“Now,” she said, warming to her point, “move forward half a century. It’s 1964. The Republicans are in disarray, a party in the wilderness, without the White House, Congress, or the Court. The Civil Rights Act has just been passed. And along comes a man named Barry Goldwater. And he’s got an idea: make government the enemy.”
Almost as remarkable as the sheer quantity of stuff was how completely oblivious to it Ms. Graves appeared to be. She’d made no comment about the condition of the place as she’d led Nate in, letting him clear his own space to sit. It seemed that as far as she was concerned nothing was amiss. And yet, for all the mess she lived in and all her rambling, she didn’t strike him as incoherent. In fact, Nate had never heard anyone speak with such conviction, except perhaps his father. Certainly none of his teachers. This was history, after all. And yet she spoke as if she were waging a rhetorical insurgency against the enemies of civilization.
“And look at us now,” she continued. “Look at how ingeniously
they have coded our politics. Using the same line of attack on our own sovereign authority to suit all their other ends. Of course, over time one begins to imagine connections between the darker forces. But then you say to yourself, No, Charlotte. You’re dramatizing, you’re giving in to conspiracy. You’re satisfying some desire to moralize because, let’s be honest, you’re nothing but a stack of Eastern prejudices. But then you pick up this”—she scanned the books at her feet, spotted the one she wanted, and opened to an earmarked page—“and you think, well maybe so. But just listen to how
they
put it. Here’s Lee Atwater—you’ve probably never heard of him—explaining how it worked. ‘You start out,’ he says, ‘in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger!” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now that you’re talking about
cutting taxes
, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is that blacks get hurt worse than whites.’
“That’s what
he
says,” she insisted, clapping the book shut. “And so then you think, I’m not mad. Not at all. Taxes
are
about race. Like everything else. As if sometime in the sixties the public square in our mind changed colors. From imaginary white to imaginary black. And we’ve been running from it ever since. As if anything you couldn’t fence in or nail to your house were the equivalent of the public pool menaced by the dark and the poor. But the public pool’s not in
your
backyard, you say. It’s nowhere close. True. But it’s in my country. Am I not allowed a patriotism of ideals? Is that what we’ve come to?”
She paused to breathe.
“You see, then, what I mean?” she asked.
“I guess so.”
“Not that
you
would agree with any of this, would you?” she said,
leaning down to address the mastiff. “He’s become such a reactionary lately. Haven’t you, Sam? All your religious blather. Do you have dogs?”
“No. We used to have a rabbit.”
“Don’t be
ridiculous.”
“Sorry, I—”
“No, no, I wasn’t talking to you. Sam here’s just a bigot. Thinks you’re a Catholic. Rabbits you say. My grandfather was fond of shooting them. They’d pop up in the yard and he’d rest his gun on the sill right there and open fire. Drove my grandmother to distraction. You’d think they’d have come back in strength by now but I never see them. He, of course, was a mugwump. Have you covered the 1880s? Republican, of the very old stripe. Bolted the party in ’84. Small-town lawyer, edited the
Finden Gazette
. Didn’t like machine politics. Laissez-faire, of course, but it was another time. He railed against the trusts as much as the city bosses, and there he was prescient. You look at the World Trade Organization today and it’s all rather familiar. The way those conglomerates are making up the rules so they can run roughshod over the locals. Nothing the railroads didn’t do to the state legislatures,” she concluded, examining a patch of the mastiff’s back for ticks or lice.
“I’m afraid the bullies here need their walking,” she said. “I’m sorry if I’ve run on a bit. But there’s a lot to cover.” She looked up at him then, meeting his eyes directly for the first time. “You will come back, won’t you? Next week?”
These last many months the intuition of others’ needs had become Nate’s second nature, as if his father’s going had cut him a pair of new, lidless eyes that couldn’t help but see into a person such as this: marooned and specter-driven. What choice did he have?
___________
A
S SOON AS
he got out of the house, he phoned Emily.
“Give us your location,” she said. “We’re in transit.”
Fifteen minutes later, Jason’s Jetta pulled up behind the Congregational Church in the center of town and Emily rolled down the passenger-side window.
“All right, the medevac’s here.”
In the backseat, Hal lay slumped against the far door with his eyes closed, a cigarette dangling from between his lips. A lanky, effete, mildly gothic boy, he prided himself on his superior intellect and perpetual indolence. To the alarm of his parents, he’d clicked through on some Internet ad and got himself admitted to a university in Tunis. From there he planned to spend the fall traveling the Maghrib.
“The Valp’s holding,” Jason said, speeding onto a side street. “But if we don’t get there soon he’ll smoke it all himself.” They avoided the streets still heavy with commuter traffic until they had crossed all the way to the other side of Finden and pulled up in front of a white stucco house with three Japanese maples in the front yard surrounding a giant vertical boulder that looked as if it had been airlifted out of Stonehenge.
“What’s with the rock?” Emily asked.
“I don’t know. His mother’s got a witch thing going on,” Jason said, stepping out of the car. “She runs some kind of regional coven.”
“I hung out with this Valp guy once,” Emily said. “All he talked about was North Korea. Those rallies they have with the colored cards, you know? Like at the Olympics, where everyone in the crowd holds one up to make an image. Apparently they’re very good at it over there.”
She sounded bored, as usual, wearied by this petty world of high school. Emily had lived in London with her parents sophomore year and returned with a coolness unimpeachable by anyone except the
three of them, who mocked her attempts to exempt herself from the indignities of Finden High.
Up on the lawn, from beside the obelisk, Jason was waving for them to come inside. “Christ, can’t he just score the shit and get out of there?” Emily grumbled, leading the other two up the driveway.
Arthur Valparaiso had a slightly intimidating presence at two hundred and twenty pounds with a shaved head and clad this evening in an orange judo outfit. They had apparently interrupted some kind of deep-focus session, in which Arthur assumed a single lunging pose for up to an hour, a feat his girth rendered implausible. But now that he’d been disturbed, he was inclined toward a bit of company before completing the sale. As Nate’s father had once said of God, the worst thing about drugs was the other people who believed in them.
The bong was produced, the music turned on, and the usual desultory conversation commenced. Knowing that the goal was an early exit, the four of them went light on the smoke, letting Arthur suck down most of the bowl, which had no discernible effect on him. Despite the smallness of his hit, Nate felt a tingling starting up at the back of his head, and slowly his thoughts began to wander as he stared at the walls of the basement rec room, which were covered with pictures of crowds: black-and-white aerial photographs of rallies in squares and piazzas, newspaper clippings of marches on the National Mall, stadiums full of rock fans shot from above.
“Have you read much Guy Debord?” Hal asked their host in a voice made all the more languid by the pot.
“Who the fuck is he?”
“French. He shared your interest in the masses. He writes about spectacle, how all this ginned-up collectivity contributes to our alienation.”
“Crowds are where it’s at, dude,” the Valp said. “They’re the future. Individualism is, like, a relic. Burning Man—that’s the future.”
Nate had discovered a vinyl beanbag in the corner. From there he watched Jason attempt to effect a game of pool, but it came to nothing. Eventually, a plea was made to Arthur and the transaction completed. Back in the car, a joint was rolled in the front seat and passed around as they sped down the state route toward the Alden strip, managing eventually to land themselves in the front row of a movie theater, at the foot of a huge screen that dashed their brains with the blood and pillage of some beast war of Middle Earth created, it seemed clear, by other, older drug-takers. They emerged into the parking lot more than two hours later, weakened and lethargic, having no sense of what to do or where to go.
For a while they drove, entranced by the clutter of lights and the bass tones of the car speakers, managing at one point to navigate a drive-through at a Dunkin’ Donuts, and coming down as they munched their crullers and cinnamon buns in silence, gliding back into Finden.
A faint numbness behind the eyes was all that remained of Nate’s high by the time they dropped him home.
He stood awhile in the front yard once they’d gone, staring at the darkened façade, only the porch light and the light up in his mother’s bedroom on. It wasn’t as decrepit a house as Ms. Graves’s nor was it new or by any means empty. He needed to cut the grass soon. The shutters needed paint. Inside, nothing had changed for a long time.
They had arrived for the first time at this house in a rainstorm, he and his brother and sister standing in the front hall listening to their mother shout at their father about how dark it was, how cramped the kitchen and ugly the cabinets and ugly the wallpaper, how the boxes
hadn’t arrived and there were no blankets upstairs, and what would they do? How would they manage? As if he had led them all into disaster.
That was ten years ago and the wallpaper was still there, and the cabinets, and the mirror at the top of the stairs which his mother had never liked.
Climbing onto the porch, he closed the front door quietly behind him and switched off the porch light.
Once, when their mother had taken their father off to New York to see a specialist, his sister had thrown a party at the house and a girl had been sick on the front staircase, and though she’d tried her best to clean it, the detergent his sister had used had left a paling stain, which Nate passed over now as he headed up the stairs.
Anywhere people lived memory collected like sediment on the bed of a river, dropping from the flow of time to become fixed in the places time ran over. But in this house, since his father had died, it seemed sediment was all that was left: the banister, the hall mirror, the bathroom’s black-and-white tile, the ticking on the runner carpet that led to the foot of his mother’s door—all of it heavy with his absence.
This was the trouble with staying away with friends and getting high. He felt wrong for forgetting his family even for a few hours, as if to keep faith with his father required an unceasing grief.
Knocking gently on his mother’s door, he turned the handle open. She was reading in bed, the covers pulled up to her waist. She glanced up over her reading glasses, her oval face gaunt, as it had been for months. She’d lost considerable weight in the last year and still ate very little.
“Was that Emily dropping you off?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We saw a movie.” He paused for a moment, feeling the obligation to offer her something more.
“I went to that lady for tutoring.”
“That’s right, I’d forgotten. How was it?”
“She’s a little strange. But it was okay.”
It never stopped being terrible, how alone his mother looked. He couldn’t make it go away, even by being here, even if he were never to leave.
“Sleep well,” she said, looking at him with a tender, somewhat distant expression, as if she hadn’t seen him in a very long time.
Chapter 6
By Nate’s third visit, Ms. Graves had stopped discussing American history altogether and thus any topic that might appear on his exam. Jumping off from Wilson at Versailles, she had waded into the diplomatic correspondence that detailed Britain’s haphazard Middle East strategy following the Armistice.
“It came down to a lack of troops. Their army was fading away, you see. Someone had to maintain law and order. And so the British did what empires always do—they installed puppets. The Hashemites! Losers to the Sauds in the battle for the Arabian Peninsula! Why not give them Jordan! Of course it was only supposed to be a temporary fix, six months of police work until the mandate could be rearranged, a gentlemen’s agreement, but look what we got! What should obviously have been the Palestinian state run for eighty years by an imported monarchy. Cancer number one. But why stop there? Ms. Gertrude Bell is a very fine and knowledgeable woman but not quite fit to rule Mesopotamia and given that the French had chucked brother
Faisal out of Syria, he was in need of a job, so why not give him Baghdad—another Hashemite installed to rule an incoherent people in an incoherent country! Truck in the Sunni elites! Throw in the Kurds! Can’t you just picture it?” she asked, tossing her arms in the air. “Little Mr. Whatsit in his Whitehall office carefully drawing his map. If it weren’t so lethal it could be read as farce.”
When Nate ventured that the units he’d missed in class were on the Revolutionary War, Ms. Graves closed her eyes, held her palm out like a guard at a crosswalk instructing him to halt, and said, “I can’t do George Washington. I simply can’t. Triumphalist or otherwise. You’ll have to go elsewhere for that.”
Slouched again in the wingback chair, Nate let go of whatever responsibility he’d felt to prepare for the test. What did an AP credit matter when he hadn’t even applied to college? It didn’t compel. Not like the woman in front of him, who was so clearly driven by her own imaginings. It reminded him of the time his father had borrowed someone’s yacht and sailed Nate out to Block Island to visit a businessman he had met on an airplane, a man who owned a paper company and might want to make a deal, only the businessman wasn’t home when they arrived at his waterfront house; the maid said he’d gone to Brazil. And so they sat together on the empty beach sipping the gin his father had brought in a thermos, the liquid warm now and rather bitter.