Loo, in her black dress and her brassy blond-orange-streaked dark hair scrambling around fountainlike from its tortoiseshell clip, is returning from another set of rooms with Janet and says, “He’s not a theologian. He just—”
Janet’s laugh, like thick carpet, like silent doorknobs, like sea-struck light through clean glass, rushes to each person’s hearing. “My mother always advised, “‘Lie all you want as long as it’s not for yourself.’”
And then from his stool at Morse’s feet Gordon hears Claire telling Janet, “I rode from Egypt with Gordon in his truck . . . and Chris was with us. The others were all in the other cars. We had no idea there was a hijacking of Gordon’s speech in the works. I’m not sure how I feel about it.”
Janet says, “The talk I expected him to do was more of an essay, sweet and earnest, lightly edifying. So maybe . . . the children know Gordon’s heart better than he does. And better than I do.”
Claire says nothing.
Janet adds, “Anthropocentrism is dangerous and needs some second thought.”
Claire says flatly, “It seemed to be a subject over the heads of the audience.”
Janet whispers, “Well, you see, it was about theology. A theological critique. Christianity, which has so shaped the West, is anthropocentric. It’s very large . . . this . . . thing the children did. Seems to be the very thing Gordon has concerned himself with in many a discussion at our dinner table here. I don’t believe anything was hijacked today. It was . . . scintillating . . . and right out of Gordon’s soul.”
Claire says nothing.
More drinks.
And then the kids come roaring in from outside with sherbet containers filled with wet jarringly pungent shells.
More drinks are offered to Gordon, Claire, Bonnie Loo, Penny St. Onge, and the other St. Onge wives on hand. And Aurel.§§§ And even Bree and Butch and Whitney and other teens. Laughingly refused by all.
A late dinner. Two of Janet’s closest friends join them. Both introduced as artists. The Settlementers have met one of them before. The food appears on the table in a stealthy way. Gordon’s loud eating sounds catch a few looks. Morse Weymouth is not at this meal. Janet explains that Morse doesn’t want anyone, even her, to see him being fed.
The chatter along the great table is, of course, of the afternoon and Gordon’s “lecture” and how it was received.
“It was received enthusiastically!” Janet almost crows.
Gordon’s smile is just a tired scrawl, one darkly bearded cheek bulging with marinated squab. He hasn’t swallowed yet as he asks, “Was I there?”
His daughter Whitney, fifteen (not as pretty as her mother, Penny, it is often remarked, too much of Gordon’s bungled expressions minus just the Tourette’s-esque eye-cheek flinch), divulges, “Yes, we messed with your speech . . . but we knew you wouldn’t read what we wrote aloud . . . like ‘you are all stinking apes’ . . . ” Her freshly brushed (in the Weymouths’ bathroom) blond ponytail whips left and right as she nods both ways at all the giggles and snorts up and down the silver-crystal-china-cluttered table.
“Hey,” Chris Butler pipes up. “Where were the husbands of the girl governors?”
Janet covers her mouth lest she spit out oozy roll on a graceless, fully liberated laugh.
“Prowling Wall Street,” one of her friends offers, this artsy friend with almost a crew cut, a long feminine neck, and earrings that must weigh as much as tire irons.
“Wall Street,” a large but not very old Settlement kid, pistachio-color eyes in a Passamaquoddy face, giggle-gags, “That’s like Ceiling Street!”
“No ceiling,” murmurs Janet’s other friend, she a large-boned broad-shouldered Mae West look-alike in a toned-down gray pantsuit, sitting near the boy. She leans toward his ear, “The sky is the limit.”
The nearest row of little kids along the table all nicker and snicker sagely, though they understand nothing of this joke . . . not the depths of it. Among these kids is a girl, eight or thereabouts, of Passamaquoddy looks but for, again, the green eyes; she has a fat lip, looking fatter by the minute. Yes, pain goes with the job of being a monkey MOTORIST.
More food, whole platters of baby birds.
More bread.
More wine.
And a light dessert of wee cookies and pineapple ice.
At last the table talk zeroes in on shareholder activism, both Janet’s and Morse’s passion in the last few years. “Have you read Bob Monks’s latest book, Gordon? I didn’t send it to you yet, did I?”
Gordon says, “You did and I read every word. Test me.”
This gets a laugh.
“Bob is a man of courageous integrity,” Janet almost whispers.
Gordon nods. He is pondering the stocks his mother signed over to him, the whole portfolio being only a bony malnourished wormy shadow of its former self due to his “wasting” (his mother Marian’s word) his minor wealth on Settlement life and on the hundred or more denizens there. “Losers” his mother calls them, all except Claire, the only wife she acknowledges. (And his many children? Nonexistent in her bristling gray eyes, so there’s nothing to discuss there.)
He glances up at Claire not far down along the other side of the table, her grave dark eyes behind those old-timey specs watching him steadily. She knows like no one else how far belowground Gordon’s depressions can go. Here she is dressed in her university adjunct history/archaeology teacher clothes looking quite distinguished and spiffy even as she grows more obese every minute, it seems. But most of all, to unknowing eyes (for instance new university students’), she always looks a little scary.
After the meal, Gordon and teenage Bree are alone a few moments, poking at books in a small parlor off the dining room, books with no jackets, just the naked brawn of brown, tan, blue, green, and black fabrics; you’d expect a first edition of Wealth of Nations to start shivering in order to catch your eye. Books of an age so old that some have a lot of spouting on eugenics, disguised as philosophy, though nothing of the sort has ever slunk from Weymouth lips. It’s just that Morse and Janet have always gotten all melty over striking book spines, unintermittent as bricks.
Bree glances through a book, flip flip. Mostly she inhales books. No, Bree is not yet a true Settlement resident, still a neighbor’s daughter. Her roiling long red hair hides her wrongly formed face from him. She has some sort of magical gifts and, it is this that makes Gordon St. Onge nervous, magic tricks, the only way to define her effect on him, and worst of all, her influence over most of the Settlement’s girl teens. How she often presses him to be a revolutionary leader, as if anyone could put smoke under the asses of Americans, all so schooled and TVed into blushingly low quotients on bullshit detection and high quotients on self-virtue. Or do Americans, including himself, ever so perfectly and beyond utterance or action, realize that they are in the deepest pocket of the hot gut of the oligo-spider’s intransmutably web-wrapped global edifice, too total for any of us living beings to crawl free of?
And besides his being ill-suited for the ill-fated idea of being a leader to save the day, for a world on fire as we speak, if there’s
