“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 fucking 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.”