"The far north?"
"Yes," she said.
"How?"
"Not easily," Virginia answered, and looked down, embarra.s.sed.
"Let"s get some food into you and the child," Praeger said."The maitre d" has a very gentle fish porridge for babies: I"ve seen him prepare it, and I"d eat it myself. And, as for you, may I recommend that you have what we"re having?"
"I don"t know. I don"t have much money."
"No no," Praeger a.s.sured her with remarkable good nature and generosity."This is a Sun monthly management dinner. Everyone eats on The Sun, We"re having some oyster pan roast, grilled haddock filets stuffed with lobster, roasted potatoes, green peas, and Dutch beer. It"s coming all around, and in half a second I can order another place."
"Thank you," said Virginia, delighted at her excellent fortune."Don"t mention it," said Praeger."May we introduce ourselves?"
That was a rhetorical question. They were itching to introduce thernselves, especially the single men, except for Courtenay Favat, who stuck his head in the air, like a turtle.
Jessica said,"I"d like you to meet my friend Virginia Gamely." "From Lake of the Coheeries, New York," Virginia added in a voice like a bell, after which the managing editor called the roll of his subordinates according to the order in which they ringed thetable.
There was Courtenay Favat, editor of the home and ladies" page,a holdover from the days in which The Sun"s patrons looked to it for canning and pickling hints, or advice on how to darn and crochet. Courtenay was simultaneously food, wine, fashion, and home editor, and he had half a page or less per day in which to operate. The Sun was devoted to hard news, literature, science, exploration, and art. Its compet.i.tor, The New York Ghost (a tabloid founded by the Australian newspaper magnate, Rupert Binkey, and left to his grandson, Craig) had literally thousands of employees doing Courtenay"s job. They even had an editor-in-chief of vegetables, and a dry-cleaning critic. But because Harry Penn was a puritan, a spartan, a stoic, and a trojan, he brooked no full-page banner headlines about truffles or potato puffs.
Hugh Close, The Sun"s rewrite editor, had the boundless energy of a hound, and was always perched upright, like a Labrador waiting for a stick to be thrown into a cool lake. He had a red mustache, and red hair that was sculpted to his head like clay. He could see puns in everything, and one could not speak to him without suffering an embarra.s.sing disinternment of double entendres. His suits were gray; his shirts had collars with bars; he could read a thousand words a minute upside down and backward (the words, that is, not him); he knew all the Romance languages (including Romanian), Hindi, Chuvash, j.a.panese, Arabic, Gullah, Turqwatle, and Dutch; he could speak any of these languages in the accent of the other; he generated new words at a mile a minute; was the world"s foremost grammarian and a master of syntax; and he drove everyone mad. But The Sun was unmatched in style and linguistic precision. Words were all he knew; they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment. (In fact, hedid not like cats, because they could not talk and would not listen.) Then there was William Bedford, the financial editor, who lived entirely for Wall Street. Even when he hiccuped, it was said, a stock price jumped out, and he had asked in his will to be mummified in ticker tape. He looked like a British major who had just emerged from the desert, which is to say that he had a long thin face, hair of bronze, gold, and silver, and an expression that was lean, and grave and slightly alcoholic. Both his father and grandfather had been presidents of the New York Stock Exchange, so he knew everyone and everyone knew him. His column was religion to many, and the organization of The Sun"s financial section was a pleasant miracle of graphs, charts, ill.u.s.trations, and accurate a.n.a.lysis. Harry Penn always said that he wanted people who were good at what they did, even if they had ragged edges (though Bedford was an obvious smoothie compared to the various saws that headed other departments)."We"re not a college," Harry Penn once declared."We"re a newspaper. I want the best people, people who live their trade, experts, fanatics, geniuses. I don"t care if they"re a little peculiar. Close, here, who is sort of peculiar himself, will polish out all the unbecoming oddities, and that will give us a paper which is to the newspaper trade what the Bible is to religion. Understand?"
To round it out was, appropriately, Marko Chestnut, chief artist for both The Sun and The Whale. All the time that they had been talking, he had been sketching, and he introduced himself by holding up the drawing he had done. No stranger to the powers of art, Virginia immediately knew several things about Marko Chestnut. First, as with the other senior staff of The Sun, he was, in terms of his skill, second to none. Over many years of rapid sketching, the demand upon a newspaper artist for speed and memorization had taught him to extract the real and essential lines of the scene before him. And Virginia was pleased that he was not content, as so many other artists might have been, to do a humorous sketch of the diners. Although she did not know it, restaurants all over the city were filled with partial caricatures that betrayed not the subjects" distortions, but the artist"s lack of vision. One could, in a few lines, show the soul. One could, if one had the courage. For the world was full of feelings, and there was so much to people that even weak lines ofcharcoal could enlighten and amazea"not because of what they were, but because of what they showed of the truth.
In Marko Chestnut"s drawing, virtues and idiosyncrasies became magically evident. Praeger de Pinto was drawn larger than the rest, and, like all people of destiny, had a look of both contentment and agitation. Bedford had shining eyes, a gray suit as pale as ash, and a smile like that of a kind wolf. Next to him perched Close, caught disarmingly in a moment of laughter. Courtenay Favat was pictured as a very small face subsumed in the floral bloom of his bow tie. And Jessica Penn, standing, was an unmistakable fusion of womanly beauty and ripening s.e.x. In the drawing of her there was no color, but, rather, a suggestion of ivory where thighs and bosom pressured a rounded outpouring of silk. Marko Chestnut had emphasized Virginia"s springy black hair, her country-straight back, and her delightful smile. Martin was given a lifted eyebrow. His skepticism was directed at Marko Chestnut himself, who was bent over, faceless, rendering the drawing in which he appeared.
When the introductions were completed, a band struck itself up in a corner under one of the many echoing arches and began to play palm waltzes. Praeger summoned a waitress to ask for two and a half more dinners, for Virginia and Martin, and for his secretary-red-haired, green-eyed Lucia Terrapin, who had come in with some things for him to sign.
The halibut steaks sizzled, the peas glistened like medieval enamels, the potatoes sang to one another of the pleasures of their roast, and the beer was as good as if it had come from a giant cask in a Lake of the Coheeries tavern. They ate like jackals, and though they tried to discuss business, they were having too much fun. The conversation drifted while, eating ferociously and tapping their toes to the tune of Dewey"s "Olives Omnikia," they attempted to find out about the long-legged northern beauty, and her baby who sang along with the music in a most unusual, unrestrained, and mysterious cacophony.
"Is your husband coming down soon?" asked Lucia Terrapin, who was young, and bound to make faux pas.
"I don"t have a husband," Virginia answered without the slightest hint of discomfort,"at least not for the present. His father," shecontinued, turning briefly to Martin,"was overtaken with a religious fervor so extreme that he had to leave us. That"s all right. We"ve accommodated."
Trying to smooth the ripples, Lucia said,"Is he still up there in Lake of the Fairies?"
"Fairies?" Virginia repeated, amused."I"ve never heard it called that before. It"s Lake of the Coheeries, not Fairies."
Hugh Close was suddenly excited by the possibility of learning the derivation of a word."What does it mean?" he asked.
"It doesn"t mean anything," answered Virginia."It"s a proper name."
"Yes, but where does it come from? Which is to say..." "It"s etymologically uncertain," Virginia declared."But I have my own theory. You know of course that a *heer" is a measure of linen or woolen yarn containing two cuts, the sixth part of a hesp or hank of yarn, or the twenty-fourth part of a spyndle. Though the origin of the word is obscure, most philologists agree that it"s close to the Old Norse *herfe," meaning skein," she said, sparkling."But don"t be fooled by Old Norse cognates!"
"Certainly not. I should say," said Favat.
"They"re as deceptive as Frisian. When you start fooling around with aural a.n.a.logies of English and the Teutonics, especially Old High German, you"re bound to make mistakes. The secret for determining the origins of upper New York State place-names lies, I believe, in morphological and orthographical distortions produced by naive transliterations or imprecise recollections (or, of course, translingual or cross-dialectical phonological adaptation) of place-names in an unfamiliar language. What I think is that Coheeries is the American dialectical form of Grohius, who was one of the first Dutch patroons to settle west of the mountains. In encompa.s.sing most of the eastern sh.o.r.e of the lake, his estate may have been thought to include the lake itself. Thus, the Lake of Grohius, transforming slowly over time into the Lake of the Coheeries, just as *Krom Moerasje," meaning *crooked little swamp," in Dutch, became *Gramercy" in English; thus your Gramercy Park. But I really don"t know." She laughed.
Everyone who heard this, especially Close, was as stunned as abird dog at an air show. Virginia had no idea that her little dissertation was not the normal stuff of social discourse, for, after all, she had spent her life with Mrs. Gamely, who could spit out thirty paragraphs like that as easily as she could turn a flapjack.
"Do you have a doctorate in linguistics?" asked Praeger.
"Me?" Virginia was surprised and embarra.s.sed."Oh no, Mr. de pinto. I never went to school for a day in my life. There is no school in Lake of the Coheeries."
"There isn"t?"
"No."
"I thought," said Marko Chestnut,"that every child in New York State had to go to school."
"Perhaps," Virginia explained."But, you see, Lake of the Coheeries isn"t really in New York State."
"It isn"t?" several people asked at once.
"No," she said, antic.i.p.ating difficulty."It"s not on the map, and mail never gets through unless one of us picks it up in Hudson. It"s hard to explain. You can"t, well, you can"t just go there."
"You can"t?"
"No." Now she knew she was on thin ice."You have to be. You have to be..."
"What?"
"You have to be..."
"A resident," said Jessica.
"Yes!" Virginia exclaimed,"a resident."
Then, because Jessica brought all her influence to bear, the matter was quietly dropped. No one believed in the cloud wall anymore; no one could see it; no one understood. It was best not to pursue the subject. Anyway, recognizing Virginia"s unusual perspective and apparent intelligence (not to mention her beauty), each department head proceeded to sound her out with an eye to offering her a job. Economic as usual, Bedford asked her, quite simply, what she did.
"In what circ.u.mstance?" she responded, puzzled, for in Lake of the Coheeries no one would ever think to ask such a question.
"For a living," he said, unwilling to be put off.
"Oh, all kinds of things. I help mother cultivate the grapes and corn, and tend the vegetables and the apiary. I cut ice from the lakein winter. I fish. I gather berries, weave, mend, cook, bake, sew and take care of Martin. Sometimes, I do the calculations for the village accounts, or read to Daythril Moobcot when he has to go down underneath the dynamo to fix it. I work a lot in the library The town has very few people, but in our library we have more than a million and a half volumes."
"That"s it," Praeger said under his breath, wondering if she could write, and what she might say.
"And I tutor children and adults when they are in need, for which the village pays me a small cash sum."
Even Favat was interested in her now, imagining that she probably had some killer recipes for blueberry m.u.f.fins and other rural foods (which, in fact, she did).
"Can you draw?" asked Marko Chestnut, already in love."No," answered Virginia, modestly looking down. She was uncomfortable now with all this attention: she had not really been aware of it at first. Jessica rescued her. They had had a difficult trip, Jessica said, and it was time for the baby to sleep.
Before they went to bed in the new Penn house (somewhere, it seemed to Virginia, inside a vast maze of overly prosperous streets), Jessica spoke to Virginia on the landing."Praeger told me that he would like to see you, tomorrow if possible, at The Sun, He thinks," she continued, with the air of an official about to award a lottery prize,"that he may want to offer you a job on The Sun or The Whale, or both, as is often the case."
"But I don"t know anything about working on a newspaper," Virginia said.
"I have a feeling that you could learn. Don"t you think it might be a fine idea?"
"Yes," answered Virginia."If I"m lucky, I"ll dream about it tonight, and tomorrow I"ll know what to do."
ON the afternoon that Virginia went down to Printing House Square to see Praeger de Pinto in the old and beautiful offices of The Sun, the city was ablaze in winter blue. To get there she had to pa.s.s through the Lower East Side and Chinatown, and these places full ofsurging color, that were the match of any Oriental city, pleased her no end. By the time she reached Praeger"s office, strength had come her from a thousand dissonant sources. She had harvested it from he city, the harbor, the ten thousand ships moving down a net of fast rivers, and the pristine geometry of the colossal bridges.
Praeger asked her questions for two hours, drinking in her soft eloquence and marveling at the way in which she thought."Can you write the way you speak?" he asked.
"I suppose so," she said."But I"m not sure."
Then he sent her into another room to write her first impressions of New York. She returned in an hour with a perfect essay as fresh as an apple. He read it twice, and then again. It was as pleasurable for him as kissing a beautiful woman.
"I feel," he said,"as if I"ve seen this city for the first time; and I thank you for it."
Virginia had written only what had seemed to her to be the truth of the way things were.
"Will you write a column for the editorial page? We"ll run it in both papers, twice or three times a week. The system here is unique: it was fashioned after that of a whaling ship. Everyone is paid in shares, anda"except for the size of offices and number of a.s.sistantsa"the benefits are equal. As an editorial page columnist, you would be well compensated because you would have a large number of shares." Then Praeger told her the range of the money, and even the low figure was more than she thought might have come to her in a lifetime, much less a year. The high figure was greater than the gross domestic products of Lake of the Coheeries and Bunting"s Reef (the next town) put together. It scared her, but then she remembered that in traveling through the city for an hour, she had seen enough to write a thousand encyclopedias of deep praise. Surely, she thought, two or three pieces a week would be no problem considering the fact that a day"s walk among the towers, bridges, and squares would send her home with her pen c.o.c.ked as if it were ready to be launched from a crossbow.
"I think I"ll take it," she said."But I don"t know the city, and I don"t know this kind of work. I fear that if I start too high, I"ll have a distorted view. And, besides, Mother always said that one must be devoted to the thing itself, so I don"t care for quick promotions and too much ease. Let me start from the beginning, with everyone else. I like the race rather than the winning." "Do you? Really?"
"Yes. I"ve imagined great victories, and I"ve imagined great races. The races are better."
"The pay isn"t the same at the bottom." "We"re not materialists. We don"t need much." "The custom here is to give a new employee ten days at salary during which he can think about what"s going on, and make an honorable and efficient break with whatever he has been doing. I expect you to rise rapidly. I hope that before the year is up, you"ll be writing a column for us."
Virginia walked through the s.p.a.cious galleries of The Sun, past people whose work seemed to mesmerize them, and she skipped out the front doors and nearly floated across Printing House Square. She took half of her ten days" salary and put it in an envelope that she bought from a man who sold stationery from the inside of his coat. This she would send to her mother. She hadn"t that much left, and she knew that it would be difficult. Still, she took the crowded streets and pa.s.sed like a newly crowned queen through one after another of the city"s exhausting districts. When she got to the Penns", she picked up little Martin and danced about.
This was only a dream. But the next day, upon her awakening, the elements of the dream fell into place exactly. Even the words spoken were the same. She had seen in her sleep the details of rooms in which she had never been, and known weather that had not yet formed, and streets upon which she had never walked. One thing was noticeably different. In Chinatown, on the way home, she bought Martin a big cherry cookie. It was sold to her by a fat Caucasian boy with slit eyes and a Chinese hat. He seemed very strange.
Now there were practical things to be accomplished. She had to find an apartment, get some new clothes, arrange for someone to take care of Martin while she worked. But these things would be easy. She believed that the city was so full of combinations, permutations, and possibilities that it permitted not only any desire to be fulfilled,any course to be taken, any reward to be sought, any life to be lived and any race to be run. She closed her eyes and saw the city burning before her in enticing gold. The sky, filled with great voluminous clouds, was ablaze in winter blue.
IN THE DRIFTS.
THOUGH San Francisco is a tranquil city, anesthetized in blue, when Vittorio Marratta died it was if a clap of thunder had rolled over the hills. Had he not specifically prohibited it, the line of black limousines following his hea.r.s.e would have been a mile long. He was central to several communities at once, and when such a man dies it seems unnatural, causing even his enemies to pour out their respect. Signer Marratta was the leader of San Francisco"s Italian community; a scientist whose discoveries in astrophysics were weighty enough to occasion the naming of not one but three galaxies after him (Marratta I, II, III) in a far-distant section of the northern sky; the onetime president of the university across the bay, in the days before its troubles shattered the scholarly quiet in which it had been founded; a former captain in the Navy, commander of acapital ship in wartime; and a wealthy fleet owner whose fast container carriers graced the bay with arrivals and departures several times a day from or for Tokyo, Accra, London, Sydney, Riga, Bombay, Capetown, and Athens, and whose tugboats made all the adjustments required for the very same harbor that his ships made busy.
The obituary writers drew their incomplete sketches, touring through his life like travelers to England who do not ever see swans, sheep, bicycles, and blue eyes. They knew that he had come from Italy after the Great War, but not that he had deserted the carnage, spent a year like a thief, and finally swum into the harbor at Genoa to climb up the anchor chains of a ship, whicha"unbeknownst to hima"was headed for San Francisco. They knew that he had married the daughter of a ship owner, but they did not know how much he had loved her before she died, or what it had done to him when she had. They knew that he had fought for the presidency of the university, but not how hard and taxing a fight it had been. They knew that he had discovered galaxies and described some fundamental truths, but they didn"t know by what hand he had been guided, nor that, after many years of deep thought about what he had seen and measured, he had been rewarded by the sight of something that he was unable to reveal only because of the character of the age. And they knew that he had two sons, but they knew little about them.
When thunder clapped over the city which knows no thunder, all kinds of things happened. Relatives bustled about buying flowers and renting automobiles, only to find that they had been excluded from the procession by order of the deceaseda"who had wanted just his sons at his graveside, and a priest. Lawyers and accountants were put to work as hard and suddenly as Seabees who must build an airfield in half an hour. Academic buildings were renamed. The observatory flew its flag at half-staff. And everyone wondered how the sons would manage all that would be left to them. Seventy-five large ships, all the tugboats in San Francis...o...b..y, a department store, several office towers, enough prime real estate upon which to build another city, trusts, subdivisions, and the ownership of large blocks of stock in great corporations, were all at issue in the will. Signer Marratta had come to own a section of the economy as varied and richly colored as a long core sample from the bed of a tropical sea,and his herd of chattels was like the one on Noah"s Ark. Naturally everyone was curious about the disposition of these a.s.sets.
The will was read on a Wednesday in May, three weeks aft the funeral, when the cracks of thunder had begun to fade. In May serenity, students left on sunny empty roads to see other parts of the country, and those who remained were enjoying the strong sun and the shining clear days that were still wonderfully cool. A hundred people were gathered in the nearly ultraviolet shadows of the largest room in the Marratta house on Presidio Heights. Swaths of deep blue were visible through French doors that led to a long balcony overlooking the bay. Had it not been for the chill of the marble, as white and clean as the cliffs of Yosemite, Signer Marratta himself might have been forgotten, for, with 150 people in attendance, the reading of the will was like a cross between a private school commencement, a court-martial, and the a.s.sembly of a covert religious sect. Sitting in the first row were the two sons, Evan and Hardesty. In their early thirties, they seemed younger. And they were strong and restless in a way that suggested that they should have been not in a ballroom but out on a playing field somewhere, or in a forest where the light was dazzling on blue streams.
"I fear," said the senior of the five lawyers who directed the proceedings,"that today there will be much disappointment in this room. Signor Marratta was a complicated man, and as is often the case with complicated men, he favored simple actions.
"During nearly half a century of a.s.sociation with him as friend and legal adviser, I found myself in a lifelong debate about the law. Signor Marratta did not know the law, but he knew its spirit, and as often as not he insisted upon a simple approach that I rejecteda"only to hear from me (after much labor and research) that, indeed, he was right. I don"t know how he did it, but somehow he knew what the law intended and in what places it would stand fast. I am saying this not to eulogize him or to apply on his behalf for posthumous honorary admission to the bar, but, rather, to caution you against making a quick judgment about what will undoubtedly appear to some as a rash act.
"Signor Marratta was the richest man I have ever known, and he left the shortest will that I have ever seen. If you expect to sit herefor hours, listening to ever larger disburs.e.m.e.nts, you will be surprised, for he has provided most of everything to only one inheritor, and a small gift to another. I am afraid that many of you will be deservedly embittered."
Instead of stirring, the room was tense with silence. Expectation and fear coiled together in a stalemate as symmetrical and interdependent as the struggling snakes of a caduceus. Representatives of universities and charitable inst.i.tutions, directors of hospitals, long-forgotten relatives, stray acquaintances, obscure employees, and delegates of the press strained together in suspensea"all but the very last hoping beyond hope that the rash act of which the lawyer had spoken would make them wealthy beyond their most fancifuldreams.
Nonetheless, they all thought that Evan would receive the small gift, which would probably be something bitter and ironic in token of his less than exemplary character. His mother"s sudden death had made him a master of calculated greed, dissolute behavior, and indiscriminate cruelty, and he lived only for what he could extract from his father, who loved him despite this.
He had bloodied Hardesty so often in vicious boyhood attacks that Hardesty was always afraid of him, even in Hardesty"s late twenties after he had fought in two wars and long been a strapping athlete. The years of military service, interrupting his career at graduate school, had made the younger brother diffident and shy. He had been broken more than once in the army, and was one of those who had come back hurt and disillusioned.
The witnesses at the reading of the will a.s.sumed that everything would go to Hardesty because he was so quiet and nondescript, and they eagerly awaited the final slap that Evan would receive for all the drugs he had taken, cars he had wrecked, women he had made pregnant, and days he had wasted. They saw that even in the short s.p.a.ce between the lawyer"s announcement of the peculiar conditions of the will and the undoing of the waxen seal that had protected it, Evan was staring at Hardesty in a way that suggested intimidation, flattery, and murder.
Evan was sweating and breathing hard. His fists were tight and his eyes wide. Hardesty, on the other hand, sat sadly next to hisbrother, thinking, undoubtedly, of their fathera"not because he was pious or dull, but because his father had been his only friend, and now he was horribly lonely. He wanted the proceedings to end; he wanted to return to his rooms, where he had very little except books, plants, and the view. Evan had moved out years before to an aerie on Russian Hill, a cavernous triplex that he used for seducing women who were impressed by the vast amount of electronic equipment he had ama.s.sed against several of its walls so that it looked like a blockhouse at Cape Canaveral.
Hardesty did not even have a bed. He slept on a blue-and-gold Persian rug, wrapped in an old Abercrombie & Fitch rust-colored wool blanket. His pillow, however, was eiderdown, and he always kept a clean case on it. Apart from thousands of books, Hardesty had few material possessions. He didn"t have a car, preferring to walk or take public transportation wherever he had to go. He didn"t have a watch. He had one suit, and it was fifteen years old. And he had one pair of hiking shoes, and they had seen three years of daily use. In contrast to his brother"s closet of eighty shaped suits, half a hundred pairs of Italian shoes, and a thousand ties, hats, canes, and coats, Hardesty"s wardrobe could fit into a small knapsack. Considering his wealth, he lived rather simply.
His father had known very well that Hardesty was silent and withdrawn because he was recovering from the wars, gathering strength, learning. Signor Marratta had loved Evan the way one loves someone who suffers from a terrible diseasea"all in sorrow. But he had loved Hardesty out of the deepest respect and sympathya"all in hope and pride.
It was generally believed that Hardesty would be rewarded for his asceticism and discipline, and that he would emerge as a solid and engaging figure fit to control his father"s wealth and manage it justly. There was much pleasant antic.i.p.ation of seeing him move from his quiet world into the rush of things, where, it was presumed, his fresh and obviously keen intellect would be not only constructive, but surprising. Of all those present at the reading of the will, only Hardesty did not a.s.sume that he was due for an apotheosis in dollars, and only Hardesty sat calmly and free of expectation. The lawyer read.
"*Herein the last will and testament of Vittorio Marratta, San Francisco, drawn the first of September, the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ninety-five.
"*All my worldly possessions, ownerships, receivables, shares, interests, rights, and royalties, shall go to one of my sons. The Marratta salver, which is on the long table in my study, will go to the other. Hardesty will decide, and his decision as it is first announced will be irrevocable. Neither son will be ent.i.tled to the patrimony of the other, ever, under any circ.u.mstances, the death or desires of one or the other notwithstanding. I make this declaration in sound mind and body, convinced of its justice and ultimate value."
At last, Hardesty was amused. Though he had a sense of humor, it was largely a private attribute. For the first time since his father"s death, he smiled, and in doing so he revealed even further that he had a kind, intelligent, interesting facea"unlike that of his grimacing brother. Hardesty shook his head in pleasant incredulity and then began to laugh when he saw Evan begin to quiver in antic.i.p.ation of having to get a job.
No way existed for Evan to appeal the decision, and neither could he think of any means by which to befuddle his brother into taking the salver. He had always hated it, even though it was made of gold, because it was engraved with words that he did not understand, and his father had spoken about it in terms far too reverential for a tray worth no more than several thousand dollars. So what if it had been brought from Italy. It was just junk, and he saw it as a pact between his father and Hardesty, a magical link between them that excluded him. The terrible irony was that he would be left with the salver (which he had often ridiculed and once even thrown out the window) and Hardesty would inherit enough to make a thousand men rich. Evan was convinced that he hadn"t a chance, not because Hardesty was interested in the wealth (for he clearly was not) but because Hardesty"s integrity would force him to take responsibility tor managing the a.s.sets that everyone well knew Evan would misrnanage. So the older brother closed his eyes and prepared to face what was for him the equivalent of a firing squad. Perhaps his father had overheard him adding up the Marratta a.s.sets (exaggerating what needn"t have been exaggerated), saying the numbers to himself likea monk in a trance. Perhaps his father"s soul, in ascension, had eavesdropped on his first son"s spirit as it was told of the father"s pa.s.sing and had been offended by the elated singing. All Evan knew was that Hardesty had the satisfied look of power.
The a.s.sembled political and communal leaders set their eyes upon Hardesty to confirm that what was obviously in his self-interest was also in the general interest, and to urge him to do the expected. Surely, they seemed to be saying, if you renounce the inheritance and it goes to Evan, you will have committed a great evil. Several of them, knowing their own children, grew quite nervous.
"I recommend," the lawyer said,"that we adjourn these proceedings until we are notified that Mr. Marratta has reached a firm decision." He wanted Hardesty"s ear, so as to persuade him to do the right thing."Is that okay with you, Hardesty?" "No," said Hardesty."I"ve decided."
The tension this engendered was, if not unbearable, at least unpleasant. On the one hand, if he had wanted time to think, it would have meant that he was not sure, and to be unsure of such an obvious choice was a dangerous sign of instability. On the other hand, a firm and quick decision could go either way, and even the right decision would have been taken too quickly. One way or another, it was frightening. If only they could get to him before he opened his mouth, to make sure that he considered these options in context.
"Such a momentous choice," began the lawyer."No," Hardesty said firmly."You don"t understand. My father had a way of speaking, a way of doing things indirectly so that we could learn while he slowed decisions and held them open to view. When we were young, if we asked him what time it was, he wouldn"t tell us, he"d show us his watch. Everything he did enabled others to learn. He was desirous that we *by indirections find directions out." And, in this instance, his wishes are very clear to me. Perhaps if I didn"t know him so wella"excuse me, if I hadn"t known him so wella"I would have a choice. But I have no choice here, not if I am to fulfill his ambitions for me, and, like him, rise out of myself and become something better than what I am.
"No. I gladly and lovingly submit to his will, and I am sure of what he wanted. The salver is mine."
A bigger stir could not have been created in San Francisco if the San Andreas fault had finally unseamed itself. Evan could hardly stand the shock. Possession of so much wealth took away his voice for an hour and a half: the sudden infusion of cash alone was like half a pound of cocaine flowing through his veins. Hardesty was forgotten by all, except for the brief moment it took to condemn him. Then, penniless and powerless, he was ignored in favor of his brother, to whom, by necessity, all eyes began to turn.
The lawyer had wanted to know why Hardesty had done what he had done. But Hardesty refused to tell. The salver had been given to Signer Marratta by his father, Hardesty said, who had received it from his father, who had received it from his father... etc., etc., how far back no one knew. But that was not the reason.
He thought it best to separate himself from the cacophony and gossip that he caused in San Francisco. He was no longer ent.i.tled to his room with its wood-railed balcony high above the bay (and would miss it forever), he was unsure of what he would do for a living, and possession of the salver was demanding in itself. He knew that, to satisfy what he understood to be its requirements, he had to leave.
Knowing that his brother was undoubtedly going to convert and desecrate their father"s study, Hardesty would have to go there and find his way past shields and blockades of memory to claim the great and demanding gift. Then he would leave forever the city of his birth, his home, and the place where his father and mother were buried.