up here today via the Dumond House? Somewhere in this home Janet may have the stunning, stapled-together document propped under a soft rosy lamp.
Now Bree and Gordon stand side by side studying paintings, one a real van Gogh! Small. Vincent van Gogh painted in such a frenzy that probably there’s enough of his stuff for everyone on the planet to have at least one. But of course, you see them only in museums or in homes such as this.
And Bree? Genius painter in her own right? Perhaps now somewhere on her person . . . knuckle crease or behind an ear . . . is a smidgen-stain of cadmium red or titanium white. His eyes graze over her nearest hand, up the wrist, sleeve, then at the blazing wilderness of her hair, which she uses, yes, always to hide her face from him, only him.
And so Gordon touches Bree. Spread fingers push through the hair to her ear. This, which is his nature, with everyone, friend, family, or stranger. Even governors’ wives. Touch is speech. And he is a yakkety man. But Bree pulls away. Well, she giggles, then pulls away. Turns her face from him, leaves the room.
He stands alone, listening to the happy furor of his children and to Janet’s lively crew-cut long-necked artist friend, teasing Janet’s Mae West friend, who replies with some low sour-voiced remark that cracks up all those old enough to get it. And he hears tattling hoots over Argot tiptoeing by in the hallway with a box of waxed paper.
Gordon hears his wife Penny’s voice, “Usually dogs steal food.”
Janet’s voice, “Actually he isn’t stealing. He’s tidying up.”
All their banter soothes him. He roams into the hallway and over to the large parlor and sees the sky to the east looking stormy, the sea blackening, while across the room the west pours light of promising pink over the rugs and circle of good-natured couches and high-backed chairs.
A woman comes into the room. A woman he’s never seen before. Gray-haired. Wears a sweater and skirt. She tells Gordon that Morse would like it very much if he would come down to his room and read to him. “The Bible,” she says and smiles. “Now that you’re a theologian.”
Gordon knows this joke is coming from the Morse he always knew, the before-the-stroke Morse.
So he can communicate. When he wants to. And this is one of his little jokes.
But when Gordon arrives in the huge, well-lighted, yellow-walled bedroom where Morse waits in a hospital bed with a rosette-pattern comforter spread over him, there really is a Bible, a white one lying on top of the comforter, and Morse wordlessly indicates the cloth bookmarks.
Gordon doesn’t sit. He paces and reads in a booming preacherly voice from the marked pages, uncommonly favored passages of war and deceit and terror and servitude, where no one is redeemed.
Again Gordon stands alone, communing with van Gogh. And those other paintings, some by people he’s met here before. Probably somewhere in another room there’s one by Vaida with the crew cut and long neck and tire iron earrings who is here tonight. But for sure, none in this room are lighthouses, sailboats, rockbound Maine coast, no stacked lobster traps or shed walls of bright trap markers, those that so many seaside homes often have in great supply.
Janet comes to him and stands, head cocked, studying him so quietly that it is only the star of blue catching one corner of his eye that makes him turn toward her. His smile is a banner, a big forced smile showing even his twisted bottom teeth.
She says gently, “I’m worried about you.”
His smile tightens, now no visible teeth, sheepish.
“Something is going to come of this . . . what you did today, my friend.”
He shrugs. “I didn’t do my speech. Brats prevailed.” Then he laughs.
And she laughs. “At dinner, you said they should all have their bottom ends warmed. An idle threat, I’m sure.”
“Rumors are that at the Settlement they die of hard labor,” he says deeply.
“Your children scare you.”
He rubs his eyes. Both hands.
She says, “Your presence at the Dumond House was stunning and important and thought-provoking. It really still was on the theme of home as your essay would have been . . . only this was home versus nihility.”
“It all worked pretty slick, didn’t it?” He sighs. “Even the bananas.” He rubs one eye now with a palm, eyes burning, teeth visible again, framed in dark-and-gray beard, a third kind of smile, not easily identifiable. He has so many kinds of smiles. “I still don’t know who the mastermind was. That’s the one who needs to be locked in the stocks.”
“Your new friend Bree. I heard them talking. She’s a natural stage director.”
His face drains of color as if he were surprised. As if.
Janet giggles. Almost a Bree-giggle, then breathes, “Something will come of it. Really. Some breakthrough in the conservative camp . . . through the wives!”
He enfolds her in his arms and kisses her noisily twice, once on each ear.
She croaks, “I’ll be deaf for a week, you brute.”
It is dark. A tangle of ocean smells, both stinky and fragrant. Lots of windows down to catch the last of it, windows of all the Settlement vehicles that are revving up in the Weymouths’ circular drive of little stones, pressed deep as cobble. It’s hard not to notice how there is no one standing in the limp spread of Gordon’s truck’s low beams.
Gordon has a melancholy flash of the visit some of his family had here this past early summer. They’d arrived in only one van. For Morse’s birthday. More adults than kids that time.
Morse was still Morse. Before sunset that time he and Gordon walked along the private beach, the twins, Katy and Karma; and the poodle, Argot, so many yards ahead they were just small guttering squeaks above the big bloooooompshshsh of the waves. The kids and dog reached a wild field and merged with its shadows. The two men got into the revisionist histories of American Colonial pirates. And the not-so-becoming empire building of Abraham Lincoln and McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt. And now the United States’ 1990s covert tiptoeing to complement its overt bullying and bombs. So involved in their talk, Gordon was startled to see Argot walking by his side, eavesdropping. When finally they reached the field, the girls were eager to show them a milkweed caterpillar in his fine birthday-party stripes.
Karma introduced him (or her?) as Noof, a kiddie name that made no sense. But hurrah! A name!
Back at the Weymouth house, one of the quiet kitchen helpers had found a roomy jar for the caterpillar to ride home to Egypt in. The dark eyes of the twins were plashed with the baby pink and baby blue colors of the sunset that shot through the kitchen mullions as they watched Noof moving along on his milkweed leaf and they knew, with no explanation, that Noof had turned a page for them. In the coming days it would all be known.
And so when they were leaving that early summer night, Karma had run toward the open van door with
