along the walls, have a tight-thighed look, a ready look. Their eyes are riveted on the speaker and his accomplices, while he, Gordon St. Onge, steps back to the lectern and stands there hanging his head. When his sadness becomes ever so ballooned in his big neck, he swallows and the mike near his face amplifies the swallow to cannon booms. He draws the palm of one hand down over his face. He jerks from the cubby the stapled speech that his kids wrote and reads out loud from the last page, “My home is in those hands.” Jerks a thumb back toward the action, another cardboard box bouncing recklessly across the floor.
On he reads: “Clever species, we Homo sapiens are. How inventive! How sophisticated and complex!” He rubs the mike now with a huge palm. Spanks it. Speakers against the ceiling thump and scrape. And on he reads. Gravely. “But sagacity does not make humans not dangerous dumb-ass stupid primates. Am I right?” He gulps from the water glass that was in the lectern cubby. The whole thing. Then he laughs, one snort. His eyes smile.
Now he stands back, wiping his mustache and beard with both wrists, eyes on the audience.
“This is embarrassing,” complains one committeeman to a committeewoman, both from the Department of Education.
“The world in those hands,” Gordon reads. He’s not smiling.
“This is quite negative,” another woman says quietly.
A man in a light-blue suit sighs, looks across heads at Janet Weymouth’s elegant profile.
A person at the next table says, “Think. Think about that face. Look familiar?”
Another committeeman leans in. “He’s our own homegrown David Koresh.” He tee-hees, then looks over toward the table where Janet Weymouth is sitting. “Funny woman, she is.” Tee-hees again. Folds his arms, looking happily entertained. “She’s gone way beyond her shareholder activism.”
At the table of adults who came with the speaker, the beachball-round Passamaquoddy woman picks a stray banana off the floor and finds room for it under her table.
The tall, scary, and, yes, infamous Gordon St. Onge just sort of roams around. Distractedly. Stops, raises one eyebrow flirtatiously at a governor’s wife who has wonderfully floofy longish gray curls. She flushes and looks down at her hands with a small smile.
Then the scary speaker walks toward other tables of upturned faces, rubbing his hands together, smiling sheepishly at three women all dressed in varying shades of rose. He does something boyish and playful with his shoulders, setting off that Tinker Bell tinkle that is his bunch of keys. A trickle of sweat looking more like a small jewel makes its secret path down under the ear of one of the governors’ wives. This, even though the room is cool.
One of the committee hosts near the doorway, talking partly to himself, partly to the fellow beside him, says, “Well, well, well . . . this is certainly a mess.”
“As if we needed this today,” says the other.
Gordon St. Onge steps to a table, presses his knee and thigh against it as he gazes into the eyes of the governor’s wife who wears the red dress, which burns like fire in the center of this room of dark woodwork and stone, window light and soft lamps, coffee, and pastel cakes. The woman might be afraid of being made to look silly by this lower-class creature and then she feels it on her shoulder. His audacious hand. She still doesn’t raise her eyes to his whiskery face but looking across the great parlor space filled with faces, she smiles a good-sport smile.
The speaker leans low, almost grazing the woman’s face with his dark graying beard . . . he’s that close . . . and whispers, “You got an aspirin you can spare?”
The words “No, I don’t,” flutter out of her mouth with a laugh. She seems apologetic.
He straightens to his full towering self, squinting from the brightness of the great arched windows, and turns to another table. Here a coffee-color dress and its dignified wearer, a round-faced graying blonde in her late fifties, pearls, brown eyes, her hand beside her pretty teacup . . . saucer . . . little squeezed tea bag there. The speaker touches her shoulder because he, Gordon St. Onge, is a toucher. No one is out of bounds. A camera flash goes off from near the entrance and the speaker turns abruptly away, lowering one side of his face against his shoulder, as upper-class criminals being led (rarely) from court in handcuffs usually do. And then he makes a sudden move, which causes the security people (probably, yes, FBI) to visibly jerk a foot or elbow.
But Gordon is almost merged with the lectern, and the stapled speech crackles in his hand as he strains to see its words without his reading glasses. “My home. Our home. Our treasured round planetary rock. Our existence. In the hands of monkeys. I ask you to hearken to and fear this.” Done.
Then he is pushing his way through the men in black and the scrambling photographers, camera light bursting behind him, and, yes, there is applause, not a standing ovation but a nice trickle, a reflexive civilized little clapping.
Now he is out into the late-day sun, and that gray-green vertiginous smell of high tide, down down down his boots go along the stony winding path, past the parked bus, past some wild rose dangly with hips, stops to paw through his shirt pocket up under his sweater vest, his pants pockets . . . sort of frantic . . . then you see he is crunching hard on aspirin straight from a bottle, like a drink of cheap wine, because the pain of caring too much is a beastly thing.
It is the home of rich people. A place so serene, so old, stone and shingles and arched windows, leaping tides and high rock with pools and periwinkles, beaches, reeds, fields, and there along the lane, trees huge enough to have scowls and to touch lofty sylvan fingertips from one side of the lane to the other. Not a lot different from the Dumond House, where the governors’ wives were entertained earlier today.
Feet don’t make much racket. People here turn doorknobs in ways that cause doors to seem ghostishly mechanized. With some rich people, it isn’t just the stuff they own but also that uncanny silky lack of sound to their rooms and halls, to their infinite elbow room, their invisibility when they so desire, that which makes their daily lives particular to them. Where is the clatter? Where are the squeaks? Where are the bumped knees? None of that. Just an airy escape dream, one of those where having open arms is all it takes to fly.
A pony-sized but light-stepping French poodle is pleased to meet Jane Meserve, who is still wearing her heart-shaped secret agent glasses in case there is some deception needing special and high-powered vision in shades of pink. Meanwhile, the dog apparently has known the seven-year-old twins Katy and Karma St. Onge in past visits. He sits before each one and offers a gracious but quickie high five.
With all the papier-mâché heads and bananas and cardboard signs back in their satchels, tucked into car trunks and truck beds, the two dozen tykes and teens milling about in the Weymouth rooms are just ordinary-seeming American youngsters, except for, perhaps, that weedy, fruity, algae smell of Settlement soaps and salves. Among the startled haut monde at the Dumond House today there is the impression that all of these kids have been sired by Gordon St. Onge. This is not true. And yet this is not the only uh-oh and gasp and freighted falsehood that will follow him to his grave.
Janet explains the poodle’s name. Argot. “In old France, it was the language of thieves. And the land of thieves. Their part of town.”
Argot, maybe not really as big as a pony, but big as a collie, stands among all the visitors, his humanlike eyes moving from one face to another as each one speaks. All over him, his tremolite-gray puffs, so
