L'America (20 page)

"All unworthy professions in classic literature. Doctors were scorned—life's gatekeepers," Claire said. Of course, Jackson knew of his future mother-in-law's feelings, but he was too confident to care much and too kind to take offense. Rather, he humored her and flirted with her and made her smile and laugh. What he didn't fully appreciate, because he was not vain or conceited, was that the thing that bothered her most about him was how sexual she found him to be. He oozed sexuality through his sheer strength and size and confidence. Try as she might, she could not stop herself from imagining her daughter in a variety of compromising positions of ecstasy.

"With him you will never be rich," her mother said, sharp eyes piercing, "and if you struggle your entire life you will not age well and that's a fact." At all this, Claire simply laughed and married Jackson and had a daughter soon thereafter and with Beth the dreams began in earnest, and now Claire danced across a field with her husband racing after her ready to tackle her. She wore an orange tweed suit that her mother had bought at Best's so that she would look the part of wife for the search committee at the college. At this moment they were supposed to be there eating lunch with faculty inspecting Jackson (and Claire) to see if they would be a "fit" for the community.

"Just think of Beth in these fields. They'd seem endless for her. So much to explore," Claire said. And she wished her daughter were with them now, her pudgy little body in her arms as she ran across the field. "We'd build right here. The house should be right here to take advantage of the view." Claire showed him the flyer and the map it contained of the farm. On the map, a farmhouse from 1846 was indicated, but they had not yet passed it, as it was hidden in a grove of sycamores at the bottom of the other side of the hill. Upon seeing it later, they would declare it far too dark and depressing though they would decide it could be useful, if properly restored, as a store from which they could sell the farm's products. The old house had been lived in for many years by the old apple farmer and his son and was in a catastrophic state of disrepair with dog feces smelling up the place.

"We'd build it here—big and filled with rooms so that anyone who wants can come and stay and stay and stay, as long as they help the farm to thrive, as long as they contribute talent and ideas. My gosh it's big enough at two thousand acres." And even if this was, as it most likely was, just one of many idealistic notions that Claire would have had across the span of her younger years, Jackson took it as gospel after her death—talked to her of it as they drove to the hospital, as he flew her body home, as he stood tall and elegant and pained along with her mother at the funeral before the cremation.
Where anyone who wants can come and stay and stay and stay.
Talked to Claire of it as he held their tiny Beth in his big arms, comforting her as she cried for mama, Jackson not understanding, perhaps never understanding, how to tell Beth where her mama was. "She's inside of you," he would say later when Beth was a bit older but not yet old enough to understand metaphor. She would want to turn herself inside out like a shirt.

But that day, up there, everything was right and thus began the dream, with those few words and the rain clouds streaking by and the sun on distant hills. Claire took off her coat and she took off her shirt and she took off her bra. She did a little seductive dance for Jackson. And she took off her skirt and she took off her slip and she took off her shoes and she took off her stockings and her underwear and she looked at him with teasing eyes, pursed lips, and did another little dance with her slip as a prop, tossing it and then even her earrings (pearl studs) into the field, and once and yet again everything was said between them with the use of no words and the warmth of April and a lacy mist on their backs.

The whole drive back to New York City they built their house on top of that hill.

 

Five weeks later, an urn of ashes in his arms, Claire's mother and Beth at his side, Beth in a ridiculous tailored coat with velvet and fur purchased for the occasion by Claire's mother, Jackson bought the apple farm at auction, using a portion of Claire's mother's inheritance from her husband. There were only a few other bidders: an Amish man and a few locals with not enough cash. For collateral, the mother (her name, by the way, was Eunice, but no one really called her that—she was Mother, the grandmother, Grammy, or to her friends Uni or Nice, pronounced like the city in France) took out a life insurance policy on Jackson for $500,000, she being the sole beneficiary. (He outlived her by many years, but long before she died he had been able to repay her with interest, which she refused, from Claire's earnings and from investments gone well.)

By himself Jackson walked up the long drive, over the vast fields, and through the woods, scattering the chips and ash and even a screw or two (the remnants of a childhood operation involving her spine) that were his wife. In the beginning, because of necessity, Jackson left the farm. But once the house was built (he mortgaged the property to raise the necessary funds) and once his Beth was settled there, he did not leave again until 2017 when Valeria would take him to Washington to receive an honor from the White House for his "significant contributions to the advancement of hydrogen for fuel." Actually, Valeria would force him to come, taking a stand, saying to him what his wife had never had the chance to say and what his daughter had been helpless to ask: stop hiding. "For Mom, please. For Claire," Valeria would finally say, just as simply as that.

Driving to Washington, out of the farmland and into sprawl that gave way to more sprawl until all gave way to city, was not as hard as Jackson had always feared, just as the shot is never as painful as the child imagines, and cold water becomes warm after the stab of entering it. It was in the ease of the journey that Jackson found the greatest sadness because that ease described just how possible it would have been for him to go to his daughter when she had needed him. He remembered her pleading with him to come to New York, stricken by the end of her relationship with Cesare; he remembered Preveena begging him to come search for Beth in the days following the calamity. How unyielding he had always been, how afraid he had been of what he would feel if he left. His allegiance to Claire had allowed him to believe he was honoring his grief, that he was giving Beth her mother by being faithful to his beautiful wife. At what cost, he asked himself now? Peaceful, oblivious, the world drifted by outside the window of the car, just as it always would have and always will. The cost was Beth, of course, denied a mother by chance but a father by will, his own will to refuse to look sorrow in the eye.

 

In the beginning the people who came to Claire were friends. Jackson had no grand (or even grandiose) design. People came for the weekend and stayed and stayed and stayed. Of course, many left as well. The first person to come was Albarbar, a friend from Harvard, where he'd been a student of religion. He only visited for a week: having earned his PhD, he had a position at Columbia and quite enjoyed the city. Albarbar assumed that the idea of a community at Claire was a stage of mourning, a phase that Jackson would pass through, but in the meantime he would indulge his friend. In fact, Jackson might be able to help someone else he knew. Albarbar had been to Rishikesh in India and had met a woman there who wanted to come to America to see what it was all about and to escape a marriage she was not happy with. Her name was Preveena and she was eighteen years old. She had wide dark eyes and uncommonly short hair (for an Indian woman) and grand ambitions to be a scholar of English literature, which she studied in Delhi. Eventually she wanted to teach and write elaborate novels, long and windy like those the nineteenth century is famous for. But her subject, of course, would be India, the Indian family across religion and caste and occupation and time. (This dream of writing evaporated with her teenage years, but she never stopped loving to tell the stories of her large and crazy family.) Preveena came from money, married money, and arrived at Claire in a sari with her belly peeking through the folds and pleats. Gold trimmed the borders of the peacock blue silk from Benares and a red bindi shone on her brow. She came to Claire with a trunk of tattered, well-read novels and another trunk of silk and jewels, and she never left.

Preveena had a friend in Madras who had a friend in Rome who had a friend in Milan who had a friend in New York who had a friend in Dallas who had a friend in London who had a friend in Paris and so it went. They came discreetly, one by one. Discreet in that it wasn't a big deal; Jackson would never have tolerated recruitment or proselytizing. No one was trying to convert anyone to anything. You helped, that was all. Some stayed for a day; some a week; some, like Preveena, never left. Albarbar visited from New York, amazed to witness the growing dream, his bald head sparkling in the afternoon sun, an astonished question mark of an expression on his face. The price each person paid to live at Claire was work and work alone. You could come with nothing, contribute only what you wished, but everyone was expected to work. At first the work consisted of developing and expanding the apple farm, making it as profitable as could be. Those who had the talent for such learned to splice branches onto root stock (apple trees, like citrus, don't grow true to their seeds: if you plant a Braeburn you don't necessarily get a Braeburn) or concoct formulas that would keep pests away without poisoning the trees (or people). Claire became like any community; expansion required a variety of definite talents. People either knew how to build or learned to build; people either knew how to manage money or they learned. No one profited individually from their work at Claire; while there you contributed according to your talents and abilities and were provided for according to your needs, but no one left Claire with more than they'd brought there. All went back to Claire. After taxes were paid, Claire's profits became part of the estate, and the estate of Claire was not owned by Jackson, would not be left to Beth (or later Rada) upon his death. Claire—the land and the community's investment—would be left to the people of Claire, and upon the dissolution of the community, Claire would be given in trust to the State of Pennsylvania for the people of Pennsylvania as a park, all two thousand acres preserved. (Lawyers, you see, were necessary, too.) On the few occasions that people left unhappily, their departure had to do with money and feeling that they weren't getting enough. The complaints always boiled down to a certain suspicion and vexing greed. Once Claire was sued. You learn from experience, or so the saying goes. After that, people who stayed had to sign a contract waiving the right to sue.

Some people simply contributed thought: they thought of what else Claire could achieve. After apples the farm moved on to meats, bartering with Amish butchers for their services slaughtering cows and pigs and chickens and turkeys. Like the apples, the livestock was raised organically. The animals thrived without antibiotics and hormones, living as freely and naturally as possible. The community at Claire had the manpower and the time and the desire to do things naturally and well.

There were plenty of skeptics, of course: writers and journalists from New York City and Philadelphia would come posing as newcomers then leave. Cynical pieces would appear in a variety of magazines and newspapers from
Vanity Fair
to the
New Yorker,
from the
New York Times
to the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
poking fun at the endeavor. Jackson didn't care. He read all the articles with pride. Indeed he loved the
Times
and had it delivered daily to the foot of that mysterious driveway, which would always remain unmarked. It was his daily ritual and pleasure to walk the long distance down the hill to fetch the paper. The news was his link to the world. (A ritual that would end with Beth's death.) And, of course, locals were suspicious, too, until they learned the economics of the place (Claire's money went to local banks after all), felt its contributions, and knew, from time and experience, that it wasn't a hippie enclave of free love and LSD. (It should be said, however, that Jackson and the lot did enjoy a good joint from time to time—Moroccan hash, Asian weed.)

People came to Claire from all over America. One man came from China when it was still quite difficult to defect. They came from Africa. They came from Norway. They came and they came and they came. Even dogs and cats came; they came from neighboring farms. "They prefer life at Claire," Jackson would say. After meat came berries, after berries came vegetables, after vegetables came ideas: hydrogen for fuel, a passion ignited in Jackson by a Russian electrochemist, who was a brief member of Claire at the height of the 1973 oil crisis and was working on the idea of a hydrogen economy. He envisioned a world in which people's cars, homes—whole cities, entire countries—employed water as fuel. Unrealistic as this pursuit may have seemed at first, it sparked Jackson's imagination. He was never one to dismiss an idea for being impractical or unrealistic if it might lead to something new and marvelous.

As more people came, children arrived or were born at Claire, and the school was started. It reached out into the local community, welcoming those who did not live at Claire, offering an alternative to the public schools, and a few local kids were even brave enough to attend. Educators joined the community and the children thrived.

As Claire grew, the community's needs did as well, and new markets were found or created for Claire's products. Fancy restaurants and gourmet food stores in New York City and Philadelphia were tapped as a market for Claire's meats and berries and vegetables and apples. An Italian man at Claire made fresh ravioli and
tagliatelle
like no one had ever tasted before. The people of Claire decided to use those reporters and papers to advantage, parlaying publicity into a lure for tourists. Guests could stay at Claire for a night, all meals included, for one hundred dollars, and people came—though few of the tourists remained. Claire wasn't about shunning capitalism: if money was needed, money was made, and once made, extra money was used to grow more money. No shame in that.