What do men do? he cries, and he woke up, tears streaming down his face in the darkness of his trailer, his body as much as his mind cold to the bone, the toothache gone.
Early the next morning, but not too early, for he did not want to have to wake them, especially this morning, Wade drove out to Lake Agaway on the north side of town. He figured he would have to say something nice about Twombley, express his condolences to the next of kin, that sort of thing, and then get down to business with the son-in-law. Asa Brown and Gordon LaRiviere be damned: it wasn’t their job to protect the children; it was his.
He passed Wickham’s, noted that the parking lot was almost filled and that most of the cars were out-of-state. There was that stupid sign, HOME MADE COOKING, pale pink in the bright morning light. A few cars had the bodies of shot deer tied to roofs and fenders, and Wade decided that he would stop for breakfast later, after he had paid his visit to Mel Gordon, when there would be only a few people still at the restaurant and he could talk to Margie and make his important phone calls. That was how he thought of them — important. This morning at eight, Wade Whitehouse was a man with several important tasks, legal matters, by God, and he wanted Margie to see him, a competent man, engaged in completing them.
He would have liked to take her out to Twombley’s place on Lake Agaway, so she could see him deal with Twombley’s son-in-law, and he had almost called her when he first got out of bed, but he remembered that Margie worked Saturday mornings. That was okay; she would get off at noon and could ride down to Concord with him this afternoon to see the lawyer. Maybe she could even be with him when he talked to the lawyer. Although that might not look so good, he thought. Well, she could wait in a restaurant or do some shopping, and he could tell her all about it afterwards.
A quarter mile past Merritt’s Shell Station, at the old mill, where there was a cluster of shanties huddled together as if for warmth, Wade turned left onto the winding narrow dirt road that led down to Lake Agaway. The sky was bright blue and cloudless, and patches of blinding sunlight flashed over the hood and windshield as he passed between stands of tall spruce and pine — trees that should have been cut and sold.
Wade made the observation every time he drove this road: these tall lovely blue-black trees should be lumbered on a regular rotating basis, and would be, too, if rich people did not own the land and did not prefer the decorative use of the trees to any other. It pissed him off.
The lake itself is not especially large, maybe two miles long and a half mile wide, and you cannot see it from the road, even though it lies only a few hundred yards off to your right and slightly downhill. It is a picturesque deep-water lake nestled between two ridges, with a north-looking glimpse of Franconia Notch and a south-looking view of Saddleback and Parker Mountain. Nice.
Five families own all the shoreline and acreage between the two ridges, summer people from Massachusetts — a physician, two manufacturers, one of whom was supposed to have invented the salt-and-pepper packets used on airplanes, a judge recently appointed to the Supreme Court and now spending most of his time in Washington, and Evan Twombley, the union official. The five families who preceded this five entered long ago into polite but legally precise association with one another to keep the land from being subdivided and to keep the five properties from ever being purchased by Jews or blacks — an agreement appended to the deed and called a covenant, as if made between Christians and a conservationist Protestant God who, only three years before, when Twombley bought his place from the last of the original five, had decided finally to recognize Catholics. Then, predictably, a problem arose. Though it was Evan Twombley, as the first Catholic so recognized, who had signed the deed with the covenant attached, it troubled folks that his son-in-law, Mel Gordon, once people got sight of him, was thought to be Jewish. It was too late by then, of course, to do anything — one could not withdraw the covenant — but as long as the place did not pass to the son-in-law, no one would worry. They did enjoy talking about it, however, giving themselves little frissons of anxiety.
By this morning, the other four families in the Lake Aga-way Residents Association, as it was called, had learned of the death of their weekend neighbor Evan Twombley in a tragic hunting accident yesterday in Lawford, New Hampshire. One of them had a satellite dish and had heard it mentioned last night on the eleven o’clock news on Channel 4, and it was in both the Boston papers, sold at Golden’s store, this morning. Well. A shame.
Perhaps Twombley’s daughter and son-in-law would want to sell the place, which would be the preferred course of action, needless to say. If his daughter alone inherited it (a strong likelihood, thank heavens), no one would especially mind or object, so long as she did not turn around and put the deed in both her and her husband’s names. The daughter was certainly not Jewish, and the children therefore could not be, since everyone knew that to be Jewish you needed a Jewish mother.
It was still possible, of course, that the Jew Mel Gordon would jointly inherit the property. If that happened, one could only hope that on reading the deed, the fellow would come to the restrictive clause at the end and would decide to say nothing about it, would go right ahead and simply sign the deed and let it go at that, quite as if he were not Jewish or black. Damn. If this Gordon fellow had been black, none of this would have happened, would it? Anyhow, his agreeing to the restrictive clause in the deed might turn out to be somewhat embarrassing for the Association, mightn’t it? After all, you did not have to come right out and say it, and no one would be rude or crude enough to ask him, but everyone in the Association and everyone in town as well thought Mel Gordon was Jewish, which meant, of course, that he was Jewish. People are not wrong about these things. On the other hand, it was not clear that he was not Jewish, either, especially if he himself was unwilling to say so one way or the other. It didn’t really matter, though, did it? Times change, don’t they? This is surely not the sort of problem our parents had to face.
Wade pulled into the neatly plowed driveway and followed it down to the three-bay garage and parked. He got out of his car slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, and strolled around to the wide porch that faces the lake. The house is a large two-story wood-frame house covered with cedar shakes, built three years ago to look a hundred years old, as if indeed it were inherited.
LaRiviere had scoffed at the idea of spending so much to make a place look old. “If you’re going to spend a quarter of a million bucks on a summer place, it ought to look like something brand spanking new, for Christ’s sake.”
But Wade liked the way it looked, and he believed that if he had the money, he would want his summer place to resemble this one, a house where several generations of smart successful kindhearted people had come to relax and be together with their children and parents and grown brothers and sisters, a place with a wide porch facing the lake, lots of old-fashioned wicker rockers on the porch where you sat in the twilight and told stories of favorite summers past, old silvery cedar shingles, two chimneys made of local stone, a steep-pitched roof with wide overhangs that slid the snow off the house to the ground before it either accumulated so much weight that it broke through or got held up by ice at the gutters and started lifting roof shingles and doing water damage when spring came.
He knocked on the glass pane of the storm door with what he felt was authority, and the inner door was opened at once.
A blond boy about eight years old with a large tousled head and thin stalklike neck pushed the aluminum-and-glass storm door open about six inches and with great seriousness examined Wade. The boy wore flannel pajamas with action pictures of Spider-Man printed on them. In one hand he held a bowl of pastel-colored cereal and milk that was slopping onto the floor; with the other he held on to the door.