chapter 5
Finden High, a brick pile with arched windows and a squat clock tower, had been erected in 1937 as part of a public works project. Like many such buildings, its bluntness was only partially offset by its few art-deco flourishes, such as the stainless steel that framed the front doors and the zigzag lines carved beneath the modernist clockface. To the grim utility of a factory, its designers had added just a whiff of style. It stood across Wentworth Street from an expanse of playing fields that extended all the way to the river. Not far from the varsity soccer pitch was the spot, commemorated with a plaque and a bench, where the Town Historical Society had decided that the first white families had alighted from their riverboats after traveling the short distance from Boston late in the 1630s. According to records, these settlers had wanted to name the then sparsely populated Algonquin hunting ground "Contentment," but taking a more practical view the Massachusetts General Court had overridden their decision, imposing upon them instead the solid English name of Finden, considered a better fit with the recently established towns of Roxbury, Gloucester, and the like.
As the students were told each fall in the assembly on local history, which served as a pep talk-cum-guilt trip, one of the settlers' first acts was the founding of a public school, which the community had maintained throughout its uneventful history of development from a trading post to a farming town to a twentieth-century suburb. Lately, the assembly had featured more on the Native American contributions to local custom but it still concluded with the principal sounding a note of pride about the percentage of seniors going on to four-year colleges, a fact the students were somehow meant to connect through the mists of time to that centuries-old journey down the river by the pious and the brave.
That spring of 2002, however, one particular student, Nate Fuller, was in danger of depressing this statistic. He had failed to fill out his applications to colleges back in the fall and failed again in the spring to apply to those with rolling admissions. His guidance counselor had called him in several times, requesting updates on his progress but he had none to report. Nor did he have a plan of how he might spend a year off to better his chances of getting in the following autumn. His teachers described him as adrift.
Most days this milky-skinned seventeen-year-old could be seen walking the halls dressed in frayed chinos and a blue hoodie, his brown hair grown over his ears and his eyes puffy with sleep. His father had died back in September, and he had been out of school for three weeks. He'd never caught up on the work he'd missed, let alone visited college campuses or written essays on his motivation to learn. Nonetheless, despite his general air of fatigue, he still possessed the changeable quality of the young, his affect shifting quickly from moroseness to affability and back. And though he cared little for his classes, he'd recently promised his mother to meet with the tutor that his American history teacher said he needed if he hoped to pass the AP exam.
On a cloudy day in the middle of April, after his latest dud of an appointment with the guidance counselor, he headed out the back of the school building and through the courtyard onto Pratt Road, where the yards were still wet with the morning's rain. Friday afternoons were usually the sweetest time of the week, replete with the promise of escape, but today he had the chore of meeting the tutor. He could blow the appointment off if he wanted and simply tell his mother he'd gone. But such deception would require its own energy and the visit would only take an hour.
Between his mother's new job at the library and his effort to be out of the house in the evenings, he and his mother didn't see much of each other these days. During the meals they did share, Nate didn't begrudge his mother her remoteness: how she didn't seem to hear what he said, how she responded in non sequiturs - bits of news about old friends or relatives, or recollections of trips they had once taken. Time together was tolerable that way. The two of them absent like that.
The difficulty arose when, on occasion, she would come to him with some fact in hand - a grade or health form - something she felt the sudden, fitful need to measure up to as a parent. Then they couldn't avoid each other, and all her straining in the last year to keep their lives together, to keep them in the house and to pay the bills, would pour into her panicked voice and no matter how small the subject she'd raised it would seem suddenly to be a matter of life and death. That was when he couldn't bear it and would agree to whatever she asked so they could both turn away again.
A year ago his father had been flying high, pulling Nate out of school in the middle of the day to eat lunch at the Four Seasons or driving him in an old Rolls-Royce out to the tip of Cape Cod late on a weekday night to watch the reflection of the moon on the dark waters of the Atlantic. Knowing that his mother was sitting at home stricken with worry about where they might be made it hard for Nate to simply enjoy such moments, however much his father did. He had lost his last consulting job a year and a half earlier and Nate knew they were running out of money. The rush of ideas about the next business he planned to start came at Nate so hard the words took on physical force, like a wind blowing fine shards of glass. The descriptions of projects and investors, elaborated down to the last digit and address, were painful in their detail.
This relentless drive of his had lasted six months. Then, in the middle of June, his father had come home and gone to bed, where he had stayed for most of the summer, making only occasional forays into the garage or basement to escape the heat. He ate little and barely spoke, while Nate's mother did her best to make it appear as if all were as usual.
Eventually, regaining energy, he'd begun to leave the house again, taking long walks on the trails over by the Audubon. He would depart before dawn and return around lunchtime. When he didn't come back one afternoon, Nate's mother called him at the supermarket where he worked after school and asked if he would go looking for him.
A quarter of a mile into the woods, Nate had come to the aqueduct that spanned the marsh, its concrete surface spotted with graffiti left by the kids who drank there on weekends. He and his father had crossed this bridge together countless times before, just meandering on a weekend afternoon, scouting out parts of the river they might row down if they had a boat. Until recently, Nate had thought nothing of their idyll of a companionship; it had simply always been there.
He crossed the bridge and continued along the path that followed the ridgeline into the forest. The Audubon preserve was a mile or so farther along, accessed from a road on the far side. Not many people walked up through this area so he wasn't surprised not to meet anyone on the trail. But he only went so far. He didn't walk all the way to the far end of the path that led down to the water's edge; and he didn't explore under the arches of the bridge on his way back or search up along the riverbank as he could have, as he might have. Rather, he stood at the aqueduct's black, wrought-iron railing looking out over the turning leaves, wishing his father wouldn't keep making his mother worry so.
The next morning, the police sergeant said only, "Up by the aqueduct," when Nate's mother asked where his father had hanged himself. The officer didn't mention when his father had done it. And so Nate had no idea if he'd still been alive as he'd searched for him, too self-conscious to even call to him aloud.
About the months that had followed, Nate didn't remember much. Luckily, his closest friends treated him with kid gloves for only a week or two before starting to give him the same shit they always did, returning his life to at least a semblance of what it had been.
He thought of them now, Emily and Jason and Hal, tempted once more to ditch this tutoring nonsense and call them to see if they'd started hanging out yet.
As he walked farther toward Winthrop Street, the houses grew sparser, this being the oldest, wealthiest part of town, made up mostly of estates.
Charlotte Graves, 34 Winthrop, along with a phone number. That's all Ms. Cartwright had written on the note card. When he had called the woman to set up the appointment, she had been curt to the point of rudeness and offered no directions.
The mailbox bearing that number stood between two driveways, leaving it unclear which house it belonged to. The driveway to the left led down to a white-columned mansion stretched out along the river-bank, recent by the looks of it but built in a neoclassical style that invited you to forget the fact. Its thick cornices and stately windows and the perfect lawns that surrounded it were somehow resplendent even in the light of an overcast day. The other drive was a weedy track heading up to a barn and a shingled little box of a house, which looked as if it had been built centuries ago and not much cared for since.
A tutor of history, Nate thought. What were the odds?
He knew which his father would have picked. Which house he would have talked his way into, putting everyone at ease, charming them with his glittering words. For all Nate knew, his father already had. For all he knew, the mansion's owners were among those in Finden whom his father had convinced to lend him boats or vintage cars, a habit he'd got into during that last spring of adventure.
Slowly, he headed down the hill to the mansion, where he climbed the steps to press the brass bell. The first ring produced no response. Glancing through a window, he didn't see much of anything inside. He leaned over and, pressing his hand to the glass to block the reflection, saw that the entire front room was empty, not a stick of furniture in it. No rugs on the floor, nothing on the walls. On the other side of the door it was the same - a vast high-ceilinged room, a fireplace at one end, and nothing else but bare boards and plaster. One of the big new houses built on spec, he figured, waiting for an owner. He rang a second time, just in case.
Curious, he stepped along the front of the house and peered through another window into another bare room. The emptiness of the place intrigued him. All that finished space marked by nothing. Without content or association. A perfect blank.
But not quite, it seemed. Through the next window, he saw a flat-screen TV set up on a crate facing an old cloth couch. There were no chairs or tables here, no lights or fixtures, just the television and the couch and an empty beer bottle beside it. The real estate agent? he wondered; but then how could he or she show the place? It was an odd, slightly forlorn sight.
Giving up, he headed back across the circular drive, past a fountain with a cherub in the middle, and headed up the hillside to the neighboring house. This one looked as if it were sinking slowly into the earth. Hydrangeas had grown up to the lower panes of the downstairs windows and the peeling gutters overflowed with leaves. At one end, a drainpipe had broken off and leaned now against the side of the house. Up on the roof, the faded aluminum rods of an old television antenna had come loose from the chimney and tilted precariously toward the street.
There weren't many places like this left in Finden. Ever since Nate had been a kid, they'd been building new houses everywhere they could, dividing up lots, turning fields and woods into new developments, the traffic worse every year.
He wondered if Ms. Cartwright had given him the wrong address, if perhaps this place was uninhabited. In fact, he hoped that it would be. But as soon as he tapped on the back door, he heard barking and the scuffle of paws on linoleum. From somewhere in the house a voice called out words he couldn't discern. And then he heard footsteps approaching. A harsh whisper followed.
"Don't be silly," the voice said. "Since when does the devil knock?"
Then, more loudly, "Who is it?"
"It's Nate Fuller. Are you Charlotte Graves?"
The door came open just a crack, and the snouts of two dogs pressed into the gap, followed a moment later by the deeply lined face of a gray-haired woman.
"Of course I am," she said. "Who else would I be? Are you some sort of Mormon? They usually come in twos."
"No," he said, raising his voice to be heard over the barking. "I'm here for the tutoring. I called last week? We spoke on the phone?"
"Did we?"
She considered him for a moment and then reluctantly pushed the dogs' heads back into the house.
"Yes, I suppose we did," she said. "I guess you'll have to come in."
She pulled the door open and stood aside. As soon as Nate entered, the Doberman leapt up, planting his front paws on Nate's chest and pinning him to the wall. He bared his teeth and began barking. A big, slobbering mastiff stood behind him growling.
"Stop being so paranoid, Wilkie!" the woman yelled. "He's got nothing to do with Elijah Muhammad. Now just come away!" she scolded, swatting the dog's head with a dish towel. The attacker pressed against Nate for a moment longer, the whites of his eyes bright in the dark pointed head. Reluctantly, he stepped off, joining the other one, the two of them standing either side of their owner like henchmen guarding passage to the rest of the house.
The kitchen looked like a set from The Grapes of Wrath, the wooden countertops warped and stained, the sink streaked with rust, the claw-foot stove losing its white enamel. The refrigerator appeared to be the only modern appliance, and even it was a pretty busted piece of merchandise. Yet this wasn't poverty. That didn't describe it. It was something else. Something Nate couldn't place.
"Is this a bad time?" he asked, hopefully. "I could come back another day?"
"No," she said. "It's as good a time as any. I remember your call now. You're the one trying to make up for lost time."
"Yeah. AP history."
Something seemed to catch her eye on the red-and-white speckle of the linoleum floor; her hands came to rest in the stretched pockets of her cardigan. For a moment there was complete silence.
"I don't do this much anymore," she said in a reflective tone, as if the commotion with the dogs had never happened and she were alone in the room, making an observation aloud to herself. "Tutoring, I mean."
Nate didn't know what to say. It seemed a private moment. Already, despite her surliness, he feared she'd be disappointed if he left.
"Ms. Cartwright - she mentioned you used to teach at the high school?"
The woman nodded, emerging from her inward turn.
As he picked up his backpack and moved toward the center of the room, the Doberman began growling again.
"Would you like some water?" she asked. "Or perhaps an Orangina?"
"Water's fine."
She moved to the sink, filled a pewter tankard, and handed it to him. It looked like something a knight might drink from.
"Well," she said, "I suppose we ought to get started."
HE'D IMAGINED a few preliminary questions. About what they had covered in class and what he had missed. But there was none of that. She had been reading about the law of property recently, she said, and this led her to the subject of taxation.
Perched on the edge of the couch, she folded her hands on her lap and stared fixedly into the ashes of the fireplace. After a moment of silence, she coughed slightly and said, "It's customary for students to take notes."
"Right," he said, reaching into his bag for pen and paper, "sure."
"The Sixteenth Amendment is generally neglected," she began. "But not in this household."
With this she commenced an uninterrupted half hour on the adoption of the federal income tax, and the long road to the passage of this general levy on corporations and the wealthy, an idea championed by the Populists and the Socialists and the Democrats under Bryan, shot down by the Supreme Court, agitated for in one campaign after the next, until finally the Republican progressives took it up as the answer to deficits and the tariff mess. Taft, a president who'd failed even to register on Nate's syllabus, was savaged by Ms. Graves as a generally ponderous and ineffectual man.
"But it should not be forgot," she said, "that it was he, who in 1909, stood before Congress and proposed an amendment to the Constitution allowing the government to collect the money."
From an ancient wingback chair losing feathers through the frayed fabric of its cushion, Nate took in the remarkable state of the room. Every surface from the side tables to the mantelpiece and a good portion of the floor was covered in paper: journals, newspapers, magazines, manila folders overflowing with yellowed documents, the piles adorned with everything from coffee mugs to used plates to stray articles of clothing - red wool gloves, a knitted scarf. And everywhere he looked, books: hardbacks, paperbacks, reference volumes, ancient leather-bound spines with peeling gold lettering, atlases, books of art and photography, biographies, novels, histories, some splayed open, others shut over smaller volumes, the overstuffed bookcases themselves standing against the walls like sagging monuments to some bygone age of order, entirely insufficient now to contain this sea of printed matter.
"'An excise tax on the privilege of doing business as an artificial entity.' That's what Taft called the corporation tax." She quoted from a tome open on the coffee table in front of her. "It took another four years before enough states ratified the measure and a bill from Congress could be sent to Wilson. But there it was, the principle established: for the privilege of earning money in this, the people's system, you, the wealthy, will pay.
"Now," she said, warming to her point, "move forward half a century. It's 1964. The Republicans are in disarray, a party in the wilderness, without the White House, Congress, or the Court. The Civil Rights Act has just been passed. And along comes a man named Barry Goldwater. And he's got an idea: make government the enemy."
Almost as remarkable as the sheer quantity of stuff was how completely oblivious to it Ms. Graves appeared to be. She'd made no comment about the condition of the place as she'd led Nate in, letting him clear his own space to sit. It seemed that as far as she was concerned nothing was amiss. And yet, for all the mess she lived in and all her rambling, she didn't strike him as incoherent. In fact, Nate had never heard anyone speak with such conviction, except perhaps his father. Certainly none of his teachers. This was history, after all. And yet she spoke as if she were waging a rhetorical insurgency against the enemies of civilization.
"And look at us now," she continued. "Look at how ingeniously they have coded our politics. Using the same line of attack on our own sovereign authority to suit all their other ends. Of course, over time one begins to imagine connections between the darker forces. But then you say to yourself, No, Charlotte. You're dramatizing, you're giving in to conspiracy. You're satisfying some desire to moralize because, let's be honest, you're nothing but a stack of Eastern prejudices. But then you pick up this" - she scanned the books at her feet, spotted the one she wanted, and opened to an earmarked page - "and you think, well maybe so. But just listen to how they put it. Here's Lee Atwater - you've probably never heard of him - explaining how it worked. 'You start out,' he says, 'in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger!" By 1968 you can't say "nigger" - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now that you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is that blacks get hurt worse than whites.'
"That's what he says," she insisted, clapping the book shut. "And so then you think, I'm not mad. Not at all. Taxes are about race. Like everything else. As if sometime in the sixties the public square in our mind changed colors. From imaginary white to imaginary black. And we've been running from it ever since. As if anything you couldn't fence in or nail to your house were the equivalent of the public pool menaced by the dark and the poor. But the public pool's not in your backyard, you say. It's nowhere close. True. But it's in my country. Am I not allowed a patriotism of ideals? Is that what we've come to?"
She paused to breathe.
"You see, then, what I mean?" she asked.
"I guess so."
"Not that you would agree with any of this, would you?" she said, leaning down to address the mastiff. "He's become such a reactionary lately. Haven't you, Sam? All your religious blather. Do you have dogs?"
"No. We used to have a rabbit."
"Don't be ridiculous."
"Sorry, I - "
"No, no, I wasn't talking to you. Sam here's just a bigot. Thinks you're a Catholic. Rabbits you say. My grandfather was fond of shooting them. They'd pop up in the yard and he'd rest his gun on the sill right there and open fire. Drove my grandmother to distraction. You'd think they'd have come back in strength by now but I never see them. He, of course, was a mugwump. Have you covered the 1880s? Republican, of the very old stripe. Bolted the party in '84. Small-town lawyer, edited the Finden Gazette. Didn't like machine politics. Laissez-faire, of course, but it was another time. He railed against the trusts as much as the city bosses, and there he was prescient. You look at the World Trade Organization today and it's all rather familiar. The way those conglomerates are making up the rules so they can run roughshod over the locals. Nothing the railroads didn't do to the state legislatures," she concluded, examining a patch of the mastiff's back for ticks or lice.
"I'm afraid the bullies here need their walking," she said. "I'm sorry if I've run on a bit. But there's a lot to cover." She looked up at him then, meeting his eyes directly for the first time. "You will come back, won't you? Next week?"
These last many months the intuition of others' needs had become Nate's second nature, as if his father's going had cut him a pair of new, lidless eyes that couldn't help but see into a person such as this: marooned and specter-driven. What choice did he have?
___________
AS SOON AS he got out of the house, he phoned Emily.
"Give us your location," she said. "We're in transit."
Fifteen minutes later, Jason's Jetta pulled up behind the Congregational Church in the center of town and Emily rolled down the passenger-side window.
"All right, the medevac's here."
In the backseat, Hal lay slumped against the far door with his eyes closed, a cigarette dangling from between his lips. A lanky, effete, mildly gothic boy, he prided himself on his superior intellect and perpetual indolence. To the alarm of his parents, he'd clicked through on some Internet ad and got himself admitted to a university in Tunis. From there he planned to spend the fall traveling the Maghrib.
"The Valp's holding," Jason said, speeding onto a side street. "But if we don't get there soon he'll smoke it all himself." They avoided the streets still heavy with commuter traffic until they had crossed all the way to the other side of Finden and pulled up in front of a white stucco house with three Japanese maples in the front yard surrounding a giant vertical boulder that looked as if it had been airlifted out of Stonehenge.
"What's with the rock?" Emily asked.
"I don't know. His mother's got a witch thing going on," Jason said, stepping out of the car. "She runs some kind of regional coven."
"I hung out with this Valp guy once," Emily said. "All he talked about was North Korea. Those rallies they have with the colored cards, you know? Like at the Olympics, where everyone in the crowd holds one up to make an image. Apparently they're very good at it over there."
She sounded bored, as usual, wearied by this petty world of high school. Emily had lived in London with her parents sophomore year and returned with a coolness unimpeachable by anyone except the three of them, who mocked her attempts to exempt herself from the indignities of Finden High.
Up on the lawn, from beside the obelisk, Jason was waving for them to come inside. "Christ, can't he just score the shit and get out of there?" Emily grumbled, leading the other two up the driveway.
Arthur Valparaiso had a slightly intimidating presence at two hundred and twenty pounds with a shaved head and clad this evening in an orange judo outfit. They had apparently interrupted some kind of deep-focus session, in which Arthur assumed a single lunging pose for up to an hour, a feat his girth rendered implausible. But now that he'd been disturbed, he was inclined toward a bit of company before completing the sale. As Nate's father had once said of God, the worst thing about drugs was the other people who believed in them.
The bong was produced, the music turned on, and the usual desultory conversation commenced. Knowing that the goal was an early exit, the four of them went light on the smoke, letting Arthur suck down most of the bowl, which had no discernible effect on him. Despite the smallness of his hit, Nate felt a tingling starting up at the back of his head, and slowly his thoughts began to wander as he stared at the walls of the basement rec room, which were covered with pictures of crowds: black-and-white aerial photographs of rallies in squares and piazzas, newspaper clippings of marches on the National Mall, stadiums full of rock fans shot from above.
"Have you read much Guy Debord?" Hal asked their host in a voice made all the more languid by the pot.
"Who the f*ck is he?"
"French. He shared your interest in the masses. He writes about spectacle, how all this ginned-up collectivity contributes to our alienation."
"Crowds are where it's at, dude," the Valp said. "They're the future. Individualism is, like, a relic. Burning Man - that's the future."
Nate had discovered a vinyl beanbag in the corner. From there he watched Jason attempt to effect a game of pool, but it came to nothing. Eventually, a plea was made to Arthur and the transaction completed. Back in the car, a joint was rolled in the front seat and passed around as they sped down the state route toward the Alden strip, managing eventually to land themselves in the front row of a movie theater, at the foot of a huge screen that dashed their brains with the blood and pillage of some beast war of Middle Earth created, it seemed clear, by other, older drug-takers. They emerged into the parking lot more than two hours later, weakened and lethargic, having no sense of what to do or where to go.
For a while they drove, entranced by the clutter of lights and the bass tones of the car speakers, managing at one point to navigate a drive-through at a Dunkin' Donuts, and coming down as they munched their crullers and cinnamon buns in silence, gliding back into Finden.
A faint numbness behind the eyes was all that remained of Nate's high by the time they dropped him home.
He stood awhile in the front yard once they'd gone, staring at the darkened façade, only the porch light and the light up in his mother's bedroom on. It wasn't as decrepit a house as Ms. Graves's nor was it new or by any means empty. He needed to cut the grass soon. The shutters needed paint. Inside, nothing had changed for a long time.
They had arrived for the first time at this house in a rainstorm, he and his brother and sister standing in the front hall listening to their mother shout at their father about how dark it was, how cramped the kitchen and ugly the cabinets and ugly the wallpaper, how the boxes hadn't arrived and there were no blankets upstairs, and what would they do? How would they manage? As if he had led them all into disaster.
That was ten years ago and the wallpaper was still there, and the cabinets, and the mirror at the top of the stairs which his mother had never liked.
Climbing onto the porch, he closed the front door quietly behind him and switched off the porch light.
Once, when their mother had taken their father off to New York to see a specialist, his sister had thrown a party at the house and a girl had been sick on the front staircase, and though she'd tried her best to clean it, the detergent his sister had used had left a paling stain, which Nate passed over now as he headed up the stairs.
Anywhere people lived memory collected like sediment on the bed of a river, dropping from the flow of time to become fixed in the places time ran over. But in this house, since his father had died, it seemed sediment was all that was left: the banister, the hall mirror, the bathroom's black-and-white tile, the ticking on the runner carpet that led to the foot of his mother's door - all of it heavy with his absence.
This was the trouble with staying away with friends and getting high. He felt wrong for forgetting his family even for a few hours, as if to keep faith with his father required an unceasing grief.
Knocking gently on his mother's door, he turned the handle open. She was reading in bed, the covers pulled up to her waist. She glanced up over her reading glasses, her oval face gaunt, as it had been for months. She'd lost considerable weight in the last year and still ate very little.
"Was that Emily dropping you off?"
"Yeah," he said. "We saw a movie." He paused for a moment, feeling the obligation to offer her something more.
"I went to that lady for tutoring."
"That's right, I'd forgotten. How was it?"
"She's a little strange. But it was okay."
It never stopped being terrible, how alone his mother looked. He couldn't make it go away, even by being here, even if he were never to leave.
"Sleep well," she said, looking at him with a tender, somewhat distant expression, as if she hadn't seen him in a very long time.