chapter 12
As Henry climbed the narrow back staircase of Charlotte's house on the last Friday in June, and set his bag down in the room where he had spent his boyhood summers, he realized his mistake: here nothing changed. Not the ancient lumpy mattress, not the frayed satin lampshade, not the linen square on the water-stained bedside table. At the inn in town, where Betsy had always insisted they stay during their annual visit, out there in the light of day, at a restaurant or coffee shop, his sister's predicament could be broken down, its components approached diplomatically, each of them discussed and resolved. But here? Here, Charlotte's circularities drew energy from the very decrepitude of the place. The house was her argument, its density of association imperative to preserve. It may have belonged to others once, to his ancestors or his parents, but it was all hers now, the physical form her opinion of the world had come to take. How could he ever change her mind while living inside of it like this?
Indeed, the initial signs were not positive. The entire first afternoon, during which he'd thought they might take a walk and ease into things, Charlotte spent conducting some half-cocked tutoring session with a sunken-eyed youth, who listened in rapt attention to a lecture that jumped from William Jennings Bryan and the gold crisis to Father Coughlin and the paranoid style in American politics. Sitting in the front room trying to keep up with the day's blizzard of e-mail, Henry marveled that a woman who'd retained this much history could nonetheless be so far gone when it came to ordering her own life.
"I didn't know you were still taking students," he said once the boy had left.
"I imagine," she said, "that he doesn't have many books in his own house. It's so easy to assume people do. But then many don't. And he's lively. I thought he was one of the usual dullards at first. But he's got promise. The world - the actual state of things - it's broken in on him. Which is moving. You have no idea what it was like at the school toward the end. How the content remained the same while the meaning of the exercise changed so entirely. From enlightenment to the grooming of pets."
Here was his sister's familiar recipe: well-meaning condescension leavened by faith in meritocracy and finished off with a dose of liberal apocalypse. She was the classic mid-century Democratic idealist, who'd lived long enough to see hope's repeated death. Raised on Adlai Stevenson, Richard Hofstadter, and redemption through rigor. It would have been easier for Henry if he hadn't agreed with her about so much. If their father hadn't stamped them at such an early age with a patriotism for process and an aesthetic revulsion at display of whatever kind.
Also, if he hadn't loved her. Ineluctably. Love tinged by an envy he'd never understood.
Practicality had been their dividing line. By choice or circumstance or fate - the lines between these seemed less discreet to him the older he got - he had been the practical one, devoted to practical functions. Not a judge of acts, not even a creator of much, but a watchman, guarding the largely unseen. She had read, studied, and taught, loved a doomed man once, and through all of it somehow retained the energy for a more or less permanent outrage at the failure of the shabby world to live up to its stated principles. She followed politics assiduously, rejecting all the while its premise of compromise. If she hadn't been so well versed in the checkered moral record of most actual martyrs, she might have allowed herself to become one, finding her single cause. As it was, she'd served and done battle with the school of a wealthy town, and apparently considered much of her effort wasted.
Henry's plan had been to evaluate the gravity of the situation for the first day or two, allaying his sister's usual fear that he'd jumped to conclusions, and then raise the subject of her moving on Saturday evening, think it through with her on Sunday, and, if all went well, perhaps even look at a few places early in the week, before the Fourth of July party at the Hollands'.
Instead, at breakfast on Saturday - which consisted of Orangina and stale bread - she blindsided him with the news that she had sued the town without the aid of a lawyer, claiming that Finden had violated their grandfather's bequest of the land.
Slipping into the backyard, Henry phoned Cott Jr. to find out what in hell was going on. The man's father had been the lawyer for the small Graves family foundation that gave to local causes, and he had inherited the job.
"I assumed you knew," Cott Jr. said. "Norberton over at the hall told me she'd filed pro se. Quite a piece of rhetoric apparently. But she managed to use a few of the necessary phrases so they couldn't toss it out."
"Why wasn't I told of this?"
"By whom?"
"By you."
"Ah," he said. "I'm guessing she never mentioned firing me. The truth is, Henry, the Graves Society hasn't been a client of mine for three or four years at least. We'd always sent the check over to the Audubon but Charlotte got into some kind of policy dispute with them - beaver habitats I think it was. In any case, she instructed me to cancel the donation. I reminded her that she had to give away five percent a year to someone. And that's when she removed my name from the checking account. She hasn't spoken to me since."
Thus was Saturday morning lost to a rear-guard action of intelligence gathering. Charlotte would hear nothing of withdrawing the suit and couldn't understand why he would want to. The hearing before the judge was scheduled for Monday and she would be delighted, she said, for him to join her.
"I know these sorts of legal matters have always been your end of things. But there's no reason to let that upset you. It's all well in hand."
After a lunch of cottage cheese and grapes, Henry's phone started lighting up and soon enough he'd been dragged into a conference call with his senior staff and someone over at the State Department, who had been getting reports all morning of a possible coup in Uzbekistan. Sitting at the kitchen table, watching his sister prepare a saute of sirloin and carrots for the dogs, he listened to his deputy describe getting a call an hour earlier from the Uzbek foreign minister, who had phoned the New York Fed to request that ninety percent of his country's sovereign asset deposits be wired to a bank in Tashkent. The problems being that (1) no one was quite sure which side of the coup the foreign minster was on; (2) the Uzbek president was proving somewhat hard to reach; and (3) the State Department, unable to determine if this was an Islamist revolution or a pro-Western military putsch, hadn't decided yet whether to stand by the current dictator or throw him overboard. Eighty million dollars was an unremarkable sum for a foreign-country transfer but enough to fund a small civil war and thus endanger U.S. basing rights, necessary for the resupply of forces in Afghanistan. During a pause in the proceedings, Henry's chief counsel, Phillip Bretts, noted drolly that the man at State had been appointed only last week to the Central Asian Desk from a job at the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.
"Any chance of getting a bit of that meat?" Henry whispered, holding his hand over the phone just as Charlotte emptied the frying pan into the dogs' stainless-steel bowls.
"It's Sam who insists on the finer grade," she observed. "Wilkie was perfectly happy with the ground chuck."
By the end of the call, Henry was ready for a drink.
He took his Bloody Mary out onto the back terrace and tried to ignore the weeds coming up through the mortar of the brick. Despite his anger at Charlotte's loony behavior, he had to confess that he hadn't seen her so animated in years. Perhaps even since they were kids, now that he thought about it. Back when she'd been queen of the realm in which he'd been so happily captive. In Rye, he used to trail her for hours from the playroom into the yard and back upstairs to the inner sanctum of her bedroom, where he'd been allowed only on her capricious wish, the air there shaded in the afternoons by the giant copper beech. Even now, he could remember how the sun used to play over her dresser and the rich, red carpet and the bed where she lay reading or writing in her diary. He doubted he and Betsy had ever created a paradise such as that for their daughter, Linda. Perhaps because she was an only child. Or maybe it was just that Henry, as an adult banished from the kingdom of mystery, could never fully credit its existence for his daughter, and could only fake a belief in it for her sake in the hope that somehow, on the far side of that impenetrable divide, the garden was still damp and lush and time had yet to be invented. Impenetrable except perhaps in the most fleeting moments, together with the person you'd adventured with there once.
What was a brother supposed to do? Charlotte was happy for the moment because her outrage had found a target closer to home than the halls of Congress and she'd managed to convince herself that she had a chance to win. But none of that changed the obvious: she was barely feeding herself; the house was more of a ruin than ever; and however you wanted to describe them, her relations with the dogs had gone beyond mere eccentricity.
Sunday he drove into town to buy proper sandwiches for lunch and insisted they go out for dinner. At the restaurant he tried to make up for lost time, keeping gently at her, drawing the conversation around to the difficulties of maintaining the house on her own.
"If it would make you feel better," she said, "you're welcome to hire me a cleaning lady. Though she'd only be allowed in the kitchen."
"That's not what I mean."
"Of course it isn't. You don't mean anything you're saying. You want to ship me off somewhere so the idea of me here doesn't weigh on you. It's not like you can hide that, Henry. From your own sister. But even if I were inclined to go, which I'm not, now is the last time I'd budge. Here on the verge. I mean, just look at what's going on. Take a step back for a moment, and look at what's going on in this country, and I don't mean just the criminals at the top - they'll do their damage and stumble out eventually - I mean the last thirty years. And then tell me if you can honestly say that the intrusion of that house, the cutting down of those woods, whoever they might have belonged to once, doesn't stand for something, for a rot more pervasive. And then tell me I'm wrong to want to take a stand. You can't. Not without betraying language, and I think you're better than that. I know you are. Because that really would be the end. To accede to that. To the notion that words mean nothing anymore. That they're pure tactics. You don't believe that."
And on she went, speechifying, close, he had to admit, to the height of her powers.
Letting go his mission for a while, he ordered another drink and let himself enjoy her company. Most of his colleagues didn't read much other than the Journal. Betsy had kept up with things, novels and films and biographies, but they agreed with each other about so much that at a certain point they'd stopped discussing it all. The fierceness of his sister's opinions had never dimmed. It was the spirit of their father in her, the old man's crusading energy, difficult at times for their mother to bear, but so obviously the thing she'd fallen in love with.
When the young couple at the adjacent table began arguing about their renovation, the husband insisting they fire the architect, whom the wife described as not only visionary but, in case he hadn't read a magazine or newspaper in the last year, "quite f*cking important," Charlotte granted Henry a conspiratorial smile, gathering him into her fold, an invitation that in the moment he couldn't help accepting with a roll of the eyes. Who was he kidding? His new neighbors in Rye were absolute pills. Their children were deplorable in the manner of over-bred dogs. The fellow being in banking, he had asked Henry over for a drink. Their house had struck him as the cross between a playpen and a corporate retreat center. But what could you do about it?
When the waiter asked if he'd like a third glass of wine, he said yes.
Back at the house, Charlotte made tea and they sat at the kitchen table. The table where their father had liked nothing better than to set out broken gadgets on a Saturday morning, a radio or toaster or lamp that had given up over the winter, and opening his tool kit begin to fiddle. Recalling such mornings, Henry, a bit drunk, felt a bone-tiredness, the kind he couldn't afford to let in too often, not in a job where the travel never stopped. It was the sort of tiredness a mind allows a body only when it knows it's home.
"So, did you manage the coup all right?" Charlotte said. "Is everyone's money safe?"
"It'll work out in the end. A few days of caution won't hurt anyone."
"Such an anonymous sort of power you wield. So far from the madding crowd. It's always intrigued me. Thinking about the people affected by what you do. The fact that they'll never know you. Sure, Daddy tried cases, but he met his defendants. There was a scale to the thing. It's not a criticism. It's just I wonder sometimes what it does to you. What it's already done to you. The abstraction. Lives as numbers. We all do it, of course. We do it reading the paper. What does ten thousand dead in an earthquake mean? Nothing. It can't. The knowledge just breeds impotence. But your abstractions, your interest rates, they change people's lives. And they'll never know who you are."
"When things get bad enough, they tend to find out."
"That's not my point. I'm talking about you, Henry. I'm sure there are plenty who simply enjoy your kind of influence, the ambitious. The ones whose power makes them furious. And there are the crypto-sadists, such an underestimated lot. But you're neither of those, however much of a fellow traveler you may have been over the years. And yet there it is - your system and other people's pain."
"It's not all pain," he said. "Money allows things."
"Of course. It's just a matter of to whom. But, then, that's not your area, is it? That's someone else's set of choices."
Sauntering drowsily in from the living room, the Doberman rested his head in Charlotte's lap, and Henry watched his sister pat him gently on the head.
"You know it's funny," she said. "All weekend, I've tried to convince Wilkie here that you're a good sport but he won't believe me, will you Wilkie? He's convinced you're a member of the Klan."
HENRY SLEPT rather poorly that night, waking more than once to what sounded like growling. The Klan? He could just see the expression on the face of the director of an assisted-living facility when Charlotte dropped a comment such as that into an interview. He got a few solid hours toward morning before his sister woke him, warning that they'd be late to court.
"We can't take them with us," he said, standing bleary-eyed by the rental car, as she came down the walk with Sam and Wilkie.
"Why not?"
"It's a government facility, not a kennel."
"Don't be silly. The bailiff's an old student of mine."
The county courthouse was a Greek Revival affair whose sandstone had gone gray with soot. The main hallway, adorned with portraits of deceased superior court judges, was already bustling at eight thirty: an officer showing a line of jurors into a waiting room, lawyers hunched with clients, explaining to bewildered family members the nature of their loved one's predicament, while on the benches nearby policemen killed time before being called to the stand.
Lo and behold, when they reached the courtroom door, a balding guard in his forties lit right up with a smile.
"Miss Graves," he said. "How ya been? I saw the name on the sheet and I wondered if it was you."
"I've been very well, thank you."
"I saw that business in the paper a few years back about the school and all. That was no good the way they let you go." He reached out to shake Henry's hand. "Best teacher I ever had," he said, his voice filled with wonder at the discovery of his own nostalgia.
"How kind of you to say. Now, Anthony, I was wondering. There is just a small favor I was going to ask. My dogs. I was hoping they could come along. Into the courtroom with us."
"Oh, geez," he said, clicking his tongue. "The judge. I don't know if he's going to like that. It's against rules." He considered Wilkie and Sam for a moment. "They wouldn't happen to be medical dogs, would they? To help you get around, I mean."
"Well ... yes, now that you mention it, they do help. A great deal."
"Charlotte," Henry whispered, only to receive an elbow in the flank.
"I'll tell you what, Miss Graves. You bring them in here, and I'll just settle them down in the back row, where no one can see them. How's that?"
"Wonderful. I knew I could rely on you."
She and Henry took seats in the third row of the courtroom and stood when, a few minutes later, Anthony called out, "All rise, the Honorable George M. Cushman presiding."
"You weren't expecting that, now were you?" Charlotte whispered.
"Expecting what?"
"You remember the Cushmans. Mommy and Daddy used to have drinks with them all the time. That's their son, George. He would come to the lake with us. Don't you remember? Chubby George."
"Oh, for Christ's sake. This is ridiculous. You're going to embarrass us."
"My God," she said, glancing over her shoulder. "Will you look at that? He's here, the bastard. With some slickster lawyer. Just look at those pinstripes. They're an inch apart."
Turning to look, Henry saw a man in his late thirties with tightly shorn black hair and a rather barren expression. He had that over-groomed look to him that many of the younger bankers did these days, giving them, at times, an almost feminine appearance, despite all their hours in the gymnasium. Not so his companion - a pug of a man whose pinstripe was indeed immoderately wide. He chewed gum and thumbed impatiently at the wheel of his BlackBerry.
"What business does he have here? I'm not suing him."
"Gee, I don't know," Henry said. "You're only trying to take the man's house. He's an interested party. He's allowed to intervene."
Before Charlotte's case was finally called, they had to sit through two DUIs and a dispute between the country club and one of its junior members over a malfunctioning golf cart, reminding Henry that only the luckless, the petty, or the deranged wound up in court.
REVIEWING HIS DOCKET in chambers earlier that morning, George Cushman had a thought similar to Henry's upon noticing that he would have to conduct the hearing on the Graves matter that day. The prospect saddened him. Though they were hardly friends, he'd known Charlotte Graves for the better part of his life and said hello to her whenever they met in town. What was more, as a member of the board of the Historical Association, he would have liked nothing better than to rule in her favor. He found houses like the one that had been thrown up on that land almost as offensive as she did. No one denied that Willard Graves had given the property to Finden for preservation or that he had specified in the bequest that should the town sell or develop it, it would revert to the estate. But the rule against perpetuities as it related to conditions broken was clear enough in this state: after thirty years the right to repossess the land was no longer valid. That term having long since expired, the town maintained, quite correctly, that its title was now absolute; it could do with the acreage as it pleased. As he would with any pro se plaintiff, Judge Cushman had done his best to tease from the mass of verbiage in Charlotte's petition some colorable argument. But when, after six pages of single-spaced invective, she'd begun a history of her family's donations to local charities, he'd given up the effort. He would give her her day in court and soften the blow by delaying his dismissal of her complaint by a few weeks.
Straight out of the gate, however, the problems began. When Charlotte stood from behind the plaintiff's table she said, "Good morning, George. I did just want to say, I am so glad it's you."
Incredulous, the town attorney rose to object but Cushman stayed him before he could speak. The lawyer for the intervener, Fanning, however, would not be held back.
"May I approach, Your Honor?"
"No, Counselor, you may not. You will be pleased to sit down. Now, Ms. Graves," he said, "litigants must address this court as either 'Your Honor' or 'the court.' Is that clear?"
"Of course, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean any offense. Your Honor."
"All right, then," he said. "Is there anything you'd like to say in addition to your submissions in this case?"
"Oh, yes, there is. You see, after I sent you the letter I found this book in the library that had what they called model pleadings, and right away I realized that I may have somewhat obscured my central contention. The way I wrote it out, I mean. This business of the thirty years. I understand that. Why we have to quiet the wishes of the dead like that I'm not so sure, but there we are. I'll leave that for another day. But what I'm saying is slightly different. Would you mind if I read a quote?"
"Go right ahead," Cushman said, leaning back in his chair.
"This is from a book I came across by a Professor Duckington. He writes, 'While, in its infinite wisdom, the legislature has seen fit to extinguish the rights of individuals in possession of contingent remainders in real property, presumably in the interest of dusting titles clean of those cobwebs of the common law that were seen as an encumbrance to an efficient and reliable system of sale and purchase, the people's representatives were sufficiently mindful of their own prerogatives, along with those of churches and charitable corporations, as to exclude themselves and the latter from the consequences of their good judgment.'"
She closed the book, returned it to the table, and smiled proudly.
"Heaven help the man's students," Cushman said, "but it sounds accurate enough. The rule applies to individuals. But the distinction's not relevant in this case."
"Oh, but it is, George," she said. "You see, my grandfather - he was a charity."
"Come again."
"Willard Graves, before he died, he turned himself into a charity: the Graves Society. We've been puttering along ever since. My point is, if you look at the records, he didn't give the land to Finden. The society did. So you see, the thirty-year rule - it doesn't apply here. The conditions in the bequest are still good. Which means the land no longer belongs to Finden or to Mr. Fanning. It belongs to our family's trust. In fact, it has ever since the town sold it. The documents are all here in my file. I believe all I need from the court is the title. And then we'll be done."
For the following ten seconds no one in the courtroom uttered a word. In fact, they barely moved. Like guests at a funeral who have just witnessed the lid of the coffin come open and the corpse sit up to greet them with a smile, they stared at Charlotte in awe.
Then the shouting began.
Mikey nearly fell over the front end of the jury box, where he and Doug had been instructed to sit, as he leapt up to yell, "Approach! Approach!," taking on, in panicked violation of courtroom decorum, the voice of the judge himself, whose rejoinder was hardly audible over the fuming objections of the town lawyer, who didn't even bother addressing himself to the bench, hurling his words directly at Charlotte. By the time Judge Cushman got a hold of his gavel and began slamming it, Wilkie and Sam had scampered into the aisle and begun barking up a racket, causing everyone but an appalled Henry to turn in still greater astonishment to the sight of two drooling hounds bolting toward the front of the courtroom.
"Bailiff!" Cushman cried, standing to pound his gavel. "Bailiff!"
Order wasn't restored for another ten minutes, as the dogs were dragged snarling from the room and the lawyers, ignoring local rules, jumped onto their cell phones to offices and aides in a desperate effort to fill in the suddenly gaping void in their understanding of a case for which they had barely bothered to prepare. After denying repeated motions for a continuance, Judge Cushman declared a recess and returned to his chambers with Charlotte's file.
By the time he'd finished examining the documents, he'd been reminded that there were, after all, a few unique pleasures to his occupation. He could of course give the town time to regroup. But they had no good argument for why they deserved such a reprieve. The evidence Charlotte was relying on had been stored in their own basement. And as to the legal argument, she was perfectly correct. The donation of the land had come from a charity. The rule didn't apply. He needn't reach the question of whether the town had been willful or merely negligent in its sale. Either way, they lost.
Back on the bench, he listened with serenity to the attorneys' pleas, objections, and even their threats of appeal and motions for recusal. When at last they had exhausted themselves, he thanked them for their advice, and then, allowing himself just this once a flash of that declamatory rhetoric that as a law student he'd dreamt of dispensing but never quite found an opportunity to employ amidst the grayness of actual litigation, he began, "As the great British prime minister William Gladstone once put it, 'Justice delayed is justice denied.'" Announcing his finding that the papers presented left no room for doubt about Charlotte's claim, he continued, "The court is certainly sympathetic to the plight the purchaser now finds himself in, having built a house on land it turns out that he does not own. But the right of reentry is an ancient one, predating our own Constitution. I cannot set it aside merely because it presents an inconvenience. However, now that the subject of ownership has been settled in favor of the Graves Society, my hope is the parties can arrive at a negotiated settlement. With this in mind, I suspend for sixty days the order I hereby enter granting plaintiff's family trust title in the land."
Looking down over his glasses at the once-again silenced courtroom, he asked, "Is there anything further in this matter?"