Memoir From Antproof Case (17 page)

As the boat came close to shore it sent a wave of white foam through basalt-black water to embrace the scattered boulders on the bank. A white house appeared far above us, perfectly framed in the trees, each of its smooth pilasters and columns rising as if from the crux of a massive oak.

I turned and looked to the mountains on the other side of the river, to see what one would see from the house, and when I did I saw Constance with a tear sparkling just under her right eye. But as soon as I looked at her carefully, it was gone.

My profession, my calling for many years, had trained me to seize upon the small signs and transient evidences of invisible powers, to tease from an unwavering landscape proof of thundering rivers below.

"What is it about this house that affects you so much?" I asked. She seemed to have been seized by emotion, and to be fighting it off.

"Nothing," she said, her voice cracking.

"Nothing?" I asked.

Then, as I watched, she slowly went to pieces. I embraced her, and she hid her face by pressing it against my neck. She cried until we passed the estate, and then, after she regained her composure, she explained to me that her parents, whom I had never heard her mention, had worked on this estate, and had died there.

"Both of them?"

"They're buried on the hill."

It seemed unlikely that she would be the child of the near-feudal servants of a great estate and then gone to Radcliffe....

"The proprietor," she told me, "was a Harvard alumnus and a great benefactor. The children of his servants and staff were given the best secondary education, and not a single one failed to go to the Ivy League."

"What about his own children?"

"They went to the same school."

"Wasn't it difficult?"

"No," she said. "When they were very young all the children were innocent and equal. As they grew, they became aware of their parents' standing, but they had known each other from too early an age to be affected by it."

"It must have been a wonderful school," I said.

"Four tutors, seven children," was her answer. "One of the barns that you saw was a laboratory, another a library."

"Noblesse oblige."

"I suppose so."

"Didn't it make you angry?"

"No. I loved my parents very much. They weren't perfect, and at times I was embarrassed by their situation, but I suppose that made me love them even more. At first you love them because they seem all-powerful, and then you love them when you discover that they are so terribly vulnerable, but you love them nonetheless, more and more, though at times, as you labor through your own travails, you hardly know it."

Except for a slight feathering of the prop in one instance, and a good deal of omission that changed the sense of everything she said, what she told me was entirely true. Though she was at times mysterious and inaccessible, her character was such that she could not lie, and she never did lie to me. She did, however, dissemble.

That was hardly a sin. After all, I myself was pretending to be someone I wasn't, all in service of the surprise I was preparing for her, though with every day that passed in her presence I realized that the Cinderella stuff was totally unnecessary. I was in love with her: that was all that mattered.

Soon after our river trip, on a Saturday in August, I had crossed the park and was walking down Fifth Avenue on my way to pick her up at the Barbizon. I was a little more than half my present age, and could jump over benches that now I seek as a drowning man lunges for a life preserver.

Just as I was passing one of the great Fifth Avenue mansions, the kind that sits in its own little park behind an immense stone and iron fence, Constance flew from the front door, which was closed behind her as if by a servant. Frozen in my tracks, I watched her snap her fingers and turn around. She had forgotten something. She bounded up the steps, took out a key, and was in and out in less time than I required to suspect that it was perhaps someone else, but to realize that, in fact, it wasn't. She shot through the gate like an acrobat, went to the curb, and seized a floating taxi with the authority of General MacArthur.

Then she was gone, and I was left to survey the house. At the time, it simply took my breath away. Later, I would learn the details. It had five stories and a basement, and totaled 48,000 square feet, not including garages, greenhouse, swimming pavilion, and squash court. On the first floor was a ballroom of immense size with an eighteen-foot ceiling. The library was of double height, with a wrap balcony and six rolling ladders, and its French doors gave out onto the great oaks in the garden.

The kitchens were studies in copper and stainless steel, with two chefs in starched white bonnets who played chess most of the day at a table by a big window. A man was employed solely to polish wood, another to polish metals and marble, another to clean glass. Though half the glory of a house is how it shines, the other half is flowers, which were everywhere, as if you were in the gardens of Niterói. Well, not quite: nothing can match a carefully tended garden in the tropical sun. It is as beautiful as the youths who tend it—young girls in straw hats and dark purple-and-blue blouses, whose faces are flushed and perfect, and strong energetic boys who cannot take their eyes from their lovely co-workers. Something there is that really makes the heart skip, about a beautiful girl, in the hot sun, with a watering can.

I stood on Fifth Avenue looking at the house and gardens where Constance had seemed so much at home. What, I asked myself, is going on? But it was clear: this was her house. When, later, she could no longer keep up appearances, she invited me in, and soon after, when I married her, it became my house, too.

Through no fault of her own, Constance Olivia Phoebe Ann Nicola Devereaux Jamison Buckley Andrews Smith Faber Lloyd was a billionairess. It had never occurred to me that the geometric dispersion of family fortunes could, in fact, run the other way to become geometric concentration, either by some form of primogeniture or by strategic marriage. Her ancestors had been so prudent, thrifty, and calculating that they had melded several dozen immense fortunes into a great snowball of wealth to which more wealth never failed to adhere. Part of her faith and passion was that she would never under any circumstances have more than one child. And that child, by God, would not marry a pauper.

"But what about me?" I asked, given that she had married me, and I, full partner at Stillman and Chase or not, was by any standard of comparison with her not only a pauper but a piker, a pipkin, and a pumpkin.

"You're an exception," she said. "Besides, the line is descended from the mother."

There is no question that she loved me as I loved her, but from the moment I saw her inserting the key in the lock of that great door, I was attacked by the octopus of anxiety as I wrestled with the worm of doubt, so to speak.

Here in the gardens I can tell the truth, though it still brings waves of seasickness. Yes, I was a fighter pilot with the Distinguished Flying Cross, an ace. I was shot down twice, and the first time I survived in the sea and made my way through the desert to take to the air again within a week, with tanks full and guns loaded.

All right, I didn't have a Harvard doctorate, but I had a Harvard A.B. and an Oxford M.Phil.. I was a full partner at Stillman and Chase, and senior at the firm by what appeared to have been a freak of circumstance but which was actually my uncle's careful calculation. In my early forties, I was an athlete in excellent health. I was becoming comfortable with presidents and kings, and I was already completely comfortable with popes. But when Constance took me home to her magnificent house—and there were others, that is, other houses—something dreadful happened to me.

From that evening on—Christ, her father was a Nobel laureate and dead to boot—I could not look in the mirror without seeing a hamster: a round-shouldered, pointy-faced, dirt-brown chicken croquette with legs and white whiskers. Her billions diminutized me. I was a kept man. A gigolo. A rodent. I tried to deny it, but when I attempted to give myself encouragement in front of the mirror, never once did I fail to turn into a gerbil before my very eyes, though sometimes I thought I might have been a guinea pig.

Even though I would not admit to this affliction, Constance made every effort to counter it. Her inborn grace led her to assure me by fact and deed. She made me co-beneficiary of the many trusts that watered her well, protesting that she had gained them by accident of birth, and I by accident of love. She had her lawyers put everything in both our names.

"There it is," she told me when it was done. "It's irrevocable. It's mine, it's yours, it doesn't matter. Perhaps we should give it away and live in a cabin on the beach."

"What beach?"

"Southampton."

"What about the piano?"

"We could build a music studio next to the cabin—sort of a Williamsburg-like arrangement, with a formal garden flanked by dependencies, and the stables, swimming pool, tennis courts, and greenhouses on the other side of a great lawn."

"How would we eat?" I asked, somewhat sarcastically.

"We'd fish and gather berries, and both Fortnum and Mason and Petrossian deliver by air mail."

As brilliant as she was, her sense of reality was unique. For example, one day I came home to find Constance pacing the library and in a foul mood. I asked her why she was upset. She told me that she had stopped in a hardware store on Lexington Avenue to buy one of those tiny little things for pulling the stems off strawberries. (I would call them tweezers except that they are to tweezers what a hippopotamus is to a praying mantis.)

The proprietor had been so nasty that she had confronted him, explaining that she, as a customer and a human being, deserved simple courtesy—at which point he erupted in obscene curses, foam, and spittle.

"So what, it's New York," I said, as I prepared to run to the store and tear him limb from limb.

"I'll get him," she said, "in my own way."

"You mean you'll buy the block and evict him."

She denied it.

"Start fifty hardware stores on either side of him?"

"No."

"What?"

"I'm going to make him believe in a pagan god," she said, "and then I'll take his god away from him."

"Of course," I answered. "I knew it, but I just didn't say it."

She then revealed a rather astonishing plan. I hardly breathed, for I understood that she had the means of actually carrying it out.

"Look," she went on, in a way that was simultaneously sweet and terrifying, "I'm entitled to retaliation, am I not?"

"Let me do it for you."

"He has a baseball bat."

"Did he threaten you with it?"

"He had it in his hand."

"I'll make him eat a tea strainer."

"You can't do that," she said. "You can't do things like that, not anymore. The newspapers would seize upon it as a case of persecution."

"You mean that possession of great wealth makes you into a doormat?"

"No, but you're forced to take roundabout routes."

"Such as making someone believe in a pagan god...."

"Yes."

"And then taking that god away from him."

"Exactly."

"But, Constance," I protested, "isn't that too
obvious?
"

"It's not obvious at all," she told me, "though it will take four or five years. The end result will be that he closes his store and retires a bitter and puzzled man."

"No wonder you're afraid of the newspapers. For what this man did to you with a few words, you're going to ruin him."

"Yes, and I'll make him wealthy in the process."

"How wealthy?"

"Millions, if he's thrifty, and if, in the end, he resists temptation."

"That's good revenge," I said brightly.

"It is."

Her plan could have come only from the unfettered imagination of someone whose entire life had been spent trying to understand the value of money because it seemed to her to have no inherent worth, in that her supply had been unlimited.

First, she was going to hire a corps of managers and set them up in an office building. They would arrange for an actor with an unfailing resemblance to Father Time to go into the hardware store in July and ask for a sled. Constance had noticed that her tormentor had a dozen Flexible Flyers piled in a corner. The actor would be made up in such a way that he seemed to glow. Constance had designed, in theory, a system of tiny battery-powered ultraviolet lights for illuminating phosphorescent powders that were to be sprinkled on the actor's shrouds and scythe.

Making his appearance during a summer lightning storm, he would ask for a sled, purchase it, and leave. The next day, two shills would come in and ask for sleds. The following day, three, the following day, four, ad almost infinitum.

In just short of three years' time—ninety-five days short, to be exact, without a leap year—a thousand people a day would arrive at this man's store, fall, winter, and summer (New York has no spring), to buy a sled, and only between the hours of nine and five.

Which would mean that at average intervals of slightly less than thirty seconds he would sell one kind of sled—all other models and accessories would be rejected—for one price only. The buyers would walk out if he tried to raise the price or even to lower it.

At the end, after overhead and taxes, he would be clearing about five million a year in current dollars. Were he himself not at the store, the legions of Constance's shills would not buy. He would be very busy, his life a blizzard of sleds.

On the hottest day of summer, when no accidental buyers were likely to appear, all the shills would be called off. The previous day, when it had been only 119 degrees Fahrenheit, he would have sold a thousand sleds. For a week he would be bereft. The neighboring merchants, who had tried to sell sleds too, and who, though they dressed as Santa Claus, advertised, and cut prices to the bone, had not succeeded, would think his luck had finally run out.

Just as the merchant was ready to retire, Father Time would come into the store and ask momentously for a baking pan. Then the cycle would begin again, only to be ended and restarted once more, as Father Time requested various other items.