Lapham Rising (14 page)

I
n the bellicose darkness of a summer evening, when the rain clouds inflate like black dirigibles, the wind cleaves the air like a cannonball shot from the deck of a battle-scarred frigate, the creek waves smack the beach like the rattle of a Gatling gun, and I have run out of martial imagery, I prepare for war. An hour from now, Lapham’s workers will have departed the construction site, their day’s mischief done, and I shall christen my Da Vinci at last.

“Finished your lecture yet?” Hector asks. His slim-reed hope is that, having neglected the Chautauqua presentation for most of the day, I will now get bogged down in it and forget my main project. How little he knows me. “Such a fascinating topic, the twentieth century,” he tries. “So complex. So—how do you put it?—layered.”

“I have my theme,” I tell him, indicating Lapham’s house with a flick of my head. “The details are easy.” We are sitting
side by side on the dock, listening to the ocean chug in its wash cycle.

It is a little after seven. I know that without having to look. And thanks to Kathy, the torsion spring lies in place, so I have nothing to do but wait. I’ve called the car to pick me up on Quogue Street at 8:45, in plenty of time to get me to LaGuardia for my flight, which I even remembered to confirm. I’ve packed. What have we here? A moment of calm? Hector starts to sing “When you come to the end of a perfect day,” but I shut him up. He stares across at Lapham’s with want and admiration. Yet he cannot help himself; he looks sweet.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

This purple hour, how I reveled in it before the banging started. The almost-night wraps around everything like a complete and airtight thought, an image that works from all sides. And I don’t mean just here on Noman, or here in Quogue. At the hour the sun gets ready to call it a day, even if thunderheads are about to break open at the seams, as they are right now, one can feel a lover’s sigh cover the East End, something unheard for a million years since the Pleistocene glaciers bullied the landmass into shape, and the breakers crashed in on the rocks, rubbing and grinding, until they sculpted a shoreline.

Somewhere at this moment an antiques dealer is hauling
in the trestle tables and ladderback chairs from the front lawn of his shop on the highway where they have stood all day on siren display. Bathers (sun and ocean) make their slow processionals up the escarpments, their eyes stunned by the battle fatigue of a day at the beach. SUVs idle in front of the shops, while husbands pick up a last-minute lobster. Cigarette boats, their frantic engines tamed to a purring, slither through the locks of the Shinnecock Canal, and aim for their slips. Mothers in whites, with tennis rackets strapped to their backs like hunting bows, ride their bikes home. Kids, too. Even the estate sections breathe more evenly at this hour, as the sprinklers on timers spume and sputter all at once, and the residents, returned from whatever, adjust their showerheads, spray the salt from their skin, and do not talk. No sound on the fresh-washed streets but the clopping of a solitary jogger. The trophy children in their pj’s read
Babar
.

Soon the villages will be left to the wheeling gulls and to the police cars crouching in the bushes, both poised for a late catch. Otherwise, it is a wholesale desertion of the out-of-doors, like the beginning of Gray’s “Elegy.” It leaves the world to darkness and to me. And to him.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

In the purple hour, my father would recite that poem, Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” Formidable
piece of work. Eighteenth century, of course. He could do it from memory, because that is how poetry was taught back then. One memorized Gray’s “Elegy,” which was incorporated into one’s being, and thus became like an eye or a thumb; one had no choice but to feel improved by it.

Tonight he and my mother lie in the Quogue cemetery (not a churchyard; he never would have agreed to that), where small gray-and-white headstones convene in an eternally unadjourned town meeting. I once had hoped Chloe and I would lie there too, eventually, but I suppose the L.A. bone-yards have more oomph. Great stone Gabriels spread their protective wings over the dust of moguls who denied Dalton Trumbo. Such a strange world.

Which reminds me: I ought to make out a will. I have tried to be careful with tonight’s plan, but I still could wind up in the drink.

“Off to do more writing?” asks Hector. “Good idea. Take all the time you need.”

Inside the house, I retrieve the camcorder that my children gave me for my last birthday. It was sort of a joke. They knew I’d long been of the opinion that the camcorder was responsible for the general lack of modesty abroad these days, that by enabling everyone to appear on television, it had contributed to the death of private life. They also suggested that I use it to record my own life as a warning to others. I’ve never
even taken the thing out of its box before, but it seems simple enough to operate, and the kids had the forethought to include a tape. I return to the dock, set the camcorder on a piling, plug it in the outlet, and position myself before the lens, with the Da Vinci behind me. I am certain I look as comfortable as George Bernard Shaw or Arthur Conan Doyle in those primitive movie interviews in which, hands at their sides, they appear to be facing a firing squad. “This is my will and testament,” I begin.

“Yahoo!” says Hector. He trots to my side. “I’ve always wanted you to make out a will. As your closest relative, I mean.”

“Only geographically. If you want to stay while I’m taping, you’ll have to be quiet.”

“As a Doberman.”

“To begin with…” I address the camcorder.

“Hallelujah!”

“I won’t warn you again.” He bows his head.

“To begin with, I wish to quote the poet Hesiod as an epigraph to this document. Hesiod, my kind of poet, wrote of the Ages of Man. As to his own times, he offered the following observation:

“A bit flip for my taste,” says Hector. “But I like it.”

“And now to the more practical portions of the will: my bequests and requests.” Hector sits up, his ears
way
up.

“To the people of the East End I leave my island, Noman, as a wildlife refuge. I would like to know that the children of the area, and especially the poorer ones, will have a place to study nature and generally enjoy themselves in a protected environment. Let there be many boats full of happy young ones going back and forth day and night across the creek in full view of the majestic house of the Laphams, who, I am sure, will delight in the round-the-clock squeals of excitement. I should warn you that there may be some opposition to this bequest from one Kathy Polite of Polite for the Elite, Realtors. But pay her no heed. She is known to be unbalanced, and it would be kinder simply to ignore her.

“To Chloe, Charles, Emma, and James I leave everything else I own, which admittedly is not much, except for what cash remains in the Money Room and a few book royalties that might provide an annuity sufficient for one good yearly family dinner in a two-star restaurant. Chloe, you are welcome to bring Joel to the dinner, at which you might raise a glass to my memory, but that is up to you. In any event, do not make a fuss about it and draw the silly attention of the other diners.

“To Dave’s boy, Jack, I leave the cancellation of my loan. The money is his.

“To the British West Indies lady who takes ticket reservations for US Air I leave a round-trip two-day excursion to the Hamptons, to show her what she’s been missing.

“To José the carpenter, who works on Dave’s crew at Lapham’s property, I leave a brand-new swimming pool, to be purchased from Miss Alvarez at Anthony’s Aqua Heaven. Please see to it that the installation is as noisy as possible.

“To Miss Alvarez herself I wish to say, I am
not
a Romantic. But you may have my copy of
The Vanity of Human Wishes
anyway.”

Hector goes into one of his bloodhound sniffing spasms to suggest his impatience.

“On the matter of my funeral: Joel, naturally, I leave this in your hands. But keep it simple. I know you may be tempted to go in another direction—a Gandhi-worthy procession of two
or three million mourners stretching along the LIE, filling all the lanes, including the HOV, from the Moriches to Amagansett, all rending their garments and heaving with grief—but try to resist it.

“No eulogies, please. I do not want the congregants subjected to other writers talking about how much they meant to me.

“And I guess that’s it,” I tell the camcorder.

“Aren’t you forgetting someone?” asks Hector.

“I don’t think so. Whom did you have in mind?” I pretend to be perplexed about this. “Oh! You!” I love it that he can’t help wagging his tail and betraying his excitement. I turn back to the camcorder.

“As to my dog, Hector, I leave him…”

“Yes? Yes?”

“I leave him to the Mexican carpenters across the creek. They are good guys and will take excellent care of him. Please tell them, however, that he is not to have nachos.”

“But what about something for me? What will I inherit?”

“Try the earth.”

I address the camcorder again. “One more thing. My epitaph? ‘Do not resuscitate.’”

I
’ve read that Mozart would grow melancholy when he approached the final stages of a composition, and that Velázquez would become surly and depressed when putting the final touches on a painting, and that Eugene O’Neill would so vigorously resist the moment when he was about to complete his final act that he would take long vacations in the tropics rather than endure the letdown of writing his last soggy lines. Such are my own emotions as I am about to survey my handiwork openly for what will be the first and possibly the last time.

I throw off the tarp with a flourish, the way a sculptor might remove the drape from a statue he is about to present to an audience in a gallery. The heavens cooperate in the moment. Thunder. Ka-boom! The Da Vinci is revealed in all its preposterous splendor. It is a work of art, of industrial art. The parts hug one another like the pieces of a gigantic Chi
nese puzzle box, functional and mysterious yet forbidding and smug in their completeness. I know how the builders of the Trojan Horse felt when they stood back from their masterwork and took it in, before the horse received a single Greek warrior. They had manufactured a weapon, to be sure, but first they had made a thing of beauty.

It is 7:41. Exactly ten minutes ago, at 7:31, Dave, Jack, and José and company packed up their gear and left Lapham’s construction site. Exactly thirteen minutes ago, at 7:28, the site experienced its last bang of the day. I made a point of listening for it. I stood on my dock, craned my neck toward the creek, and waited.
Bang
. More than the last bang of the day, it was the last bang, period.
Bang
.

Now the storm arrives, not in a spray of droplets but with mature force. In the midst of the Sturm und Drang, I try to imagine how many white party tents are at this moment tottering on their tent poles on all the lawns of all the towns and villages of the East End. How many tent flaps are flapping; how many paper tablecloths are flying about in the wind; how many knives, forks, spoons, and napkins and plastic champagne flutes and tea lights are spinning through the air like shrapnel; how many canapés are sodden; how many contingency plans are hurriedly being put into effect; how many caterers are checking their contracts to verify that they cannot be held responsible for the weather; how many guests are
apologizing for phoning at the last minute, unable to shake their summer colds; and how many hosts and hostesses are holding their heads with both hands as though they were in danger of flying off with the rest of the things.

The porch leaks and the storm strafes the house at a slant, entering the front door and pelting the remnants of the parlor wall into a viscous mound of plaster of Paris. The rain thickens and falls in metallic sheets, and I am soaked through and a bit chilled.

But the Da Vinci holds. The winches and the plates move easily. The pine ball I have been soaking in a tub of gasoline for the past two weeks lies in its pouch ready for ignition. Kathy Polite’s braid performs brilliantly. I had misgivings, I must admit, but damn! She’s as strong as a horse. I pull down the hurling arm using all the weight of my body. I fasten it at the base. I stand back. There. I take the extra-long fireplace matches I have been keeping dry, say a brief pagan prayer, and light the ball. It flares in the pouch like the sun itself, and for just a flash, the light it gives off illuminates everything in sight, including the looming skeleton of Lapham’s house across the creek.

Outer walls, inner walls, pool-house walls, gazebo walls, atrium, aquarium, arboretum, auditorium, and asparagoretum walls; the piazza, esplanade, terrace, and gardens; the conservatory, the refectory, the aviary, apiary, chapel, sta
bles, pantry, bomb shelter, French doors, pocket doors, the voissoir and the spandrel and the joists—all are lit up in the white of white heat, as if the scene were London bathed in floodlights during the Blitz.

Hector stares, then backs away. He is soaked through as well, his fur the color of unpolished silver, his mass diminished by the rain. Succinct little animal. He retreats to the shelter of the porch.

It’s going to work, I know it. I did the research. I spent hours.

During World Wars I and II, soldiers tossed grenades using a type of torsion catapult. Aircraft carriers used catapult technology to launch planes from their decks. Years earlier, Samuel P. Langley, the Wright brothers’ chief competitor, had built an aircraft called the Aerodrome that was propelled by a spring-powered catapult. And long before that, Alexander the Great had included catapults in his campaign artillery, substituting torsion springs for the gastaphetes, the old crossbow, in something like 400
B.C
. By the third century
B.C
., great warriors were using the euthytonon for shooting arrows and the palintonon for throwing stone balls. And then later there were all of those flashy Romans and hairy Anglo-Saxons who fired off boulders, which I suppose constituted the world’s first weapons of mass destruction. And what list would be complete without David, of happy memory, whose
slingshot was a primitive form of catapult and whose opponent, like mine, had the advantage of size? Such is the brief history of this remarkable machine, which has served noble causes from the first ticks of time.

But none of the men who used the catapult in battle, not one of my distinguished and heroic blood brothers in arms, can have felt more satisfaction or a greater sense of purpose than do I at this moment.

Would that a tenor drum rolled. Would that a phalanx of French horns blared. Would that banners—swallowtails, fan-ions, and a couple of flammules—were flapping on pikes held aloft by Roman legionnaires wearing helmets and cuirasses and bearing shields and a glassus. Would that they might unfurl a tapestry depicting the anabasis of Cyrus the Younger as he marshaled his ten thousand Greek auxiliaries against Artaxerxes II. Would that a grandstand were packed with the great people of history—Dr. Johnson, Shakespeare, Dante, Beethoven, Vermeer, Newton, Curie, Gandhi, Michelangelo, King, Dearie, Gilliam, and of course, da Vinci—all on their feet cheering.

They acknowledge me. I acknowledge them. In my bearing I try to strike a balance between the demeanor of a victorious general immensely honored and that of a foot soldier simply doing his duty. Now all is hushed. A lone snare drum thrums a solemn march, and I am carried back to the earliest bright
moments of the American Revolution, when all was bugles, fife, and promise, and the first Laphams were lost, or confused, at sea.

I step forward. The rain grows sleety. I pull the trigger device. The arm is released from the slip hook, and the pine ball shoots forward at a forty-five-degree angle, just as Sir Ralph promised it would. The fireball is launched at so high a trajectory that it competes with the storm for command of the night. It trails a bluish light into the black rain, and makes a deep
whoosh
, like a wind in the Arctic, audible even in the midst of the thunder and the massive torrent. Hector hunkers down and tucks his head between his paws. The rain crashes, the air sizzles with lightning. A clap of thunder I hear as applause.

Mouth open, eyes fixed, I await the hit, listen for the crash, watch for the moment of impact when the House of Lapham will flare into its own crematorium. A gasp. A blink. I follow the flight of the ball as a parent might gaze upon a child heading off to make his fortune in the world, and my heart thrills with sadness and pride and expectation.

And then I hear something terrible yet familiar. And then I see something even more terrible. The fireball that was growing smaller and smaller in its flight away from me—a medicine ball diminishing to a bowling ball to a golf ball—all of a sudden appears to have reversed its evolution, as if in a
parallax, and now seems (am I imagining this?) a bit bigger, and a bit bigger. Definitely bigger.

What happens next I cannot bear to relate. Thus I shall describe the event as I imagine
The Southampton Press
will describe it a week hence, in a piece squeezed between one on the soaring prices of summer rentals and another announcing a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton at the home of P. Diddy.
The Southampton Press
is a responsible paper, so, to my regret, it will get the story right.

…though not before I rush in to grab Hector,
The Vanity of Human Wishes
, my Blossom Dearie CDs, my Junior Gilliam photo, and, I don’t know why, my pen and a writing pad. I guess I won’t need US Air or the hired car, after all. Rude of me not to call and cancel, but the phone is melting.

The newspaper article ought also to mention that not only is my house on fire; my entire island, a victim of the “driest summer in memory,” is likewise ablaze. Tennessee in flames. My house is gone; my island is going. The fire spreads over it in scattered orange triangles, both equilateral
and isosceles. I sit on my beach with my feet in the water and stare at the last two things to go, the Da Vinci and my wooden rowboat. The boat flares up nicely. I have no way out but to swim, and in this storm, and with my injured toe, I may not make it.

In the house, only one structure remains unaffected by the fire: the statue of Chloe sits absorbed in the news, forever and ever, indestructible and immortal, God bless her. The Hungarian dwarf would be pleased. My dock holds as well, probably because it too has its feet in the water.

Hector issues a volley of machine-gun barks at the flames. He is especially helpful in emergencies. I carry him over to
Sharon
, place him in her hull, and guide him toward Lapham’s shore. He looks annoyed, insofar as he can look anything, and tosses me a sarcastic bark.

“Satisfied?” he asks.

“I’m trying to save your life.”

“The good Lord will save my life,” he says. I wish the remote had a torpedo button. As he fades from my sight I hear the loud, atonal strains of the Navy hymn.

An empty bottle of Absolut vodka floats up to me, and I begin to scribble a letter to put inside in hopes that the vessel will ride the waterways north and eventually reach the Chautauquans. Since it is a vodka bottle, it stands a better than even chance.

A loud pop from a burning log startles me, and I turn to see the fire gobbling up my cord of wood, then rushing to the hill as if in a panic, and spreading everywhere. This is not the best atmosphere for writing. But it does add a certain urgency, a real deadline. I continue:

Now the air is clogged with smoke. I try to fan myself with the writing pad, but it doesn’t work. I’m going to get this done regardless.