Pike's Folly (6 page)

It took them twenty minutes to get back to the inn. Stuart drove a few miles under the speed limit, keeping both hands on the wheel. Marlene's silence scared him; every now and then he said, “How're you doing, hon?” or “Would you like me to slow down?” or “We're almost there.” She found that she couldn't speak to him just now. They'd debrief later, back in the room.

The grassy parking lot behind the inn was half-empty when they returned. Stuart noticed a young couple walking down a stone path to their car. “There's someone out there,” he muttered. “Maybe I should run in and bring out some clothes.” She handed him his jacket, which he refused. “You need it more than I do,” he said.

She tossed it at him anyway. The parking lot was not well lit, and all he could see was the gray shape of her body in the passenger seat. “Just bring me my jeans and a T-shirt,” she said.

Sighing, he climbed out of the car and walked across the lot. The couple wished him a happy Thanksgiving but cast a curious eye at his sports jacket, which was rumpled. He smiled and continued stiffly on. At the steps, he watched them pass behind his own car and squeeze into a silver Audi. The car started and pulled away; as it did, he unzipped his pants and took out his penis. Within seconds, an aching loneliness overwhelmed him—the night was made even more silent by the sound of crickets—so he stuffed it back and went inside.

Up in the bedroom, he opened Marlene's suitcase and brought out something for her to wear. Along with her clothes, she'd packed a hardcover novel, written by someone he'd once met while out promoting his own book on tour. The book surprised him, in that Marlene rarely read for pleasure. He felt as though he'd caught her cheating with another man—which, in a sense, he had. Still, he could hardly blame her; what this other man had accomplished was something beyond his own abilities and ambitions. He was creatively impotent, and J. Alan Sessions was not. She was better off without him, better off reading someone else's book.

When he looked up, he saw her standing naked in the doorway. “I left the car unlocked,” she said. “I'm gonna take a quick shower, okay? My whole body's shaking.”

For ten minutes, he listened to the sound of the shower running, then undressed and moved into the sitting area, where he halfheartedly fondled his cock by the window. Doing so gave him no pleasure, only the vague sense that he'd lost control of his life.

When she finally came out of the bathroom, she was wearing a towel around her midsection and another wrapped turban-style around her head. “We'll try it again tomorrow,” she said, “but during the day. I think I'll stay in the car, if that's all right— at least just to get started. We'll see how it goes.” Reaching up, she unwound the towel from around her head and dashed her fingers through her wet hair. “The best thing, honey, is that we're doing this together. You're the only one I can talk to, the only one I can share any of this with, because I know you feel the same way I do and would never judge me or think I'm weird.”

He studied her carefully. “Of course you're not weird,” he said.

They didn't have sex that night; instead, he watched her masturbate, then followed her into the bedroom, where they slept until morning. At seven, he rolled out of bed and got dressed. “I'll be right back,” he whispered to her.

Her eyes opened partway. “Where are you going?”

“Coffee,” he lied.

Outside, he started the car and drove back along last night's route, scanning the breakdown lane for Marlene's skirt and blouse. The highway appeared wider and less hemmed in by trees than it had the night before, and its smooth blacktop— white and yellow lines freshly painted—made his behavior seem all the more appalling. It was, to Stuart, like looking at a page of his own writing, then hearing it read aloud by someone else; he couldn't relate to it, and every nuance, every wide-open curve in the road, embarrassed and offended him.

6

The day after Thanksgiving, Allison and her dad paid a visit to his mother's house on Benefit Street, near Brown. Keeny hadn't felt well enough to join Gregg for Thanksgiving, though she'd rallied in time to have brunch with a few of her lady friends at the Rue, a popular spot on the East Side.

Allison and Gregg found Keeny in the living room, fiddling with the TV. “I'm taping this opera for a friend,” she said and pushed a button on the VCR. “
You
know her, Gregg,” she added. “Barbara Stevens, Kenneth's wife. We went on a bus tour to the Lincoln Center together. Mozart. She'd never been to an opera before. I said, ‘You poor thing.' Some of these CEOs keep their wives under lock and key.”

“I went to the Met last year,” Allison said.

Keeny patted Allison's cheek. As much as she loved her granddaughter, she sometimes found it hard to take her seriously. “How's the young man?” she asked.

“Good.”

“Job?”

“Still looking.”

Keeny grinned; these were all coded questions, and Allison's responses were equally diplomatic.

“Let me give you some money,” she said and hobbled into the kitchen, where she unlocked a cabinet and pulled out her purse.

Keeny looked especially frail this afternoon. Her bronchitis had worsened over the fall, and she'd recently begun a new regimen of medications to help control her blood pressure. With Keeny getting older, soon all of the Reese family's problems would fall squarely on Gregg's shoulders.

From inside her wallet, Keeny took a check she'd been waiting to give to Allison for some time, judging from its wrinkled and creased condition. “This is too much, Grandma,” Allison said.

Keeny pshawed. She didn't expect gratitude from her own family. There was no need for it. Whatever she had belonged to all of the Reeses.

“Mom, you shouldn't throw your money around like that,” Gregg said. “Whatever Allison needs, I'll give her.”

Keeny frowned. “If Allison doesn't want the money, she can donate it to the Reese Foundation. I'm sure she knows that already.”

Allison glared at her father. “God,
Dad.
It's not like I asked her for it.”

“I know, I know.” His face felt hot. “It's just that I've been so preoccupied with money these days, and . . . then this lousy
cleaning woman
comes in and takes you for a ride every week.”

“What's wrong with my cleaning woman?” Keeny asked.

“She . . . just doesn't do a good job. Look.” He pointed at the sink, which had a coffee cup in it. “Right there, and . . .” Actually, the room wasn't nearly as dirty as he'd thought it was. Little by little, he could feel his authority slipping away.

Keeny scoffed. “Oh, relax. It's only eighty dollars a week, which isn't much in Providence. Besides, she cleans both floors.”

Allison chimed in. “If Grandma needs a new cleaning woman, I'm sure we can help her find someone else.”

“
That's
right.” Keeny reached for her granddaughter's hand. “Very sensible, as always.”

“Thanks, Gram.” Allison pointed down a dark hallway to the bathroom. “I'll be right back. I've just got to fix my contacts.”

Suddenly more businesslike, Keeny led her son back into the den. Edging the volume down on the TV, she offered him a seat on the suede leather sofa she'd brought over from her old house on Wayland Square. Most of her furniture was familiar to Gregg from his childhood, and it looked odd to him in these new surroundings, where the rooms were smaller and the various tables and chairs didn't quite fit.

“I always forget how deep this sofa is when I sit down,” he said.

With the air of depriving herself for the sake of a guest, Keeny took a seat on a hard ladder-back chair. On her head was a silver turban, which she wore to hide her baldness. As her hair had turned thin and straggly, she'd adopted the male custom of shaving her head every few days. The result had made her look younger, if unnaturally so. A recent face-lift added to the impression of alien perfection, a kind of “old woman of the future” as envisioned by a comic book.

“I didn't mean to go on about the cleaning lady like that,” Gregg said. “I just think that you've got to be careful when you're spending a lot of money, particularly when you're a Reese.”

Keeny squinted peculiarly. “What does being a Reese have to do with it?”

He laughed. He'd been saving this conversation for another time and didn't want to get into it now. “Nothing, I guess.”

Under most circumstances, she would've taken this opportunity to lecture him about his predecessors at the Reese Foundation, who'd done so much for the needy people of Rhode Island, but a fit of coughing derailed her train of thought. “How's Allison?” she asked. “I suppose she must find living with you terribly boring.”

“I don't think so,” he said but allowed, “It's probably unrealistic to expect her to live at home forever.”

Keeny reached deep into her cardigan pockets, pulled out a Kleenex and wiped her nose. “I remember, you were a real homebody when you were a kid. You hated going to summer camp because you didn't want to be away from me.”

“No, I hated summer camp because nobody liked me there.”

“That's not true.”

“Not a single soul,” he asserted. “And you made me get on that bus every day because you were convinced I was having the time of my life, and when your friends asked about me, you
lied
to them. You said, ‘He's having a
wonderful
time,' when it was plainly obvious that I wasn't.”

She stuffed the Kleenex back into her pocket. “You're remembering things wrong, but never mind.”

At this impasse, Allison returned from the bathroom and plunked down next to her father on the sofa. “What are you guys watching?” she asked, squinting at the TV.

“Grandma just said she's taping a program for her—”

“Oh, right. I spaced.” Turning to Keeny, she said, “Grandma, did Daddy tell you? Nathaniel Pike came over yesterday. He looked awful. Thinner.”

This wasn't true, of course. She'd said it only to please her grandmother, who despised Pike. He'd been a hanger-on at the Reese Foundation some twenty years ago, when he was in his early twenties and still hustling all across the state. The foundation was at that time the biggest cash cow in Rhode Island and one that Pike had set his sights on. Keeny had always suspected him and Gregg's ex-wife of having a little fling—not that it mattered, given that her son was a homo.

Gregg sensed his mother's disapproval. “He invited us to New Hampshire next month,” he said.

“You're not going, are you?” Keeny snapped.

“Yes, I
am
going, Mother. Just for a few days. A little rest. I think I deserve it. This is a hard job.”

“Oh, I know how hard it is. Believe me, I managed the Reese Foundation for thirty-eight years, even when your father was still alive. All that time, we always stuck to what we believed in. Not once did we compromise or lower ourselves by associating with gangsters.”

Gregg bristled. “Pike's not a gangster. He's just a guy who made a lot of cash when he was younger, and now he doesn't know what to do with it all.”

“So he spends it on foolish indulgences—like a
mountain,
of all things—instead of following the
Reese
example, which we've upheld for more than three hundred years.”

“Maybe he doesn't want to follow the Reese example.”

The blinders were up; she refused to be persuaded. “You be careful of that man, Gregg. You don't know what he's up to. It might be dangerous. It might be illegal.”

“Or it might be totally harmless. Give me a break.” Gregg hadn't expected such a complete lack of sympathy from his own mother. He'd always believed that the Reeses were different from other families. Their loyalty to one another was old-fashioned, even romantic.
They
were the gangsters, not Nathaniel Pike.

Later that day, after Gregg and Allison had returned home, he sat alone in his study to recover some of the serenity that his mother had disrupted. Whenever he'd tried to assert himself, not just as a Reese but as his own person, Keeny would refute him with the usual guilt trip about his ancestors, who'd never once made a bad decision or failed to serve the public good. Were
all
families like this? he wondered. Gregg actually knew very little about his family history. The past half-dozen generations were fairly well documented: surgeons and CEOs, even a state senator. But before the late eighteenth century, those accounts became more vague, until all that was left was a name scrawled in a yellowed store ledger, like those of so many other old New England dynasties—names that revealed nothing but suggested a great deal. Wealth's evil source.

7

The recorded history of the Reese family dates back to 1636, the year
after Roger Williams left Massachusetts Bay to settle on the eastern
banks of the Moshassuk River. Williams was exiled in late 1635,
having been found guilty of espousing controversial views from his
pulpit in Salem. He escaped before his sentence could be carried
out and took shelter in present-day Bristol, Rhode Island, where he
begged the help of the chief of the Wampanoag tribe, Ousamequin,
whose winter headquarters were on Mount Hope.

Long a friend of the Wampanoags, Williams was the first white
man to publish a linguistic study of Native American languages,
Key into the Language of America
. The Native Americans liked
and respected him, and this mutual respect was the basis of their
friendship. In the spring of 1636, Chief Ousamequin granted him a
section of land ten miles north of Mount Hope, but the deed was
challenged by the governor of Plymouth Colony, Edward Winslow,
who claimed the land already belonged to him. Ousamequin provided Williams with a new deed, which stood up under scrutiny,
and Providence was founded in May or June of 1636.

Two of the original settlers were Hugh Perry Reese and his wife,
Ginny. They moved from Salem to Providence in 1636 and built a
house next door to Williams. Ginny was a frequent presence at
the church services Williams conducted from his private residence.
Devout to the point of obsession, she spent her days and evenings
attending his prayer sessions, until Hugh grew tired of her absences
and asked her to stay at home. When she refused, he beat her. The
couple's dispute was brought before a town council meeting, where
the majority decided that Hugh Reese had violated his wife's
rights. As a punishment, his voting privileges were rescinded until
he offered a formal apology. He never did, and the Reeses left
Providence the following month.

They were not heard from again until the next year, when
their names appeared in a census document for Aquidneck Island,
along with nineteen other families. The leader of the new settlement was Anne Hutchinson, an antinomian who'd run afoul of
local authorities for preaching an unpopular form of Calvinism.
Her quasi-mystical views were supported by a local magistrate in
Boston named William Coddington, who followed her to Aquidneck in early 1638.

On balance, the settlers on Aquidneck were more worldly
than their counterparts to the north. Though no less devout than
Williams, Hutchinson and Coddington acknowledged the need
for aggressive trade and commerce. As it was practiced, antinomianism (the name was pejorative, meaning “against law”) stressed
individuality over communal living and material success over
piety. Unlike Williams's followers, who were each granted the same
amount of land, the antinomians were awarded property on the
basis of class and wealth. Such philosophies would have appealed
to an ambitious merchant like Hugh Reese.

Relations between Reese and his wife seem to have improved
after they moved to Aquidneck. The diary of one William Dyer
records that on 3 March 1647, he “Saw Mr. & Mrs.
Reece
on
Thames St., walking past the merchants house, holding hands in
publick, and
kissing on the mouth
!”