America America (39 page)

Then he threw a party.

He chose May 1st—the eve of the votes in Indiana and Ohio and Washington, and three days before a rack of southern primaries would begin. “International Workers’ Day,” he said to Liam Metarey. “They can’t miss the symbolism.” The two of them were sitting in a pair of willow rockers on the porch outside the Senator’s guest cabin, two tumblers of Scotch on the table between them. I was straightening up inside.

“It’s May Day, too,” said Mr. Metarey. “That’s what they’ll pick up on.”

The Senator glanced at him.

“The distress signal, Henry. Mayday.”

“I don’t care. The unions will come out for me. Every worker in the county’ll be here. Make it good. Good as the first one. Real down-home stuff.”

“With all due respect, Senator, what they need is a press conference. Not a party.”

Henry Bonwiller burst out laughing. “I guess that’s why I’m the Senator, Liam, isn’t it? Because I know that what they want up here is a party. Reporters included.”

“Okay, Senator. Well, I suppose we can do it, if you want.”

“I do. And I want a big one. Ray White again. Just like the first time.”

“I’ll see if he’s available.”

“He’d better be available.” He emptied his glass and pulled a cigar from his breast pocket. “After what I’ve done. You can remind him.”

“Senator,” said Mr. Metarey, “I think most people in the country—certainly everybody in the press corps—well, Henry, let me put it this way: they’d have to be fools not to know the odds on what’s coming.”

“Liam,” the Senator said, “leave this to me.” He stood, leaned to the window, and squinted inside to where I was sweeping the floor. “Corey!” he said gruffly, “how many we feed and water at the one before?”

“The first party, sir?”

“Damn it,” he growled, “how many?”

“I think a thousand, Senator—a thousand guests. More or less. If I remember.”

“But you’re wounded now, Henry,” I heard Mr. Metarey say. “If you don’t mind my mentioning. All the papers were calling you the front-runner then. With all due respect, sir—look at what they’re calling you now.”

The Senator disappeared from the window.

“Pricks are calling for me to pull out.”

“That’s right, Henry.”

“Blood’s in the water, all right. You’re certainly on the mark about that.” I’d paused in my work now and was watching them. He was smelling the skin of a cigar, rolling it in his fingers. Then he bit off the end. “But I’m the one bleeding,” he said tersely. “Not you.”

“Yes, sir. But—”

“And I’m the one who’s gonna stop it.” He spit the tip. “Corey!” he called again, “How many’d you say at the first one?”

“Roughly a thousand, sir.”

“Thank you,” called Mr. Metarey.

“Blood in the water. Yes, yes. Scandal, all right. Papers all over me. Sniffing like hounds. Nasty as you can imagine. In that case,” Senator Bonwiller said, flicking open his lighter, “I’d plan for
two
thousand.”

“Senator,” Liam Metarey said, “I’m obliged to tell you, I believe you’re making a mistake.”

II

“S
HE NOTICED YOU
said it happened at night.”

“She did.”

“And how
did
you know that, sir?”

“Trieste, you’re going to make a good reporter.”

“Thank you, sir.” She smiled. “And you’re going to make a good source.”

I had to laugh. “But the answer is that everybody assumes it. If it happened during the day, someone would have seen it.”

“Possibly.”

“Probably, Trieste. Almost certainly.”

“But then she let it drop?”

“Trieste, her daughter—her only child—died. Thirty years ago. In her shoes, what you’d want to do is find peace. I really think that she only wanted to hear something nice about JoEllen. That’s all. That’s why she was talking to me, Trieste—not to investigate something. She’d found those pictures of me driving. That means she was looking through all those things again from those days. She must have just wanted to hear something about JoEllen again. That I’d heard her sing or maybe that I liked her. Maybe that I met her during that time and that she was happy.”

I saw her then, JoEllen, sitting in Morley’s in her hat and dark glasses.

“Happy,” I said, turning to the window. “At least, when she was with him. That’s what would have meant something to her mother.”

O
NE AFTERNOON A COUPLE OF MONTHS LATER,
I set out with Dad and Mr. McGowar to visit Mom’s grave. It was late October, and the tapestry colors along the parkway were giving way to the winter vista. The drawing and not the painting. At a distance through the thinning woods we could see the glint of Little Shelter Brook where it turns toward the river, and beyond it the full reach of the gray and white subdivisions that now cover most of the hills between here and Buffalo. Dad had put down his book, maybe because Mr. McGowar was in the car. It was
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
. South of town, where the two yellow cranes still stood above the horizon, he said, “Let’s go see if they’ve made any progress.”

“I thought we were going to see Mom.”

“She’s not going anywhere,” he said. Then after a moment, “Sorry.”

“That’s okay, Dad. Why do you want to see it all again?”

“I just want to.”

“It’s going to be worse.”

“Of course it will. It’s getting cold. They’ll want the foundation down and the utilities closed in before winter. Eugene,” he said, “is it okay if we don’t go see Anna today?”

The pad appeared.

FIN

By the time we reached the approach drive, the sun was low over the trees. Through the bare woods on the other side of the road, I could see our old neighborhood, the dark brick façades and the steep gambrel roofs. Dad and I rarely look that way anymore when we pass on 35, and for some reason we never talk about it. The houses are lived in now by the temporary employees of the big electronics assemblers that have moved in along the parkway. And by Mr. McGowar, of course, too. That afternoon I’d picked him up at the old bus stop.

At the gravel entrance to the Metarey estate, pickups turned in ahead of us and behind us. Every hundred feet or so on the shoulder there was a no-trespassing sign, and a union restriction placard next to every gate in the fencing. Still, I knew we wouldn’t have a problem: there’s not a plumber or electrician in the whole county who wouldn’t cross the street to say hello to my father, and not a construction crew who wouldn’t let him onto a job.

Sure enough, there was a guard at the main entrance, but Dad hopped out of the car and ambled up the hill to greet him. Through the window of the shack I could see them laughing together.

The pad appeared:

STIL A TAWKR WEN HE WONS TU

As soon as he returned, we set off up an incline that hadn’t even been there the last time we visited—a mound of earth squared off and angled by the heavy graders at just enough of a slope to hide the entire site from the road. I think we were still in the vicinity of the old iron gates, somewhere near where the asphalt used to give way to river stone. The huge portico of sycamores was gone, and the dirt rise we were climbing suddenly smoothed into an embankment of gravel thirty yards across.

“Six lanes,” Dad said. “Not bad.”

We could hear the big machinery now.

“Okay, Dad, Mr. McGowar—I’m warning you.”

Then we were at the top.

In a moment, Mr. McGowar’s hand appeared between us.

WOW

“That’s what I meant.”

A whole new settlement, out on the plain before us. Stores. A low, rambling cluster of them. Complete down to the dark tile roofs and glass entrance arcade. Dozens in varied succession. All joined together in a single, stretching edifice that rose and fell along different rooflines like an Amsterdam street-front but that was still one unending building, maybe a third of a mile across. We sat looking down on it.

“Silent,” said my father. He took off his Yankees cap and set it on his lap. “Upon a peak in Darien.”

Around it, where I think the east woods might have run, was the parking lot. Room for a few thousand cars and a half-dozen feeder roads snaking in a careful, symmetric geometry that was apparent from above. The whole thing probably a quarter-mile deep and twice that long. Half of it still gravel. From this height we could see a handful of paving crews scattered across the expanse, like wagons on the prairie, trailing dark swaths of new concrete. And beyond them, on the far side of a narrow, excavated creek, the houses. Rows of them, staggered into the hills toward the orchard.

“There’s nothing left here, Dad.”

“No.”

At the center of one of the courtyards was a concrete-walled pond, and from the summit we could see water in it that had been dyed aquamarine and a fountain that as we watched began to spout. From a maintenance hatch off to the side, a couple of men were adjusting its controls. I had an inkling they were standing where the fly-casting pools used to be. Beyond them the pavement turned to gravel again, and one fleet of cement trucks out there was carrying the work forward to meet another team on the far side that was carrying it back. A loading dock was already finished.

I heard a page flip.

OPN BI THANGSGIVN

“My God,” Dad said, “we were just here—what was it?—some time ago. They were just cutting the trees.”

“Six weeks ago, Dad.”

MAB CRISMUS

“He’s fast,” Dad said. “I’ll give him that. Working on a Sunday, too. Wonder who he is. Union job site, so he’s paying for it, at least. City Irish, a quarter on your dollar. From Buffalo. Ruthless.”

DOLR HES A SCOT

“Okay, you’re on.”

“There’s nothing left,” I said. “It’s gone.”

“Completely.”

A pair of twenty-four-wheelers pulled up behind us, shaking the earth, dust rising from their tarps as they climbed past in low gear and started down. They moved along the ring of access roads until at a certain point they both swung onto the lot and opened their under-hatches. Pale lanes of new gravel appeared behind them.

Mr. McGowar’s hand moved to the front seat again, pointing.

NOT CMPLTLE

“Not completely what?”

GON

He pointed again.

OK TRE

I looked. Sure enough, a quarter mile to the east, where the main entrance road widened to what looked like a river delta of asphalt—and where, I was beginning to realize, the house had once stood—there it was.

The bur oak.

Leafless. But still standing.

By the time we reached the ring road, it had disappeared behind the buildings. But we followed the drive around, circling the ever-changing roofscape and the packs of parked pickups, only here and there catching a glimpse of it until I wasn’t even sure it was what we thought it was. But then we came around a turn and there it stood again, its crown stretching over the entrance circle.

“Dad,” I said, when we got out. “Mr. McGowar. You knew.”

“It’s nice,” Dad answered. “You have to admit. Stately.”

The trunk stood at the center of the circle so that incoming traffic had to part beneath the limbs.

“A union job,” Dad said. He nodded at it with his chin. “Mostly, at least. More work than it looks, I’ll tell you that.”

“It looks like plenty.” I saw now that it was slightly smaller than life-size, but from a distance you wouldn’t have known.

BRONS

“Stiffened with concrete, Eugene. Cellular concrete.” He gestured up toward the lowest boughs, which shone dully like caramel. “Came all the way up from Pittsburgh with the equipment. That must have been a tricky one.”

“It’s quite a monument,” I said. “But to what?”

“That’s a philosophical question, son.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Well, you’re the philosopher. All I know is that it’s one fancy construction treatment. Don’t see it much around here. No local bids—you can bet on that. Lighten it with air, I guess. Boy,” he said, shaking his head. “Didn’t do anything like that when I was in the business.”

SHUR DDUNT

“Set in molds,” he went on. “Special rebar, not even forty-grade. Long lengths. Probably built it by computer. Only reason for the concrete is to hold the rebar, if you ask me. And the rebar just holds the bronze.” He tipped his ball cap. “But nobody did.”

“Nobody what?”

“Asked me.” He smiled. “Lady up in Vermont made it. Trucked the steel all the way out there so she could bend it. That’s right, Eugene—a lady. Don’t know how she did it, but she did. One branch at a time. Only part that wasn’t union, by the way. Brought down like that, too. Don’t know how much concrete in the branches either, but plenty in the trunk. And it’s got roots, too.” He took off his cap and held it to his chest, like a ballplayer waiting out the anthem. “Had to or it’d fall.”

“No leaves, though.”

“Doesn’t need ’em.”

“And you knew all about it.”

“Everybody knows about it, at least where I live. The rest I heard about fifteen minutes ago. From the guard. He’s Murph Mills’s boy.”