“Why wasn’t I told of this?”
“By whom?”
“By you.”
“Ah,” he said. “I’m guessing she never mentioned firing me. The truth is, Henry, the Graves Society hasn’t been a client of mine for three or four years at least. We’d always sent the check over to the Audubon but Charlotte got into some kind of policy dispute with them—beaver habitats I think it was. In any case, she instructed me to cancel the donation. I reminded her that she had to give away five percent a year to someone. And that’s when she removed my name from the checking account. She hasn’t spoken to me since.”
Thus was Saturday morning lost to a rear-guard action of intelligence gathering. Charlotte would hear nothing of withdrawing the suit and couldn’t understand why he would want to. The hearing before the judge was scheduled for Monday and she would be delighted, she said, for him to join her.
“I know these sorts of legal matters have always been your end of things. But there’s no reason to let that upset you. It’s all well in hand.”
After a lunch of cottage cheese and grapes, Henry’s phone started lighting up and soon enough he’d been dragged into a conference call with his senior staff and someone over at the State Department, who had been getting reports all morning of a possible coup in Uzbekistan. Sitting at the kitchen table, watching his sister prepare a sauté of sirloin and carrots for the dogs, he listened to his deputy describe getting a call an hour earlier from the Uzbek foreign minister, who had phoned the New York Fed to request that ninety percent of his country’s sovereign asset deposits be wired to a bank in Tashkent. The problems being that (1) no one was quite sure which side of the coup the foreign minster was on; (2) the Uzbek president was proving somewhat hard to reach; and (3) the State Department, unable to determine if this was
an Islamist revolution or a pro-Western military putsch, hadn’t decided yet whether to stand by the current dictator or throw him overboard. Eighty million dollars was an unremarkable sum for a foreign-country transfer but enough to fund a small civil war and thus endanger U.S. basing rights, necessary for the resupply of forces in Afghanistan. During a pause in the proceedings, Henry’s chief counsel, Phillip Bretts, noted drolly that the man at State had been appointed only last week to the Central Asian Desk from a job at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
“Any chance of getting a bit of that meat?” Henry whispered, holding his hand over the phone just as Charlotte emptied the frying pan into the dogs’ stainless-steel bowls.
“It’s Sam who insists on the finer grade,” she observed. “Wilkie was perfectly happy with the ground chuck.”
By the end of the call, Henry was ready for a drink.
He took his Bloody Mary out onto the back terrace and tried to ignore the weeds coming up through the mortar of the brick. Despite his anger at Charlotte’s loony behavior, he had to confess that he hadn’t seen her so animated in years. Perhaps even since they were kids, now that he thought about it. Back when she’d been queen of the realm in which he’d been so happily captive. In Rye, he used to trail her for hours from the playroom into the yard and back upstairs to the inner sanctum of her bedroom, where he’d been allowed only on her capricious wish, the air there shaded in the afternoons by the giant copper beech. Even now, he could remember how the sun used to play over her dresser and the rich, red carpet and the bed where she lay reading or writing in her diary. He doubted he and Betsy had ever created a paradise such as that for their daughter, Linda. Perhaps because she was an only child. Or maybe it was just that Henry, as an adult banished from the kingdom of mystery, could never fully credit its existence for
his daughter, and could only fake a belief in it for her sake in the hope that somehow, on the far side of that impenetrable divide, the garden was still damp and lush and time had yet to be invented. Impenetrable except perhaps in the most fleeting moments, together with the person you’d adventured with there once.
What was a brother supposed to do? Charlotte was happy for the moment because her outrage had found a target closer to home than the halls of Congress and she’d managed to convince herself that she had a chance to win. But none of that changed the obvious: she was barely feeding herself; the house was more of a ruin than ever; and however you wanted to describe them, her relations with the dogs had gone beyond mere eccentricity.
Sunday he drove into town to buy proper sandwiches for lunch and insisted they go out for dinner. At the restaurant he tried to make up for lost time, keeping gently at her, drawing the conversation around to the difficulties of maintaining the house on her own.
“If it would make you feel better,” she said, “you’re welcome to hire me a cleaning lady. Though she’d only be allowed in the kitchen.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Of course it isn’t. You don’t mean anything you’re saying. You want to ship me off somewhere so the idea of me here doesn’t weigh on you. It’s not like you can hide that, Henry. From your own sister. But even if I were inclined to go, which I’m not, now is the last time I’d budge. Here on the verge. I mean, just look at what’s going on. Take a step back for a moment, and look at what’s going on in this country, and I don’t mean just the criminals at the top—they’ll do their damage and stumble out eventually—I mean the last thirty years. And then tell me if you can honestly say that the intrusion of that house, the cutting down of those woods, whoever they might have belonged to once, doesn’t stand for something, for a rot more pervasive. And then tell me
I’m wrong to want to take a stand. You can’t. Not without betraying language, and I think you’re better than that. I know you are. Because that really would be the end. To accede to that. To the notion that words mean nothing anymore. That they’re pure tactics. You don’t believe that.”
And on she went, speechifying, close, he had to admit, to the height of her powers.
Letting go his mission for a while, he ordered another drink and let himself enjoy her company. Most of his colleagues didn’t read much other than the
Journal
. Betsy had kept up with things, novels and films and biographies, but they agreed with each other about so much that at a certain point they’d stopped discussing it all. The fierceness of his sister’s opinions had never dimmed. It was the spirit of their father in her, the old man’s crusading energy, difficult at times for their mother to bear, but so obviously the thing she’d fallen in love with.
When the young couple at the adjacent table began arguing about their renovation, the husband insisting they fire the architect, whom the wife described as not only visionary but, in case he hadn’t read a magazine or newspaper in the last year, “quite fucking important,” Charlotte granted Henry a conspiratorial smile, gathering him into her fold, an invitation that in the moment he couldn’t help accepting with a roll of the eyes. Who was he kidding? His new neighbors in Rye were absolute pills. Their children were deplorable in the manner of over-bred dogs. The fellow being in banking, he had asked Henry over for a drink. Their house had struck him as the cross between a playpen and a corporate retreat center. But what could you do about it?
When the waiter asked if he’d like a third glass of wine, he said yes.
Back at the house, Charlotte made tea and they sat at the kitchen table. The table where their father had liked nothing better than to set
out broken gadgets on a Saturday morning, a radio or toaster or lamp that had given up over the winter, and opening his tool kit begin to fiddle. Recalling such mornings, Henry, a bit drunk, felt a bone-tiredness, the kind he couldn’t afford to let in too often, not in a job where the travel never stopped. It was the sort of tiredness a mind allows a body only when it knows it’s home.
“So, did you manage the coup all right?” Charlotte said. “Is everyone’s money safe?”
“It’ll work out in the end. A few days of caution won’t hurt anyone.”
“Such an anonymous sort of power you wield. So far from the madding crowd. It’s always intrigued me. Thinking about the people affected by what you do. The fact that they’ll never know you. Sure, Daddy tried cases, but he met his defendants. There was a scale to the thing. It’s not a criticism. It’s just I wonder sometimes what it does to you. What it’s already done to you. The abstraction. Lives as numbers. We all do it, of course. We do it reading the paper. What does ten thousand dead in an earthquake mean? Nothing. It can’t. The knowledge just breeds impotence. But your abstractions, your interest rates, they change people’s lives. And they’ll never know who you are.”
“When things get bad enough, they tend to find out.”
“That’s not my point. I’m talking about you, Henry. I’m sure there are plenty who simply enjoy your kind of influence, the ambitious. The ones whose power makes them furious. And there are the crypto-sadists, such an underestimated lot. But you’re neither of those, however much of a fellow traveler you may have been over the years. And yet there it is—your system and other people’s pain.”
“It’s not all pain,” he said. “Money allows things.”
“Of course. It’s just a matter of to whom. But, then, that’s not your area, is it? That’s someone else’s set of choices.”
Sauntering drowsily in from the living room, the Doberman rested his head in Charlotte’s lap, and Henry watched his sister pat him gently on the head.
“You know it’s funny,” she said. “All weekend, I’ve tried to convince Wilkie here that you’re a good sport but he won’t believe me, will you Wilkie? He’s convinced you’re a member of the Klan.”
H
ENRY SLEPT
rather poorly that night, waking more than once to what sounded like growling.
The Klan?
He could just see the expression on the face of the director of an assisted-living facility when Charlotte dropped a comment such as that into an interview. He got a few solid hours toward morning before his sister woke him, warning that they’d be late to court.
“We can’t take them with us,” he said, standing bleary-eyed by the rental car, as she came down the walk with Sam and Wilkie.
“Why not?”
“It’s a government facility, not a kennel.”
“Don’t be silly. The bailiff’s an old student of mine.”
The county courthouse was a Greek Revival affair whose sandstone had gone gray with soot. The main hallway, adorned with portraits of deceased superior court judges, was already bustling at eight thirty: an officer showing a line of jurors into a waiting room, lawyers hunched with clients, explaining to bewildered family members the nature of their loved one’s predicament, while on the benches nearby policemen killed time before being called to the stand.
Lo and behold, when they reached the courtroom door, a balding guard in his forties lit right up with a smile.
“Miss Graves,” he said. “How ya been? I saw the name on the sheet and I wondered if it was you.”
“I’ve been very well, thank you.”
“I saw that business in the paper a few years back about the school and all. That was no good the way they let you go.” He reached out to shake Henry’s hand. “Best teacher I ever had,” he said, his voice filled with wonder at the discovery of his own nostalgia.
“How kind of you to say. Now, Anthony, I was wondering. There is just a small favor I was going to ask. My dogs. I was hoping they could come along. Into the courtroom with us.”
“Oh, geez,” he said, clicking his tongue. “The judge. I don’t know if he’s going to like that. It’s against rules.” He considered Wilkie and Sam for a moment. “They wouldn’t happen to be medical dogs, would they? To help you get around, I mean.”
“Well … yes, now that you mention it, they do help. A great deal.”
“Charlotte,”
Henry whispered, only to receive an elbow in the flank.
“I’ll tell you what, Miss Graves. You bring them in here, and I’ll just settle them down in the back row, where no one can see them. How’s that?”
“Wonderful. I knew I could rely on you.”
She and Henry took seats in the third row of the courtroom and stood when, a few minutes later, Anthony called out, “All rise, the Honorable George M. Cushman presiding.”
“You weren’t expecting
that
, now were you?” Charlotte whispered.
“Expecting what?”
“You remember the Cushmans. Mommy and Daddy used to have drinks with them all the time. That’s their son, George. He would come to the lake with us. Don’t you remember? Chubby George.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. This is ridiculous. You’re going to embarrass us.”
“My God,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “Will you look at that? He’s here, the bastard. With some slickster lawyer. Just look at those pinstripes. They’re an inch apart.”
Turning to look, Henry saw a man in his late thirties with tightly shorn black hair and a rather barren expression. He had that over-groomed look to him that many of the younger bankers did these days, giving them, at times, an almost feminine appearance, despite all their hours in the gymnasium. Not so his companion—a pug of a man whose pinstripe was indeed immoderately wide. He chewed gum and thumbed impatiently at the wheel of his BlackBerry.
“What business does he have here? I’m not suing him.”
“Gee, I don’t know,” Henry said. “You’re only trying to take the man’s house. He’s an interested party. He’s allowed to intervene.”
Before Charlotte’s case was finally called, they had to sit through two DUIs and a dispute between the country club and one of its junior members over a malfunctioning golf cart, reminding Henry that only the luckless, the petty, or the deranged wound up in court.
R
EVIEWING HIS DOCKET
in chambers earlier that morning, George Cushman had a thought similar to Henry’s upon noticing that he would have to conduct the hearing on the Graves matter that day. The prospect saddened him. Though they were hardly friends, he’d known Charlotte Graves for the better part of his life and said hello to her whenever they met in town. What was more, as a member of the board of the Historical Association, he would have liked nothing better than to rule in her favor. He found houses like the one that had been
thrown up on that land almost as offensive as she did. No one denied that Willard Graves had given the property to Finden for preservation or that he had specified in the bequest that should the town sell or develop it, it would revert to the estate. But the rule against perpetuities as it related to conditions broken was clear enough in this state: after thirty years the right to repossess the land was no longer valid. That term having long since expired, the town maintained, quite correctly, that its title was now absolute; it could do with the acreage as it pleased. As he would with any
pro se
plaintiff, Judge Cushman had done his best to tease from the mass of verbiage in Charlotte’s petition some colorable argument. But when, after six pages of single-spaced invective, she’d begun a history of her family’s donations to local charities, he’d given up the effort. He would give her her day in court and soften the blow by delaying his dismissal of her complaint by a few weeks.