Butler, the teenager with the skin affliction, has open sores today, even on his lips. A lifelong torment. But also Chris is a pianist with the gentlest touch upon the keys so that the melodies flow skinless, bodiless in a majesty larger than the one thin sore patchy-haired teenager who straddles that piano stool. He is Beauty is, as beauty does, as they say. He is not a child of Gordon’s but is. Because Gordon St. Onge possesses all who come to him for the sanctuary of his granite-cored hills, and his many halls and rooms, which are never hushy.
Chris smiles quirkily and wonders, “Does Argot steal?”
Janet laughs her velvet laugh but doesn’t take Chris’s wrist, though she does lean quite close and her breath is a shimmer of mint. “He did when he was a boy.”
Claire snorts over this.
“Please, all sit, if you’d like, and have something.” Janet names wines that sound no different from the language of thieves.
The twin girls, Katy who looks most like Leona, and Karma who has inherited the intensity of Gordon’s eyes, tell of a desire to go out on the beach, and so Argot accompanies them, as well as a young woman named Eva who is in the Weymouths’ employ and very, very reticent but smiley.
Of course, at least eight other youngsters troop after, Argot glancing back over his shoulder to graciously acknowledge them with two precise wags of his stick-shift, ball-ended, four-on-the-floor sort of tail.
Gordon doesn’t sit. He’s restless. He gazes out the broad windows. At the ocean. As if he had just today discovered it and is bewitched. He stands there close to the glass with the solid peachy-blue light of the Atlantic’s high tide and the sky cast over his face and sweater vest and shirtsleeves and on his fingers that wrap around the stem of the glass that is filled with something dark red and virile-looking.
A woman who resembles Janet but is no relation quietly wheels Janet’s husband in. Morse Weymouth. A man who once would, with his gray, sometimes baleful eyes, look into your eyes in a direct way. His questions were direct. That short, broad-chested, fierce man. Gone! His nonprofit environmental lobbying organization, he was its father and its stoutest funder. The project has had only small victories but Weymouth money, money so old it may have once been backed by the king of England’s corporations, will never run out and so the little organization is still alive even as the man is dying.
Morse Weymouth. Since his stroke, his mouth hangs open and he breathes noisily. He leans to one side. Or is it that he sags? Or is it more like sinking? A once formidable warship in full sail, heavy with cannon, swollen with righteous wrath, coming at you over the glitter of sunny seas, now just squeaking, bubbling, groaning, down, down, down till the bowsprit is spookily unnamable, easing down through the depths, shorter, shorter, till you can see nothing there.
And so he does not speak and he refuses to look at anything above table legs or knees.
This is the first time Gordon has seen Morse this way. He steps from the window. He doesn’t push a brotherly hand-and-wrist-grip on either of Morse’s limp hands. He doesn’t fake a cheery, “Howzit going, Morse?” He just goes and sits on the little footstool close to Morse’s feet as if he were a big loyal dog. He aligns his wineglass bottom with a fuzzy coaster on the nearest low table and sighs terribly.
Janet makes no comment, just turns and smiles sorrowfully at Claire and Bree and Beth and Geraldine. Claire’s eyes inside her steel-rimmed specs are always without twinkles, now truly just two black starless nights.
And Bree? Brianna Vandermast? Neighbor of the Settlement but she is also of the Settlement, fifteen years old, almost six feet tall, august among the other teens that she usually hangs out with, her admirers. Strident ripples of red-orange hair and, oh, those eyes, each honey-gold-green eye lovely but for the strained and awful distance between. That face startles persons beholding her for the first time. She is watching Gordon as he sits so helplessly near the once powerful Morse Weymouth. Yes, Morse is now just a sort of likeness of roadkill and wouldn’t such cruelty cause Gordon’s reason to be to accelerate? But the buttons and switches that usually set him into obsessive and thunderous motion over the sight of suffering seem to all be busted.
Through the open French doors to a sunroom, the sea can be heard best, its mighty FLOMP! and broken-glass-like hiss.
Now Bree answers Janet’s many probing and heartfelt questions.
Janet asks, “Don’t I know you? From The Recipe?” This is a reference to that lyrical political outpouring of calligraphy from this girl’s pen, which once photocopied, with a dandy orange top page, Gordon had mailed to many. And maybe Janet was one of the only ones who read it.
The girl answers huskily, “Yes, The Recipe for Revolution. We wrote it together.” Her cursed eyes again slide onto Gordon, still motionless on the footstool, then back to Janet’s face, that face, how it emanates both kindness and mischief shamelessly synchronized.
Gordon’s hands rest now, one on each of his knees, till he finally reaches for his wine.
Morse Weymouth’s hair is thickly gray on the sides, thin on top. His orange-sherbet-colored button-up camp shirt. Big square pockets on the chest. Nothing in the pockets. No glasses on his face. He always wore glasses. Never contacts. No laserings. No vanity with him. But seems now there’s nothing he wants to see. He shows absolutely no reaction to Gordon’s nearness. Makes no sound but his bestial breathing. That in and out wide-awake snore.
Gordon glances at Claire and then to Bree who is now carefully listening to Janet tell about how when she was about Bree’s age, she was so shy she passed up the chance of getting to know Tommy Dorsey‡‡‡ when he visited her father in Connecticut. Dorsey and some band members “stayed THREE DAYS at my family’s home and I managed not to run into him the whole time, except at dinner, where I made not a peep. Normally if there was just our family, I talked and . . . oh, I had such a giggle . . . quite strident . . . and when that happened, my mother would have to discreetly pat my hand, which meant Shut up.” Her voice softens as secrets must be ever soft, “There were half-hour stretches where I hid behind shrubs and trees outside, rather than meet Mr. Dorsey on the paths or the lawn. I’d see him and his friends out in the garden . . . was there a tulip tall enough to hide behind?” Janet giggles. “Not for someone as shy as me.”
And the girl Bree with the devilish red hair and far-apart eyes giggles. Bree doesn’t know who Tommy Dorsey is or was, but giggles among gigglers are hazardously infectious.
The waves beyond the windows flomp! and hiss. And the scent of the sea is a kind of whammy on the souls of the mountain-loving Settlementers.
Eventually Bree goes outside to smoke. How boyish her smoking mannerisms are, due to her years of working in the woods with her father’s logging crew. Tanned, trim-waisted, with ripped-short fingernails, no jewelry or floral hair doodads. Tomboy. But the sly fire in some of her sidelong gazes always gives her away as “boy crazy.”
Gordon can hear through the sunporch doors and screens Bree chattering with his daughter Whitney, also age fifteen, who doesn’t smoke; and Bonnie Loo, his wife, who does. Bree is talking a blue streak! Small talk and jokey anecdotes, all that easy human back-and-forth spilling from Bree’s lips as with Bonnie Loo’s, between their sharp poofs of smoke out there on the flagstones beyond the sunporch. Bree has never talked like this with Gordon St. Onge. Not in that careless chiming way. To him she has related her radical ideas cautiously . . . and The Recipe . . . low and rimey . . . yes, cold . . . yes, withholding. But with Whitney and Bonnie Loo and Janet, with everybody but Gordon, Bree izzzzz warm. Deep, deep, deep, deep down he knows why it is so.
