The Duration (9 page)

He shrugged, took a deep breath. Looked out the window at the parking lot.

“SmartSeeds was good, gave me something to do. Sort of like the Peace Corps for screw-ups. Man, the island where I was, the second time? It is far. Like, far far. No buildings, really. Just, like, shanties and hammocks and bike paths. I kinda wanted to stay there forever.”

He paused, looked at the table.

“But you know how it is with colonialism. Never lasts. Plus, they stopped paying me. I had to leave. Flew to San Francisco, so I saw Jimmer for a couple of nights. He's like Future-Man now. After that, I was in Florida for a while. My mom's there.”

He looked at me.

I nodded.

“She's the same. Anxious. Medicating with gin. I was working at some grade school, a teacher's aide like. SmartSeeds has a pretty good network for when you come home, but they wanted me to finish my degree and go to grad school, and I'm just not into it.”

He stopped and sipped his coffee.

“What are you into?” I asked.

Chick looked back out the window.

“Not grad school. And not Florida. Holy shit, man. Alligators and snakes everywhere. There's not a body of water in that state I'd feel safe in. Not even the tub.”

He smiled, trying to tunnel his way back to comedy.

I stayed on him.

“And?”

His smile faded.

“And, I don't know. Met a teacher at the school, she asked where I was from. I said here, and she knew it from when she was a kid. She used to go to Camp Whippoorwill, started talking about what a wonderful place it was, the usual shit, and I was like, lady, you don't even know.”

He shook his head.

“But then, like, here I am, right? Got myself to the other side of the world and all it ever felt like was a test. I can't see starting over. Not in the Pacific, sure as shit not in Florida. Ponce de León said the Fountain of Youth was in Florida. Dude was fucking high. So I got on a train.”

Our wet waitress came back and sloshed more coffee into our cups. We ordered. She scribbled on a pad and then looked at Chickie. He was holding up his coffee mug.

“This coffee tastes like salt,” he said.

She squinted at him. Her nails were long and shiny. She rapped them on the Formica.

“Did you say ‘shit'?”

“Salt,” Chick said, nodding. He started smiling at her and then at me. He handed her the mug.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Try it.”

She looked at the mug warily.

“It's okay. I'll just get you a new one.”

“No, no, no,” Chick said quickly, taking the mug back. “I love salt.”

He brought the mug to his lips and took a big sip, but he was already laughing and the coffee sprayed out across the table.

The waitress started to smile. She couldn't figure this dude out.

“Do I know you?” she asked, an easy switch from sullen to coquettish.

Chickie smiled back at her and extended his hand.

“You do now,” he said.

“So what's your plan?” I asked after we'd finished eating. We were walking up toward Asgard, to see if we could catch Unsie before the weekend got too busy. “You can't stay at the Horse Head. Especially without a car.”

The wind bit. Friday's fog was behind us, and temps were back in the 20s. Low for this time of year, but not by much. I ducked my chin into my collar. Chick didn't seem to notice. The morning was bright but faint, with a cloudbank on the southern horizon. People said if you don't like the weather in the Berkshires, wait five minutes.

“My plan?” Chick asked, looking sideways at me. He shrugged.

“Are you, like, thinking about staying here permanently then?”

He shrugged again, all shrugs these days. He started to say something. Stopped.

Asgard was closed. A sign on the door said it opened at ten on Saturdays. We still had half an hour, so we kept walking, past the Heirloom, also closed, up toward the library.

“I saw Ginny Archey in there,” I said, hooking a thumb back toward the bar. “She said to bring you by.”

Chick made a small move with one corner of his mouth and said nothing. We kept walking until we got to the library and ducked out of the wind.

“So,” I said. “Permanently?”

“Dude,” Chick said, quietly. “Can't we just enjoy each other's company?”

He still wasn't looking at me, but “Dude” was the functional opposite of “Guy.”

“Well, all right, dude,” I said, throwing it back at him. “Maybe I should just be heading out then?”

Chick huffed like a teenager for a second, then put his hands out and closed his eyes.

“No, you're right. I'm sorry. It's just . . . I don't know. I don't have a plan. So, like, I sort of wish you'd stop asking.”

He suddenly looked exhausted. His hands dropped and his head seemed too heavy for his neck.

I looked around the library foyer, trying to figure out what to say next, trying to muster the emotional wherewithal for this sort of triage. Part of me, a rational part, a smart part, wanted to just light out of there, go back to Boston, get some mass-produced coffee and either sit on a couch and watch the Celts or go out in the Back Bay and hit on an accountant. But of course I couldn't do that, because that day when Bill Trivette caught us goofing around in the bell tower, he sent me home and kept Chickie behind.

There was a rack of brochures by the door and a bulletin board on the foyer's back wall. I focused on the board to have something to do. There were a surprising number of events coming up. Story time. Knitting circle. Gable Reads Together. Good stuff. Community stuff. I drew strength from it. To consolidate that strength, I tore a tab off the fringe of the knitting circle flier. It was the first one to go.

“Okay,” I said, feeling stronger already. “How can I help?”

Chick peeked at me from the underside of his own head.

“Well,” he said, then paused. “No. Forget it.”

I looked at him. Crossed my arms.

He waited a respectful amount of time, then raised his head. “I guess I do have one plan. The rhino. At Fleur-de-Lys, remember?”

I did. There was only one.

Chick reached over to the rack of brochures and pulled out a glossy pamphlet for Head-Connect, the same one he'd left for me at KMC.

“The horn,” he said, tapping the pamphlet in his hand. “It's there.”

True to her word, Florence Banish, whose mother had been a chambermaid and, briefly, a midwife at Fleur-de-Lys in the early 1900s, was in fact the definitive resource on Van Nest palace intrigue. Among the many rumors circling lonely Guy Van Nest in those fitful first years of his post-adolescence, the one about his sexuality seemed to bother him most. His house staff reported that his most frequent summer visitors were young men, like himself, from the counties around Manhattan, and that he was more interested in lawn tennis than debauchery. That, to Florence Banish, was a thin reed on which to hang a conclusion. I didn't have a strong opinion about it. But I mean, shit, the poor kid grew up with everyone calling him “young Master Guy,” with a dad who wasn't around, and then dead, and with a mom who would have rather been somewhere else. I'd be desperate for a little lawn tennis with my friends too. But apparently, Guy took the rumors to heart.

The rhino, a white double-horned brute originally from the savannahs of Zimbabwe, had roamed the rolling acres of Fleur-de-Lys all summer long with its circus cohort, eating the grains and grass and marigolds, rolling in creek beds, sleeping with its siblings in a roomy stable after Guy had the horses sent off. During performances for the Van Nest entourage, the ringmaster, a thin Hungarian named Asko Hoge, coaxed the great beast into charging at a brace of hay bales stacked in a pyramid, sometimes, for extra effect, setting the top bale on fire first. The young rhino's larger lower horn, nearly 3 feet of curved keratin, would dip and sway, and the beast would emit a deep bellow, and then it would be off, its speed always a surprise to the spectators, five thousand pounds of muscle crashing into the hay, which would tumble and flare and bounce, and the crowd would cheer, and the rhino, spooked, would rush off to hide in the stables, later to be coaxed out by the zebras and rewarded with a bucket of warm apples and a scrub bath. The lions would roar and the twin elephants would perform a cloying trunk-to-tail dance, but for Guy, the rhino, with its mighty horn, was where it was at. He briefly entertained the idea of putting a saddle on it.

The rhino was also ill, or cursed, or otherwise problematic, which is probably why Asko Hoge agreed to leave it at Fleur-de-Lys when Guy Van Nest offered him a ridiculous amount of money for it at the summer's end. Guy, of course, didn't know or care that the rhino was ill or cursed or otherwise problematic. Rather, Guy, whose own childhood had impressed upon him the importance of having children before you were too old to be bored of them, had decided that he wanted an heir, that an heir would put certain pesky rumors to rest, and that the great white rhino somewhere outside his back veranda would provide him with both the spark and the symbol of virility he would need to woo and then impregnate one of his female visitors, about whom he was otherwise ambivalent.

And so it was that the rhino stayed behind when the circus left for Albany on Labor Day 1914. As local extravagances went, it wasn't even that over the top. Florence Banish's mother told her of rare birds at Naumkeag, swans in the ponds and flamingoes in the swamp. Idlewylde had an incendiary carousel. And there were rumors that at Elm Court the house staff was bioengineered to be mute. Guy fenced in 13 acres of rolling fields and woodlands toward the back of his property and, late at night, would come and stand at the edge of the stables, listening to the beast grunt and dream. And something must have worked too, because soon there was a wedding both lavish and perfunctory, and a young woman from a Scarsdale trading family took up residence in the east bedroom of the main house. Florence Banish's mother was promoted to midwife. For a time that autumn, Fleur-de-Lys had a hum to it that transcended the hollow frivolity and general end-of-the-world-ness of society America on the cusp of a distant war. Guy himself, then just twenty-five years old, was seen to be walking taller, a more serious figure, his hair oiled and slick, his gaze quicker.

“I have a memory of him coming up the drive in his fancy car,” said Florence Banish, who had been four in 1914. “Just a whirl of finery, everyone moving.”

Alas, the pregnancy did not take, and the girl from Scarsdale went back to Scarsdale, and winter pushed fall aside earlier than usual at Fleur-de-Lys. The white rhino stopped visiting the back meadows and stayed closer to its stables, snorting and chirping and pawing at the same parcels of muddy lawn. The dogs, no longer afraid, nipped at its tail. Guy left for the city for nearly all of November, and in his absence the stable-hands, who in their defense were horsemen and cow-milkers by training and somewhat terrified of exotic animals, gave the rhino a wide berth. The warm apples and scrub baths ended.

By the time Guy returned, around Thanksgiving, the rhino was despondent. It rubbed itself raw against the walls of its stall, stabbed its huge horn into the trunks of elms, ate little. It keened in grunts throughout the night. Guy tried to contact Asko Hoge, but of course the Hungarian was long gone, miles past Albany, never to return. Forsyth would have seen that one coming.

Guy took to his chambers.

One December morning, as the house staff of Fleur-de-Lys readied the breakfast and the grounds crew swept the first snow of the year off the pea-stoned walkways, a great crash echoed from the ground-floor ballroom. Florence Banish's mother had been one of the first to reach the room, and to have seen the great white rhino twirling and stomping at its center, a wooden window frame impaled on its horn, blood on its muzzle, a jagged hole where just the day before French doors had led to the back patio, and to the lawn, and then down to the stables.

Florence Banish's mother was herself relatively unflappable, and had in fact once coolly stuck a gardening fork into the meaty palm of an opportunistic handyman—rather less handy after that—but when the beast turned and looked at her, its eyes cloudy and mad, she screamed and took off running back down the hallway toward the front of the house. She didn't need to look back to know that the rhino was charging after her, nor did she need to warn the other household staff, who were already hiding themselves in closets. When Florence Banish's mother reached the landing of the curling stairway that led to the second floor bedrooms, she took them two at a time and, about halfway up, caught her toe on her skirt and went down hard, splitting her lip on the marble steps. Nine stairs below, the rhino came into the main foyer and snorted. Florence Banish's mother looked at it. It didn't seem to see her, focusing on ground-level nuisances like a marble bust of Cleopatra and an urn purportedly from the Greek island of Naxos, both quickly destroyed. The rhino whirled about the foyer, bludgeoning the walls. Portraits fell, windows shattered, and it occurred to Florence Banish's mother that there would shortly be nothing left for the rhino to smash except her. But then Florence Banish's mother heard a click and looked up to see Guy Van Nest at the top of the stairs, his hair askew, his pajamas wrinkled, and a rifle in his hands.