“This town, Danny,” his grandfather liked to say, a common refrain, sometimes bitter, sometimes fond. This town.
Black Elm had been built to look like an English manor house, one of the many affectations adopted by Daniel Tabor Arlington when he made his fortune. But it was only in old age that the house really became convincing, the slow creep of time and ivy accomplishing what money could not.
Danny’s parents came and went from Black Elm. They sometimes brought presents, but more often they ignored him. He didn’t feel unwanted or unloved. His world was his grandfather, the housekeeper Bernadette, and the mysterious gloom of Black Elm. An endless stream of tutors buttressed his public school education—fencing, world languages, boxing, mathematics, piano. “You’re learning to be a citizen in the world,” his grandfather said. “Manners, might, and know-how. One will always do the trick.” There wasn’t much to do at Black Elm besides practice and Danny liked being good at things, not just the praise he received, but the feeling of a new door unlocking and swinging wide. He excelled at each new subject, always with the sense that he was preparing for something, though he didn’t know what.
His grandfather prided himself on being as much blue collar as blue blood. He smoked Chesterfield cigarettes, the brand he’d first been given on the factory floor, where his own father had insisted he spend his summers, and he ate at the counter at Clark’s Luncheonette, where he was known as the Old Man. He had a taste for both Marty Robbins and what Danny’s mother described as “the histrionics of Puccini.” She called it his “man-of-the-people act.”
There was little warning when Danny’s parents came to town. His grandfather would just say, “Set the table for four tomorrow, Bernadette. The Layabouts are gracing us with their presence.” His mother was a professor of Renaissance art. He wasn’t entirely sure what his father did—micro-investing, portfolio building, foreign-market hedges. It seemed to change with every visit and it never seemed to be going well. What Danny did know was that his parents lived off his grandfather’s money and that the need for more of it was the thing that lured them back to New Haven. “The only thing,” his grandfather would say, and Danny did not quite have the heart to argue.
The conversations around the big dinner table were always about selling Black Elm and became more urgent as the neighborhood around the old house began to come back to life. A sculptor from New York had bought up a run-down old home for a dollar, demolished it, and built a vast open-space studio for her work. She’d convinced her friends to follow, and Westville had suddenly started to feel fashionable.
“This is the time to sell,” his father would say. “When the land is finally worth something.”
“You know what this town is like,” his mother said. This town. “It won’t last.”
“We don’t need this much space. It’s going to waste; the upkeep alone costs a fortune. Come to New York. We could see you more often. We could get you into a doorman building or you could move someplace warm. Danny could go to Dalton or board at Exeter.”
His grandfather would say, “Private schools turn out pussies. I’m not making that mistake again.”
Danny’s father had gone to Exeter.
Sometimes Danny thought his grandfather liked toying with the Layabouts. He would examine the scotch in his glass, lean back, prop his feet by the fire if it was winter, contemplate the green cloud formations of the elm trees that loomed over the back garden in the summer. He would seem to think on it. He would debate the better places to live, the upside to Westport, the downside to Manhattan. He’d expound on the new condominiums going up by the old brewery, and Danny’s parents would follow wherever his fancies led, eagerly, hopefully, trying to build a new rapport with the old fellow.
The first night of their visits always ended with I’ll think on it, his father’s cheeks rosy with liquor, his mother gamely clutching her cocoon of plush cashmere around her shoulders. But by the close of day two the Layabouts would start to get restless, irritable. They’d push a little harder and his grandfather would start to push back. By the third night, they were arguing, the fire in the grate sparking and smoking when no one remembered to add another log.
For a long time Danny wondered why his grandfather kept playing this game. It wasn’t until he was much older, when his grandfather was gone, and Danny was alone in the dark towers of Black Elm, that he realized his grandfather had been lonely, that his routine of the diner and collecting rents and reading Kipling might not be enough to fill the dark at the end of the day, that he might miss his foolish son. It was only then, lying on his side in the empty house, surrounded by a nest of books, that Darlington understood how much Black Elm demanded and how little it gave back.
The Layabouts’ visits always ended the same way: his parents departing in a flurry of indignation and the scent of his mother’s perfume—Caron Poivre, Darlington had learned on a fateful night in Paris the summer after sophomore year, when he’d finally worked up the courage to ask Angelique Brun for a date and arrived at her door to her looking glorious in black satin, her pulse points daubed with the expensive stink of his miserable youth. He’d claimed a migraine and cut the evening short.
Danny’s parents had insisted they would take Danny away, that they’d enroll him in private school, that they’d bring him back to New York with them. At first Danny had been thrilled and panicked by these threats. But soon he’d come to understand they were empty blows aimed at his grandfather. His parents couldn’t afford expensive schools without Arlington money, and they didn’t want a child interfering with their freedom.
Once the Layabouts had gone, Danny and his grandfather would go to dinner at Clark’s and his grandfather would sit and talk with Tony about his kids and look at family photos and they’d extoll the value of “good, honest work” and then his grandfather would grab Danny’s wrist.
“Listen,” he would say, his eyes rheumy and wet when you looked this close. “Listen. They’ll try to take the house when I die. They’ll try to take it all. You don’t let them.”
“You’re not going to die,” Danny would say.
And his grandfather would wink and laugh and reply, “Not yet.” Once, installed in a red booth, the smell of hash browns and steak sauce thick in the air, Danny had dared to ask, “Why did they even have me?”
“They liked the idea of being parents,” his grandfather said, waving his hand over the leavings of his dinner. “Showing you off to their friends.”
“And then they just dumped me here?”
“I didn’t want you raised by nannies. I told them I’d buy them an apartment in New York City if they left you with me.”
That had seemed okay to Danny at the time, because his grandfather knew best, because his grandfather had worked for a living. And if maybe some part of him wondered if the old man had just wanted another shot at raising a son, had cared more about the Arlington line than what might be best for a lonely little boy, the rest of him knew better than to walk down that dark hall.
As Danny got older, he made it a point to be out of the house when the Layabouts came to town. He was embarrassed by the idea of hanging around, hoping for a gift or a sign of interest in his life. He’d grown tired of watching them play out the same drama with his grandfather and seeing them indulged.