The Duration (8 page)

I looked up and nodded.

“Chief Winston says you are here to write a book report on Fleur-de-Lys. An apologia of a sort. It is to be thirty pages long and is due by the end of the month. Fortunately for you,” she said, “I am the definitive resource.”

She turned in the door and headed inside.

“Follow me.”

Guy Van Nest was the only child of Forsyth and Helene Van Nest, a late baby, a gift to the tycoon's second wife when he was in his fifties and she was already pushing thirty-five. In photos from the late 1800s, Guy appears as a small boy in short pants, pale—but that might be the tint—and surrounded by knees. Forsyth had made his fortune in the West, sliding needles into mineral veins, fueling the factory fires of the Cuyahoga, the construction of highways across the Atlantic Coast, the general choke and rattle of the late Industrial Revolution. Perhaps in response, he built Fleur-de-Lys deep within the Berkshire hills, surrounded by trees and fields, an Eden, a solace, a place where he could pretend to be a naturalist. Fresh air and clean water. He shipped Helene and baby Guy up here and rarely visited, and when he died, not soon enough, he left the entire estate, all 36 acres and 900 statues and forty rooms, to the child, who was eight at the time.

Life was a series of nannies and clowns and croquet parties for Guy and his lonely mother, who cared less for the sleepy hill towns and their inhabitants than her husband seemed to want of her. Guy made few friends among the local children, many of whose parents worked for him, and his summers were spent in carriage rides from one cottage party to another, social events where the bonhomie was largely ceremonial. After Forsyth died, Helene was less and less in residence, taking the train back into the city at every opportunity and more often than not leaving Guy behind, on his massive estate, with his handlers and his jugglers and his short pants. As he hit his teens, things got a little crazy: wilder parties, construction projects commenced and halted, visitors of all shapes and sizes. Skinny-dipping. Naked lawn bowling. He developed something of a reputation.

Then, in his early twenties, Guy went big. He'd hosted a traveling circus at Fleur-de-Lys, putting them up for the entire summer, the performers in the main house and the animals in stables and tents he'd commissioned. In the evenings, servants regaled the uptown taverns with stories of bearded women and dwarves and sword-swallowers, and some days you could catch an occasional glimpse of great gray beasts wandering aimlessly across the property's back fields. When that summer ended, rumor had it, Guy had kept a rhino.

We learned all this from Florence Banish, who had a whole folder of Fleur-de-Lys material in a fireproof cabinet in one of the library's archival spaces. At that point, Head-Connect hadn't yet purchased the property, although some of the local realtors whispered of overtures from Lake Tahoe. Chick and I sat at a circular table and spread the contents of the folder out in front of us. Grainy pictures, newspaper clippings, yellowing photocopies of deeds. Florence Banish watched hawk-like as we sifted through them, her voice a cross between a croak and a flute: no bending, no drinks, careful with the artifacts. Of course no drinks. Jeez, couldn't she see we had no drinks?

By our third day of research at the library, I was bored and had started to try and work out how big we could make our margins. Chickie, on the other hand, was engaged.

“Shit,” he said, sliding a frail slip of newsprint my way.

It was a clipping from the
Berkshire Record
, an old weekly newspaper now subsumed by the
Franchise
, an inside page dated April 1927. The paper was brittle and the color of Florence Banish's hands. It was an obituary. Guy Van Nest, erstwhile owner and sole occupant of Fleur-de-Lys, died of pneumonia at the young age of thirty-eight and was buried on Long Island.

“Shit,” I said. I got it right away.

Florence Banish hissed at me.

“Shoot. Sugar. If he's not buried here, we can't use him for Ms. Flemmy.”

We were combining our probationary report for Chief Winston with our history paper, of course, but the latter depended on the subject being buried in town. Now Guy Van Nest didn't qualify. We could still use the material for Chief Winston, but the one for Ms. Flemmy was due in a week and that's the one for which we were suddenly without a subject. Chick groaned. Then he began shuffling through the papers again.

“Maybe he had a kid?”

I checked the obituary. Van Nest was divorced, no kids.

“No luck.”

We itemized the papers. Records from a bankruptcy, deeds of transfer. World War I going on somewhere, the stock market heading south. We settled on a grainy black-and-white from late August 1914, according to the thin scratches along its margin. The steps to the Italianate main house, a spread of people in front, a white tent top off to the left. Thin and mustachioed Guy Van Nest at the center of the spread, on the pea-stoned entry, dressed for dinner and flanked by women with parasols, then farther out by dark and hairy and dramatic creatures, acrobats in jumpsuits belted at the waist, a pair of midgets, a body builder, a 7-footer. A bearded figure of indeterminate gender with his or her arm around a clown, and past them, housemaids and gardeners and livery on the upper steps. Everyone staring at Guy, who had a smile on his face, a lion at his feet, and an elephant looming behind him, its trunk draped around his shoulders like a shawl.

“What about the rhino?” said Chickie.

I looked up.

“What rhino?”

“The one he kept at Fleur-de-Lys after the circus left. What happened to that?”

I shrugged.

“Heck if I know,” I said, out of deference to Florence Banish. “How do we know if there even was a rhino at Fleur-de-Lys?”

“There was a rhino at Fleur-de-Lys,” Florence Banish said. “There still is.”

We looked at her. She was standing in the door of our little project room, leaning a frail hip against the frame and looking dreamily out a side window. If she'd had a thin cigarette, she could have been in a movie. After a second, she gathered herself, took a look out to the main reading room, and then crossed slowly to us. She moved some papers around and centered the circus photo before us. She stared at it for a moment, then bent a bony finger toward one of the housemaids, second step, third from the edge.

“That's my mother,” she said.

Chick and I walked from his room at the Horse Head. He was limping a little bit, holding his left side.

“What'd you do?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Don't know. Probably nothing. Just getting old. The knee aches when it's cold out.”

He was twenty-eight, six months younger than me.

I clicked the unlock, and the truck blinked. Chick had blown his ACL out in the second fight with Tim-Rick Golack, somewhere near our foul line, at the bottom of a pile of kids. It had never healed right. They had to call the game with six minutes left in the fourth quarter. Tim-Rick had been in a different pile of kids near the baseline, his head in the crook of my arm, but the game was in our home gym and he took the blame for the injury, both from the fans and, the next day, in the paper. Which is what made his resurrection as a local businessman such a surprise.

“Nice ride,” Chick said, looking at the Escalade. “Not as nice as Jimmer's, but not bad.”

Jimmer was somewhere in Silicon Valley, doing something with numbers.

I'd had the Escalade for two years, got it shortly after law school, a gift to myself from those bottomless first paychecks. It was a stupid ride to own in Boston, where everyone either took cabs or the T, and where 15 feet of available curb was hard to find. And driving it I always felt like I was heading to an AND1 Mixtape game. But I liked it. It looked good parked next to all those little BMWs in the South End, like a killer whale in a school of clownfish. It announced my presence in the city, a kid from the sticks no longer. I came to play. I came to scale the walls. Plus, it helped me to feel wanted, because someone was always moving a couch.

My ride was the only ride in the parking lot.

“Where's your car?” I said.

Chick opened the passenger door.

“Don't have one.”

“How'd you get here, then?”

He looked at me.

“Where? Here, Gable?”

“Like, here.” I motioned to the Horse Head. It was a long walk from anywhere. “Last night, how did you get here?”

“Oh,” he said. “Buddy dropped me off.”

“Buddy? Buddy dropped you off?”

We didn't know anyone named Buddy. And anyway what buddy did Chick have who was dropping him off at the Horse Head?

“A buddy. Elvis LaBeau, from Misconic. You remember Elvis LaBeau.”

I did not remember Elvis LaBeau. I got in the truck. Chick climbed in the passenger seat and looked around. He put his hands on the dash and pretended to be taking it all in.

“Boston is treating you well, I see,” he said.

So transparent. My head was starting to hurt.

“Dude, hold up. Back up.”

Chickie looked at me, then lowered his eyes.

“I need a little chronology,” I said.

“Fine,” he said, staring at his socks. “Can we do it over breakfast?”

We drove into town and stopped at Gina's, one of the few places where you could still order an omelet with the yolks. The waitress, a woman in her early twenties whose hair looked wet but was in fact dry, brought coffee.

I decided to start with a banality.

“How, uh, how's life in education?”

Chickie was shaking salt into his coffee, he'd always done that, and started grinning at his memories, though whether it was genuine or strategic I wasn't sure.

“Less educational than advertised.”

“You did it twice, right?”

He nodded.

“You do it twice, you get extra credit.”

The coffee was thin and the mug was diner-ceramic, clunky, all rounded edges. I took a sip and put it down. I cleared a space before me on the table and put my hands there, palms down.

“Can you, like, give me some straight answers?”

Chickie took a deep breath and squared up in his booth. People used to call me So Handsome, but, growing up, Chick was the one of us who made the heads turn. My look, which didn't do much until I started to grow into it around junior year, was sort of Harlequin Romance cover, strong jaw, oversized face. When I could grow stubble, it was all over. Chicks throwing their panties onstage, that kind of thing. Not really. But anyway that took years. Chick's look, which he had from, like, fourth grade on, was straight out of a S.E. Hinton novel, Ponyboy all the way. He didn't take a whole lot of interest in the girls, but they'd taken a whole lot of interest in him. Everybody did.

He looked that way now, despite the beard. Skin a little rougher, vaguely feral, but still. He looked like someone you wanted to protect.

“So, what's going on?” I said. “Why are you back here?”

There were a lot of places in the world with slates cleaner than this one.