Union Atlantic Page 3

  With the Bennetts on one side of her and the woods on the other, Charlotte had always thought she would be safe from the worst of the intrusion. Her house, the old family place, was a redoubt of sorts. After all this time living in it, its memories were for her neither a comfort nor a haunting. They were simply the traces of beings with whom she shared the place. Time by herself had done that to Charlotte, slowly worn away the hard barrier of the self that had clenched against loneliness for so many years at the beginning but in the end lacked a source of power. Unfed by the barriers of others, social fear tended to wither. The membrane between herself and the world had begun to breathe. And while this gentle dissipation had put to rest the anxiety she’d endured in the earlier years, when still wed to the story of marriage, it had increasingly opened her to a more profound, if not exactly personal, terror. Say, for instance, not the thought but the unsought intuition of every soul at stake on the planet hour to hour. A thing not to be borne for more than a minute without destroying the integrity of her individual mind. So you let in just a few fates at a time, hoping the blinders would hold. With the dogs, she could just about manage. How comforting it turned out even their ornery presence could be when the dumb quantity of humanity pressed its case.

  Before the mansion had been erected, there had been the chain-saws and backhoes, trees dragged like corpses to the road. Then the engines of the diggers, the cement mixers, the nail guns. She had stayed indoors, unable to watch. They removed so much earth, the angle of the land itself had changed. The maples they left along the top of the hill, from where she could now see all the way down to the river, did a poor job of hiding the new site even with the leaves out, and as fall had come round again the naked wood frame of the unfinished house had shown clearly through the bare branches.

  As a teacher all these years, seeing for herself the small-mindedness of those who ran the town of Finden, Charlotte should have known it would come, that the town would betray the trust her grandfather had placed in it. Her father might have done something about it. A man with a bedrock faith in the law, he had prosecuted malfeasance to the last. Episcopalian by birth, Presbyterian by temperament, Quaker in abstention, secular to the bone. He would have found a way to stop these cretins. But not her younger brother, Henry. No. After a few brief discussions with the lawyer, Cott Jr., Henry had suggested that if Charlotte found it too much to bear, perhaps the time had come to sell the house and move somewhere, as he put it, more practical.

  Thus it had been left to her to wage the battle. Naïvely, she had begun with an attempt to persuade, writing letters to the selectmen and the newspaper. When that produced nothing but a few polite replies, she’d begun gathering signatures outside the supermarket, informing people of the town’s plans. Just a few years earlier, most people would have at least stopped and said hello. She had been their teacher, after all, or their children’s teacher, or both. But now they looked upon her with pity.

  Budgets were budgets, the town said. They regretted deeply the necessity of putting a parcel of land up for auction. But the referendum for school funding had failed at the polls and they had to look to their assets. Never mind the breach of faith. Never mind the lobotomized, negligent short-termism of it all, as if a one-time windfall could ever fund an annual expenditure. What had government become these days but the poorly advertised fire sale of the public interest?

  But, oh, how they would rue the day now! Because at last Charlotte had done what she should have years ago: she had fired Cott Jr., the incompetent, collaborationist son of the old family lawyer who’d done little more than play at resisting the town’s grab, and she’d gone herself into the records down at the town hall. And there she’d discovered the mendacity of these idiots. Cott Jr. had said she had no legal recourse. But he was wrong. She’d filed her own suit now. She didn’t need an attorney to stand up before a judge. She would crush these scoundrels all on her own. And though it was late in the day, the trees already felled, that monstrosity already erected, still how sweet the victory would be when eventually she evicted that little charmer and razed his house to the ground.

  Just thinking of it slackened the muscles of her shoulders and chest, as if for these many months she’d been wearing a shirt of chain mail, the bands of which were only now beginning to warm and expand, allowing her to breathe.

  Heading up the road past the Bennetts’, she came to the low wooden fence that ran along the edge of the golf course. Wilkie and Sam nosed toward the gap that led onto the fairway. Seeing no one on the tee and the green clear, she followed them through onto the rough grass. The sky had brightened to a pale blue.

  How insane it had all been. How perverted. This business with the house all of a piece with what had gone on at the school, where they had run her out for describing the world as it was and most everyone had simply gone along with it, so enamored of authority they couldn’t imagine disagreeing. For years she’d assigned a photo-essay on lynchings in her unit on the Jazz Age. Then one day the department head told her she would have to stop because the objections from parents had grown vociferous. She had continued nonetheless, distributing the materials at her own expense with a new cover page explaining the topic’s contemporary relevance, including quotes from the novels of Tim LaHaye, along with a line from one of the parents’ letters, complaining that the assigned reading was too negative.

  “Yes. So was Dachau,” she’d said to the woman on parents’ night.

  These people who behaved nowadays as if the world were a menace sent to sicken or debilitate their children. What meagerness of spirit. To treat your own offspring as so inherently weak. They pumped their addled sons full of Ritalin and Adderall and their sullen daughters with whatever the psychopharmacologist recommended, but the unimpeachable facts of history were considered bacteria. She had done nothing more than describe such people to themselves. For that, she had been deemed unfit. Her only contact with students now was the occasional child one of her former colleagues sent to her for tutoring.

  Held back by the dogs sniffing at something on the fairway, Charlotte paused, looking down the slope of the first hole to the stream and the footbridge that led across it.

  Her father had played this course in the summers. Each Memorial Day weekend he would drive them up here, along the post road through Connecticut and Rhode Island and across to Massachusetts. Her mother in the front seat, her eyes covered in dark sunglasses, her lacquered Nantucket creel on the floor by her feet, hands folded on her lap as she gazed out the window in controlled displeasure at one aspect or another of the arrangements—luggage or dinner plans or how soon on Tuesday their father would have to get a ride to Boston to catch the train back. Until August he would come only on weekends, spending the weeks alone at the house in Rye and commuting into the city. Most of the other families they knew went to Long Island or the Cape, but despite their mother’s annual disgruntlement they came here, to this town where their father’s family had always lived, to the house he’d grown up in and inherited.

  What could Charlotte have known then of how she’d return here by herself? Nothing. At the time, the adventure seemed ever new. Rushing with Henry into the house ahead of their parents to claim their rooms, rolling on the cotton-tufted bedspreads, the air tinged with naphthalene and the richer scent of pitch from all the wood: the dark ceiling beams, the slanted floors, the narrow steep steps back and front. After a day or two, when her mother had aired the place out, the smell of mothballs faded, but the tar-like taste remained all summer, as fixed in the house as the old latch doors and twelve-pane windows. The red Jeep in the barn had a sticker for the lake, and they’d drive there with an ice chest full of lunch, stacks of towels, and an umbrella her mother read under while they swam. Later, running to the back of the field at dusk to pick asparagus among the tall grass; or across the road to Aunt Eleanor’s house for sugar or cooking oil, the screen door on the back steps slapping behind her; watching the slow, dying flail of the greeny-black claws of lobsters held between her father’s thumb and forefinger just before he dropped them into the boiler; the ridged metal shell-snappers set out with little forks to get at the thin meat in the legs; mosquitoes bouncing against the porch bulb after dinner when her father smoked a cigarette and looked back into the house at them like a man in a darkened theater watching the scene of a play. He’d wink at her and Henry on his way out the door with their mother to some party nearby, as if to say, lucky you, staying here, free to play at what you like, you always have more fun than me—and Charlotte could never tell if he meant it. Waking to the sound of the river, starlings in the crab apple tree by her window, eating cereal with Henry in his pajamas, the weightless late-morning hours before they went to the lake, idling in the backyard, on the mown grass, mountains of white cloud floating in the vast blueness of the summer sky.

  A shield. That’s what the memories were, the ones that had risen in her with such force of late. A barricade thrown up against the depredations of the present.

  Down on the second tee, a golfer arranged himself. Wilkie and Sam took no notice, their snouts still pressed to the ground. Of Charlotte’s drifts into reminiscence, the two of them did not approve. She found this hard, given all the love she had shown them over the years. She understood they missed the woods and the chance to run untethered by the river as they used to; they resented being leashed on every walk now.

  When she’d first moved to Finden, it had been to rest, the summer after Eric died, for what she thought would be only a few months before returning to New York. There had been no living thing in the house with her, no pets or plants, the garden untended. It had stayed that way all through August because why settle in where you weren’t going to stay? Then her landlord in New York, not wanting any trouble after what had happened, had
asked that she not renew the lease. Part of her wasn’t sure she could face going back in any case. That fall, she took a temporary job teaching history at Finden High while she figured out what to do. At some point, a colleague had come by with a cutting of a jade plant and they had gone together to a nursery to buy geraniums and bulbs.

  For most of her time here, there had been only the plants and the garden, which she’d tended with great care. It was just in the last six or seven years that she’d taken in the dogs. Samuel had come from a litter of purebred mastiffs owned by George Jakes, the son of Mr. Jakes, who’d always been their plumber and who looked after the property during the year, when the family was back in Rye. George had brought the puppy over one day when he’d come to fix the tub and asked if Charlotte would mind the company because while his children wanted to keep all seven of them, it wasn’t practical.

  A small fawn-colored creature with floppy ears, Samuel lay happily in her lap that first day. She hadn’t considered how large he would become and might have hesitated if she had, if only because of the strength it required to hold him back once he gained his full stature. All through her adolescence and young adulthood Charlotte had prided herself on her lack of sentimentality, a badge of honor in a household dominated by her father’s pragmatism. She considered pets a maudlin affair, lacking the fundamental seriousness that characterized worthwhile emotional life. Despite all this, Sam’s dopey comfort with himself peeled at least one layer of reserve from Charlotte, and even as he grew into a larger animal, she continued to let him lie with her on the couch, his head in her lap as she read the paper.

  Wilkie, the Doberman, had come from the pound a year or so later. A story in the local newspaper said an unusual number of homeless dogs were being put down so she’d driven over and visited with the keeper, who told her she could have any one she liked. A roar of barking had filled the aisle of wire cages. Amidst all the noise, Wilkie stood silent and intent at the far end, the sinews of his legs and neck visible beneath a gleaming coat.

  He slept the first week in the yard and then a month or more in the vestibule before claiming a large wicker basket inside the back door. Once Sam had fought him out of the dining room and Wilkie had claimed the hall, they got along grudgingly and lay beside each other on the warm stones in front of the fireplace. Slowly, her days had formed themselves around their habits: rising before dawn, a long walk before breakfast, a nap in the late afternoon, dinner earlier than she ever used to eat, and another walk before bed.

  Naturally, conversation ran in everyone’s head, snippets of talk, a moment’s complaint dismissed, plans for the week or the hour or the minute debated back and forth. If you lived on your own, of course, the volume tended to rise, filling the silence. Fair enough. She’d had decades of this as a single woman. If you added the everyday fact of people speaking to their pets, and more, of their sensing, sometimes keenly, the wishes, wants, or moods of the animals they lived with, then none of what had begun happening a few months ago should have been thought abnormal. She resented the judgment she knew others would make: dogs don’t talk. There’s help you could get.

  As a young woman living in New York, she had visited certain apartments with Eric, apartments of those who considered themselves radicals, the rent on walk-ups paid by suburban parents while the children decried the system, the main attribute of which was an authority so pervasive the masses couldn’t see it. Dime-store Marxism peddled to the disaffected. And then there was the other strand, the young men and women who ate their peyote and read their Huxley and spoke of the subtler tyranny of the ordered senses. Damp is how she remembered them, pale, long hair pasted down the sides of their faces, sweating in overheated apartments eating cake and oranges. Visiting in those rooms, observing, Charlotte found herself standing behind a cordon sanitaire, a line drawn in the invisible but deeply staining ink of class. It’s not that her parents would have reproved her for doing such things or taken drastic steps. They would merely have been disappointed, their distaste, like hers, more aesthetic than political.

  For years afterward, a criticism had lodged itself in her: that she’d been afraid of experience, a coward, a debutante stuck in the mind of the ball. But what sloppiness and vagary those believers had been delivered into. What bathos of posture and commercialism. All their therapy and their divorces and now their wretched houses built up to her door. And what of their radical perception now? Would they even think to credit Charlotte’s mind for a minute?

  So a few months ago the conversations in her head had grown a bit in volume, and pushing outward the bicker and debate had circled into her companions, Wilkie and Sam, with whom she’d always communicated in one way or another. So what? They’d taken to conversation in the way she would have predicted from their personalities: Sam the more arrogant of the two, convinced of himself, Wilkie making up for self-doubt with an added righteousness. Were the flower children-cum-yuppies going to cart her off for an imagination gone too florid?

  If she were honest with herself, however, Charlotte had to admit the animals themselves had begun to trouble her of late. At first they had merely taken up one side or another of exchanges long conducted internally, most of them quotidian: when to put in the storm windows, when to take them out; whether to read the paper or give oneself a rest from news of death. Helpmates, they were. Companions who cared enough to take a view of the daily dilemmas. But recently their talk had begun to veer from what occupied Charlotte’s conscious mind. More and more the topics were their own.

  An odd couple they made, she considered, walking behind them now as they moved along the bank of the stream. Sam with his blond coat and oafish head, that openmouthed lumber of a walk, his tongue hanging from his mouth; Wilkie, so dark and slender, so precise in his movements, lithe and graceful and possessed of a mystery absent in Sam’s bluster. She hadn’t asked the keeper at the pound who his previous owner was or how he had ended up there because she thought it unfair to Wilkie to judge him on his upbringing. His good demeanor had spoken for him that day.

  The two of them led her over the footbridge, past the green, and back onto the road again. The turning of the earth had brought the light of the sun into the tops of the trees now, and it cast long shadows across the pavement and the fronts of the houses whose east-facing windows shone with the white-and-orange flood. Another few minutes and they were back by the stone wall that ran between the road and Charlotte’s front yard.

  As they turned into the drive, Fanning’s great, gaudy pretense came into view again.

  Planks of the tree fort she and Henry used to play in had still been rotting up in the old sycamore by the river when they cut it down, a tree from whose branches her father had hung a swing that swung you out over the footpath high enough at times it seemed you could fly right into the water.

  When she’d seen that intruder coming down the steps yesterday morning, the first thing she’d noticed was his suit, too slick by half. It fit him more like a diving outfit than a proper set of clothes. But then why should one expect anything discreet from such a person? That was not the logic of his kind. Theirs was the reign of endless display.

  “The new place is mine,” he’d said, shoving his car up beside her.

  They would see about that.

  In the breezeway, the dogs sat on their haunches, waiting. As she reached for the latch, Charlotte glanced down into Sam’s face: the loose, moist folds of his jowls, the curtains of his ears, his eyes a dark vacuum.

  Your town walls are fallen down, he said. But such is the descent of the devil at this day upon ourselves, that I may truly tell you, the walls of the whole world are broken down, such a gap made in them, that the very devils are broke in upon us. And what use ought we to make of so tremendous a dispensation? What use?