martha Claire
, my dad's old bay-built crab boat, rolled gently at the pier behind the Inn, responding to the waves from small power boats on Jenkins Creek. Her seventeenth coat of white paint glistened with a red tint from the evening sun, and showed no evidence that my brother would not be returning to her helm on Monday morning. Jimmy had kept her in sparkling condition.

I drove on back to Washington with the top down so I could smell the hay fields between Parkers and the City. I noticed when I left the church there were several frowns aimed at my car. I knew exactly what that was all about; the worst aspect of my small town life: envy. I remember in high school we used to have cliques that were always judging people by their possessions, their wealth, their clothes. As adults, it became a new car, new wife, new fur coat, a job in the city, a new house, or a Saab convertible. The socially preferable mode of transportation in Parkers was a pickup truck, preferably at least ten years old, with dents on every fender. I might have to get one of those.

It was the hard edge I remembered from my youth. My friends were always fighting someone, whether it be individually at a bar, or collectively against the State over a dredging permit. There seemed to be an inferiority complex associated with living in the southern tip of Jenkins County. We were called South Countians in Parkers. And the watermen joked that all the crap in Baltimore and Annapolis would sooner or later be thrown on South County.

In fact, you could get so worked up about the problems of South County, it sometimes seemed a relief to get back to the city where nobody cared. In Parkers we had no chain grocery stores, so we had to drive to Annapolis for food, an inconvenience only the poor recognized as a discriminatory cost of living. Our banks were small branches where the young tellers didn't fully understand how a money market worked, or how to transfer money electronically, and usually recommended passbook savings accounts paying less than three percent interest. There was no local government to respond to any public need, and whether it was police, medical or building permits, we always had to make the trip to Annapolis. Not a great distance, but psychologically it was a million miles. It was also money: every trip to the doctor or the store cost five dollars for gas and incidentals. It wasn't necessarily cheap to live in Parkers.

My townhouse in Washington is just behind the nation's Capitol, recently renovated by a young couple who discovered the original bricks between the row houses. They tore out the ancient plaster and left a beautiful internal façade for the one big room that served all purposes, except sleeping. The bedroom was upstairs. That's why, when the young wife got pregnant, they had to find a bigger house and I was lucky enough to find the perfect bachelor pad. Even at 34, I am still single.

I opened the varnished front door, picked up the paper, and tossed my keys on the granite kitchen counter. It was dark because the only windows were on both ends of the house, and dusk was about to become night. I turned on the television because it provides better background noise than music, poured my first scotch on the rocks for the evening, plopped down in the stuffed armchair, and thought about the day. More specifically, I wondered why my deceased brother wanted me back in the waterman business, and why I might even consider it. There was, of course, the 147 acres of land on the Bay that my parents had left to my brother. In their will, they wrote that I had been given their cash for college, their dreams, and the brains to become a lawyer. Thus the land and the
Martha Claire
would have to take care of my brother. I think Jimmy deeply resented the intellectual implications of that provision, and perhaps that's why he now presented me with this Faustian option. He never showed me any resentment, seemingly happy with his life. But Jimmy's will was nevertheless strange: it offered me half the 147 acres if I would also accept our family workboat and return to the crabbing business for at least five years. The other half of the land was left to his wife and daughter.

What the hell was he up to? You could argue that he knew my frustrations with the law and just wanted to give me the value of a simpler life, for him a better life. Or he just wanted to be fair, rectifying our father's mistaken benevolence. Or you could argue that his final revenge was to force me out of the law and back on the water. He could never understand why I left the water. When I told him I was getting tired of the city, and often yearned for a return to the water, he could never understand why I didn't do it. “Just give up the money, put on your blue jeans, and join me on the boat,” he would say. “To hell with the law.”

I couldn't figure out his motives, so I poured a second scotch, only for the purposes of mental clarity you understand, and fell back into my chair. I am Irish, as I suppose the name Neddie Shannon makes obvious. But I'm not freckled with light skin and all that. Rather, I have dark skin, dark eye brows and light brown hair that I will never lose because my father and grandfather lived into their eighties with enough hair to start a wig shop. I also enjoy a challenge, a good root for the ole underdog, a fine turn of events, and people who care for other people.

Anyway, I don't have to determine my future tonight. Just before going to sleep, however, I should add that my list of favorite things does not include the law. It's just never been fun. The billing system, where you have to account for every hour spent on a client, has always seemed nuts to me. And I've never had a client who thought it was fair. It detracts from my sense of completion. Start a job and finish it, my dad used to say, and let the market set the price. As I finish this day of sadness and introspection, maybe it's time to reinvent my life, or at least do a little restructuring.

Chapter Two

I hate digital alarm clocks because you can never make them alarm, or it's a.m. when it should be p.m., or it's radio when it should be buzzer, and the settings are too small to read in the dark or when you're snockered. So I just leave those blinking red digits staring at me in the night and trust I'll wake up to read them, remember my appointments for the day and respond accordingly. This morning I thought about my father getting out of bed at three o'clock in the morning to ready his crab boat for six hours on the Bay and I knew my returning to the water was folly. On the other hand, is it a law that you have to start crabbing that early? Why not nine o'clock? I decided to roll over until 8:30 and consider the matter again.

After a couple of cups of instant expresso, I slipped into a pair of kakis, docksider boat shoes, no socks, and a blue denim shirt, the daily outfit of the dot com generation, even if we are lawyers. I was taking the day off after the memorial service, mainly because everyone would expect me to. And I needed some help in thinking this matter through. The answer seemed to be Diane Sexton, a very attractive lawyer in our firm who I had been warned to stay away from. She told me once that she had met my brother in association with one of her clients, somebody with interests on the Chesapeake, and although she wouldn't know a blue crab from a shark, she might have good career advice, at least about the law. She specialized in real estate development.

My Saab swung into a tight parking space in front of Hamilton House on Pennsylvania Avenue, just as Diane stepped through the revolving door. With the top down she recognized me immediately, waved and walked to the car. I couldn't help but notice that although she was wearing a light green summer business suit with brown heels, her jacket was low cut exposing the curve of her cleavage, with no evidence of a blouse or scarf underneath. I imagined her talking off her jacket in my living room, and I wondered if she had imagined me imagining her. I always think women have baser motives than they admit.

“Diane,” I shouted, “glad I caught you. Could I buy you coffee?”

“Don't you think I have a client waiting?”

“No,” I replied, “you would have been in at six getting ready.”

I pushed the door open and she climbed in. One advantage of a low and small sports car is that women have to swing their fanny in first, which she did, and I reminded myself again of the colleague who said Diane was dangerous. But that might be the best antidote to sadness. So I swung out in traffic and headed for the Willard Hotel.

The Willard is the best thing about Washington. As a boy, Dad would bring me to the city to visit the museums and we would drive by the Willard. The museums were the extent of my cultural training because they had ancient wooden boats on display, and were located on the Mall where parking was plentiful. I liked the natural history museum best because of the prehistoric skeletons of elephants that flew, and the like. And I always liked the tired old Willard when it was closed, for about 20 years with pigeons flying through the upper windows and a faded wooden sign on the front that read: Closed for Renovations. A smaller For Sale sign below, suggested that the former was contingent upon the latter. But so many Presidents had lived in, or at least visited, the Willard over the years that the building could never be torn down in this era of historical preservation. Nor could it be renovated at a reasonable price. This project was going to require deep pockets and somebody who would repair the elegance and splendor of the 1930s in a way that would fetch four hundred dollars a night. After a couple of decades, it happened. Somebody bought the hotel and restored its legendary elegance. And now, the marble columns in the grand foyer, the circular mahogany bar, and the plush carpets often drew me to the hotel. It embodies the fine plush world of money and power that I thought the law should engender. And after I discovered that you didn't have to own the firm to visit the Willard, I went about every Saturday night. In fact, you don't really need much money at all. If you have twenty dollars you can spend the evening with two drinks at the Round Robin bar, or the morning with a pot of coffee in the restaurant, and feel very good about yourself. With Diane it was even better.

“Diane,” I began after we were seated by the window, “I don't know you too well, but I want to talk about my future. I need a little help.”

“Sure Ned,” she said. “I'm so sorry about your brother. Is that what this is about?”

“Yes.”

“Well, be careful,” she said. “Never make decisions in sorrow or in anger.”

“Right.”

“Let me just lay out the situation,” I continued. “Tell me what you think.”

She picked up her coffee which had just arrived, raised it to her lips, and took a small sip, noticing the Willard eagle on the side. When she set the cup back on the small, circular table, I blurted it out: “I may leave the firm.”

She didn't blink an eye, probably not really caring one way or the other. But she did show the proper concern by asking why.

“The truth is,” I said, “I've always wanted to go back to Parkers. I thought it would probably be retirement, to some big mansion on the water.”

“Looking for grandeur?” she asked. “Or recognition as the hometown boy who made good?”

“Both, I guess. Parkers isn't much of a town, really. Just a few crab houses with bars and not a one of them has tablecloths.”