Along with the cans of primer under the back shelf, she found tins of turpentine that she’d purchased a few years back, intending to call someone about doing the shutters and trim. She placed them in her bag with the matches.
My second wife, my dear friend Elizabeth, died of the measles on the afternoon of November 9
, Sam started in again.
“For heaven’s sake, can’t you shut up!”
Ten days after giving me the twins, Eleazer and Martha. Oh, to part with so desirable, so agreeable a Companion, a Dove from such a Nest of young ones too! Oh! the sad Cup, which my Father appointed me! And when five days hence my maidservant succumbed, I tested the Lord’s patience by imagining the malignancy to have gone up over us. Then the twins died. The sixth and seventh of my children to be taken up by the Almighty. And when a week later Jerusha too fell sick I begg’d the Lord for the life of my dear pretty daughter. I begg’d that such a bitter Cup, as the Death of that lovely child, might pass from me. But she too went to our Savior. And I died in life unto this world as all sinners must preparing for the world to come, knowing the Lord is in thy Adversity! Fifteen children I fathered. Thirteen I buried. Such a record of woe as no man should have to bear, my cross but a dry sort of a tree. But never did I despair of the Lord’s infinite wisdom or cease in the business of Worship. And you stand here aggrieved by the bitter fruit of one sinful lust? One loss of a man not your husband?
“Damn you!” she shouted, pushing him aside with her knee.
Why it is useless for you to deny that it is in the shadow of his going that you have arrived here at this foolery, allowing your spirit to shape itself thus. What, after all, are your great Politics but a woe without end? What is your pessimistic liberal blather but the Bible’s own warning of the Apocalypse shorn of the just Consolation of Heaven? You have decried this world as any of the Lord’s preachers might, and lived as if in the End Times, yet every day you have succumbed to the pride of earthly wisdom, the pride of thinking of yourself as above the Savior’s flock. And in your condescension you violate your own philosophy of tolerance. Yes, yours is a metaphysical pride. The pride of human knowledge
.
“Your children must have died of boredom,” she snapped, beginning to tremble.
How stupid to have no food in the house! Surely the weakness in her limbs came from hunger. Sam rubbed his wet nose at her waist, slobbering.
Among the rusting tools and old flowerpots she looked about for an implement in case she had to force a window. She found a trowel and added it to her supplies.
There are but a few sands left in the glass of your time
.
Don’t listen to that old bigot
, Wilkie said.
Now’s your time to act
.
Pushing the barn door open, she tried keeping the dogs blocked behind her, but they were too strong and they forced themselves by, running ahead down the driveway. The mist had cleared but overhead the sky was still a low ceiling of cloud, the nimbus of the sun visible only as a brightening patch of gray on the horizon.
Don’t go, he said.
Slowly, she turned, the membrane porous, time’s order shuffled.
Eric sat on the weathered oak bench by the ladder, leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees, as young and beautiful as the night she’d met him.
Don’t go, he said. Stay here awhile.
“But if the man comes back … I’ll lose my nerve.”
You never did. You’ve always been beautiful to me, in that way. You never lost your conviction.
“I kept thinking of you.”
I know. I heard you. You were heard. And Nate, you were good to him. You have to remember: our love isn’t the only kind. You have loved, my darling. You have loved so much. I see it. I see it in you now. You’re beautiful.
“No,” she said. “Look at me. Look at what I’m about to do.”
But you won’t. I know you won’t. It’s okay. Close the door. Sam and Wilkie, you can let them go now. They’ll be all right.
“But there’s no one to feed them.”
Someone will feed them.
She feared he would disappear if she stepped closer. And so she remained
still, blessed now, she understood. The dearest thread in that old fabric of being had loosened, letting him pass back through to her. And so at last she could tell someone, “It’s not the dogs’ fault—the things they shout. They’re in me, the ministers. The puritans and the slaves. God help me,” she said, tears leaking from her eyes. “I tried to love my country.”
As it should be loved.
“But weren’t we fools?”
Yes. Loving fools.
She wiped at her dripping eyes. And when she looked again he was gone.
She stood motionless, gazing at the bench, at its bleached wood, still as stone. A mute object. Eternal in the perfection of its indifference. For the first time that morning, she noticed the clouds of her breath visible in the bitter air.
Heading back up the ramp, she crossed the breezeway, and stepped back into the kitchen. The fridge door hung open, its shelves holding nothing but a jar of pickles and a few bottles of soda water. In the drawer, greens rotted in a plastic bag. A sack of sprouted potatoes lay on the floor between the fridge and the counter. The counter itself was barely visible beneath the clutter.
Proceeding into the living room, she wondered how it was that she had never seen the mess. How long had she been living in this ruin? When, precisely, had the storm struck?
She sat on the one cleared spot of her sofa. She could hear the dogs barking at the door, clawing at it, trying to get back in, to get at her once more. Even at this distance, their voices reached her. They were no longer distinct and yet louder than ever. A roar that nearly drowned out the litany in her head, the one she’d lived by and with, her litany: Henry II and Magna Carta and Gutenberg and Calvin and
Milton and Kant and Paine and Jefferson and Jackson’s rabble and Corot and Lincoln and Zola and Dickens and Whitman and Bryan on his cross of gold and the patterned fabrics in the paintings of Matisse and Walker Evans and Copland and Baldwin and King in Memphis, the chorus exploding in her, the ideas all that were left, a pure narrative drive using up the last of her.
It had to stop, she thought, reaching into her canvas bag. She could make it stop. She could at last exercise her will over history’s reckless imagination of her.
The open-faced books on the coffee table soaked up the turpentine like arid soil.
She thought to close her eyes as she struck the match and dropped it, but then that wouldn’t be right. She would watch.
Chapter 19
The press conference announcing the discovery of trading fraud at Atlantic Securities was held at the U.S. attorney’s office in lower Manhattan one morning in late October 2002, shortly before the opening bell on Wall Street. Minutes later, Jeffrey Holland, solemn but confident, stood before another lectern at Union Atlantic headquarters in Boston to inform the public that the authorities would have the company’s complete cooperation in investigating the matter. Risk-management safeguards had clearly broken down and would be overhauled with the help of an independent advisory committee chaired by a former head of the SEC, whose recommendations would be followed to the letter. After consultation with the board, it had been decided that the role of chairman and chief executive officer should henceforth be separate. In the months ahead, Holland would step aside as CEO to focus on the larger, strategic issues facing Union Atlantic Group.
A consortium led by JPMorgan Chase and the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi had agreed to purchase a twenty-billion-dollar
stake in the troubled bank to secure its capital base, while the Dutch bank ING would be acquiring the Atlantic Securities division for a nominal sum in return for assuming a portion of its debt.
In early trading, the stock plummeted thirty percent but it began to recover soon after the Federal Reserve Bank of New York issued a statement saying the plan had the Fed’s full backing and that it stood ready to provide liquidity as needed in the event of serious market disruptions. The Treasury Department followed with a statement of its own.
When asked to comment on the mismanagement and near collapse of one of the largest financial institutions in the nation, the White House press secretary disagreed with the characterization of “near collapse,” saying it appeared to be a case of a few bad apples. The president, he said, was glad to see that the private market was responding appropriately to maintain its own stability and had full confidence that the regulatory authorities would continue to monitor the situation.
Doug watched these announcements unfold on a television mounted behind the counter of the diner in Saugus, where he had come to purchase a new passport. In order to make bail, he’d been forced to surrender his at the arraignment, along with the title to his house. After the hearing, the government had made it clear that McTeague and Sabrina were already cooperating. Which meant all Doug’s efforts at concealment were now evidence against him. If he stuck around for the two or three years it would take them to prosecute the case, and by some miracle managed to drag Holland down with him, he might get eight to ten, depending on the judge’s mood. But he had no intention of going to prison. Not in the name of bureaucratic punctiliousness about where to draw the line between aggressive investing and fraud. If other fools wanted to take the fall for that nonsense then let them. Doug had violated the spirit of the law
years ago, if that’s how you chose to understand it, by commencing mergers not yet permitted. But then the law had changed, the profits had rolled in, and Holland had become a business hero. And now Doug was expected to do time for a bad bet on the Nikkei? You’d need to be a true believer or have a wife and kids to put up with that.
Opposite him in the diner booth sat a friend of a friend of Vrieger’s whom he’d been put in touch with about getting new identity documents. The guy was in his mid-fifties, dressed in a khaki fisherman’s vest, bifocals dangling on a chain around his neck. After he’d finished his milk shake and scrambled eggs and nattered on about the Patriots for too long, he handed Doug a thick, white envelope. “I hope your memory’s good,” he said, signaling for the check. “If you can’t remember who you’re supposed to be, you’re finished.”
On his return to Finden that morning, as he made the turn onto Winthrop, Doug was passed by a column of fire trucks. As he crossed the river, he saw flames coursing from the downstairs windows of Charlotte’s house on the hill; they had caught on the overgrown bushes and on the dry shingle, setting the whole side of the house on fire. He pulled into his driveway and jogged up the slope, watching smoke billow from her front door. As the firemen unwound their hoses, a fuel tank or gas line exploded in the kitchen, sending a ball of orange flame shooting across the back entryway and into the barn. The panes of the upstairs windows began to pop. The fire was consuming the ancient wooden structure like kindling, the whole edifice starting to crackle and sag. By the time the water had been tapped from the hydrant it was too late to do much more than contain the blaze.
“Was she in there?” Doug asked the fire marshal, who stood beside one of the engines in full protective gear, issuing the occasional order from his walkie-talkie.
“Her dogs seem to think so,” he said, at which point Doug realized
the sound he’d been hearing all along was their howling. “Curtis,” the marshal called to a police officer, “get those animals in a squad car, would you? They’re driving me crazy.”
“Do you know what caused it?”
The man shrugged. “These old places burn fast, but not this fast. My guess is we’ll find some kind of accelerant.”
Up on the road, traffic had clogged as passersby stopped to marvel at the sight.
“Did you know the woman?”
“Yeah,” Doug said. “A bit.”
“Anything unusual lately? Anything we should know about?”
Before Doug could answer, a voice from the dispatch squawked an indecipherable bit of news over the marshal’s radio and he moved off toward a group of firefighters standing closer to the blaze.
Doug remained there for some time, standing beside the truck, watching as the flames crested and then slowly diminished, the house turning to ash and scattering into the dry air.
This, then, was her moment. Less public than the monk immolating himself on the street in Saigon, but a protest nonetheless. He didn’t feel pity. His neighbor had never sought that. A lone soldier against an army. That’s how she’d described herself to him. And a professional one, it turned out, choosing a battleground grave over the dishonor of retreat.
He stayed until after most of the trucks had left, leaving behind them only a few charred posts and the crooked, blackened tower of the chimney.
O
F ALL THE NEWS
he watched in the weeks that followed, of UN weapons inspectors and the sniper menacing the suburbs of the capital
and the rise in housing prices and criminals being released onto the streets of Baghdad, the story Doug couldn’t get out of his mind was the one about the pilotless drones flying over the Empty Quarter, a vast swath of western Yemen, off whose shores the
Vincennes
had once sailed. Intelligence services wanted to know if the operatives of various radical networks had secreted themselves among the nomadic tribes, who were the only people to traverse that portion of the Arabian desert. Cable news made only a few mentions of it but on the Web he found more and lying in bed or on the couch downstairs he watched over and over the various clips of aerial footage that people had posted.
In that nowhere place, so appealing in its way, mountains of sand razor-backed by the wind enclosed barren valley floors covered with hundreds of identical hillocks each swept to a point. Shots from higher elevations revealed a broader pattern: lunar white pockmarks spread over the flats between the sand ridges which stretched across the landscape like the wrinkled hide of some beast too large for the human eye to see, its skin slowly ulcerating in the sun.