The Almanac Branch (7 page)

Djuna said, “I guess it would be a little hard to wear a tie with the shirt on backwards.”

“Faw wanted me to tell you they're here.” Then he left.

I eavesdropped dinner, with Desmond at my side. The voices we could not connect with names. I heard Mother speak only to offer more wine, or to call Djuna out from the kitchen; her exclusion from the conversation was of her own choosing, but was not, so far as I could make out from my blind on the landing at the head of the stairs, contested by her guests, whose attentions were directed toward my father.

Where sphinxes hide their riddles in silence, we mortals bury ours in banter. No need to recount the laughter and the jokes. Desmond, bored, tiptoed from our listening perch to my room, and climbed out into his treehouse to do whatever it is he liked to do out there. I overheard, after he left, two remarkable things, though—one, that in honor of their first trip as men together, Faw had decided to make Berg a vice-president of this Gulf Stream Trust thing, “to get his feet wet,” and Berg, over Mother's mild protest, got to sample his first sip of champagne, having been toasted by Pannett, or Neden, or one of them. The second matter was much more perplexing, because Berg's premature blossoming as the newest flower in the Geiger festoon I saw for the parental bribe that it was. Faw was buying some good behavior, was what I figured—after all, what good would Berg be to some French woman in some church on an island in the Caribbean?

“What woman, what island are you talking about?” Neden asked. They all seemed drunk except for my father. He may or may not have explained to them what he was referring to, but the matter was so bizarre that I misunderstood along with the others. Whoever this woman was and whatever was her role in the Gulf Stream deal, were matters either so very tangential to what my father's colleagues were doing in their roles as employees of the Sprawl that none of them wanted to commit a faux pas by expressing some opinion that would show them to be ignorant of the inner workings of Geiger, or else it was more complex than heads pleasantly adrift in champagne and wine would want to bother to comprehend. Everyone, it seemed, wanted instead to crowd in with his own bizarrerie.

The hour had gotten late. Dinner had been cleared, Desmond had come in from outside because it had gotten too cold and went off to bed. Mother with Beth Silliman and Mrs. del Russe retired to the kitchen, where Djuna'd built her evening fire. The Sillimans were going to sleep in the guest room downstairs, and the others were staying at the Peconic Lodge over on the island. This was a weekend for these city people, in other words; it was going to be a late night.

Faw and the men—Berg still among them—isolated themselves in the library, and I listened in through a heat register, pressing my cheek to the warmth of the grate, and straining to hear what was being said. They were discussing Gulf Stream in entirely different tones than what I'd discerned at dinner.

“But what are the parameters on setting up a not-for-profit on foreign soil, Chas? I didn't think you could do that,” Pannett, I believe it was Pannett, quietly said. The smoke of their cigarettes staled the heat that rose through the register. A decanter clinked against a glass, I could smell cognac. It made my tongue dry, and the back of my throat mildly sore.

“No, you can't,” Faw answered.

“Well, how does it work?”

“We operate out of Cape Hatteras, there is a storefront church we have there—actual church, the pastor we've got there is something like a Unitarian I think, so far not much in the way of membership about five families. But the church is nondenominational—”

“You mean its denomination is money, right?” cracked Neden.

And another voice came in, which was del Russe's. “What we're doing here is that 2 or 3 percent of profits of all the Geiger entities will be donated every year to this trust. It is an amount that is not unusual and should not attract any attention if someone is going over the books. Given that all the Geiger companies are incorporated in the state where the individual technology for each of the products is located, where the manufacturing base, or the warehousing base, say, is set up—like say, we make those baseball bats and the bowling pins with the limited edition star signatures out of upstate New York ash, turn them up there, both those companies are New York limiteds, you see—there's no reason for anyone to connect them, the different companies, in any kind of interstate way, you see. It's all generally legal.”

“Generally?” again Neden pushed.

“The purpose of the trust is to honor mariners who have given their lives in the interest of trade. And about this I'm very serious”—I wanted to laugh, knowing my father as I did, but no one laughed, and I bit my cheek—“and so as one of the outreach programs, missionary program as it were, we're raising money to salvage derelict vessels from the Gulf Stream gyre and save them for posterity, making a contribution to the history of international trade—because these guys were the pioneers.”

Pannett—or Neden, their guttural voices were similar, then did laugh, and said, “Absurd.”

“You know what the Gulf Stream gyre is?”

“Can we skip ahead to the point?”

Faw continued, “The Gulf Stream gyre is a circle—”

“This whole thing sounds more like circles than points—”

“—or it's shaped more like the outer edge of an amoeba or a squash or something, but it's a circular path in which the warm water runs through the cold water of the Atlantic. It's about a ten-month loop. You with me? So, historically, ships get hit by high water and storm-waves that are created by when this cold and warm encounter each other, just like storm systems when you get a thunderstorm because of cold air and warm air colliding. And the crew abandons ship, sometimes they're saved, as often not. It's all in the history books. And your ship is abandoned, and as often as not if her frame and skin are of decent wood and she's still basically seaworthy, she'll get pulled into the Gulf current and go round and round—”

“A ghost ship, now, the point being?”

“So, well, we've got this church, set up as a 501(c)(3) I think is what del Russe and his friends over at Internal Revenue call it, but whatever, it's a nonprofit tax-exempt foundation, and in the charter there is this outreach program so that part of the organization's activities can run something like this. To salvage antique vessels of historical importance from the Gulf Stream gyre, bring them if possible to port, dry dock, and undertake to restore, and then donate to museums to the Christian memory of the international community of pioneers and traders.”

“Unutterably ridiculous, all right?”

Someone else said, “For the final time, the point is what?”

“We have an account in North Carolina, we have an account in the French West Indies, like I was saying earlier, the latter takes project outreach program funds from the donations given to the former—goes through our banks in the city—the latter moves monies into another account overseas, you know, like for holding funds for capital as investment against the costs of repair, which would of course have to be contracted out to specialists in the field, of which I have already put one or two on the payroll, a couple of brothers who live in Gustavia, on St. Barthélemy—Bartholomew being a mariner, by the way, and so that's quite an appropriate place I think to carry on this work, since from what I've been able to learn, he was a religious man as well as a man given to discovery. And to the point, these repairs will or will not eventually come to pass, you with me?”

When he asked, no one said a word, and when he went on to say it didn't really matter that they understood, I detected a tone of satisfaction in his voice; it was as if he had led them point by point through something with the hope that they wouldn't get it. He asked del Russe, who had been quiet, a question, which I didn't quite hear, and all of a sudden del Russe seemed to speak the same foreign language. He assured my father and the others that while over the years the trust would no doubt amass a surplus, quite a large surplus, and would therefore have to show activity, they, Geiger, had set up a religious objects company whose factory in Canton had a guaranteed client in the Gulf Stream Trust—the “Make Mary” ornament, for instance, a figurine of Mother Mary with a smiling face, could be produced in hundreds of thousands of units for not much money and sold at inflated prices to the church, which would then “distribute them.”

“In other words, bury them in the sand,” said Faw.

“Well, that would be one way to distribute them, to be sure. You could also give them away to believers if you had the time and inclination, though that might not be as efficient.”

“All right, then,” my father finished.

Whether no one spoke then because they all suddenly understood and had nothing to say, or they failed to speak because they wouldn't know what to ask, I couldn't surmise, but a silence ensued. Faw went on, and as he did, the hush downstairs developed further, and what I heard became fragmented, and engulfed, as it were, in the drift of my sleepiness, which was encouraged by the heat pouring upward from the register, and the lateness of the hour, so that what I am able to remember has become a palimpsest. I record it, because in retrospect, all of what has now come to pass was mentioned—if only in some kind of embryonic way—that night, and it has been the link in my memory that led me to St. Barts, so many years later, quite a different island than it must have been back then during the night of the Shelter Island dinner. What linked, what added up to something that made a one and one makes two kind of sense? In some way, all of it; in some way, none. That church mirage of Faw's and the peculiar films that Pannett and Neden went on to discuss, however, I can now see as smoke and fire.

One of the men said, regarding the films, “You have the equipment here to show it?” and the women's voices in the other room rose and fell down in the kitchen, mingling with the voices of their companions in the library.

“—but those birds, they would have been tasty, though I admit it's sort of horrible the way you have to do them, snip their beaks off and stick them up their … oh. But they were going rancid or something—” Djuna talking, and I could tell they thought she was quite a pip.

“I think I'd rather not,” Faw told the man.

Djuna, again, saying, “Blanch-
ailles
. It's very fast but it's pretty hard to do, too, so Grace should get some of the credit, she's such a dear, so how you do it is you get the flour, clean linen, the wire drying basket, and you start with the lard to melt into hot liquid in the biggest copper frying pan you can find.”

“Is that false cypress or viburnum in the yard out front?”

“So, on this plantation where they grow asparagus—”

“And Neden and I were thinking about making this new one, it's called
Oriental Affairs
, in which these Chinese women—”

“Well, they don't even have to be Chinese, they can be Vietnamese, Korean, it doesn't matter you can't tell the difference, tell them the copy.”

“Well, you know you start with the advertising materials and build backwards to the product itself, of course. That's the only way to assure profitability. And so we've been working on the copy, which goes something like this, goes, The pulsing heart of their sensuous, mysterious souls to each and every man with every sinewy shudder … lift their geisha skirts and squirm under—”

“Those aren't called skirts, they're kimonos.” My father didn't sound pleased with any of this talk; in his voice there was not only discomfort but (was it possible?) fear.

“It's true that a copper pan'll heat faster than steel—”

“—while silver chains and the emperor's handcuffs clink, they drop their silken stockings, these angels of passion trained in the mysterious ways of the East, where a man's satisfaction comes above all, in the tradition of a thousand suns.”

“Very poetical.” And yes, I could hear Faw's fear through the sarcasm, though I doubt any of the others could.

“The lead female character's name is going to be Jade. You like?”

“—and here it was something the whatevereth?” and they were putting on their coats and saying goodnight and Berg was sent up to bed, I think, “if the real thing is your cup of hemlock, is how the bit will run it's a little rough still but, if you want to see it all and touch it all, if wet and deep and up and down and in and out's your thing, you'll never know how good it is until you see the most steamy seduction scene ever filmed …” such laughter, as I myself began to sleep on the floor, and—

Faw had never spanked me before, he did it so gently that although I cried and though it hurt I could tell his heart wasn't in it. My cheeks showed the marks of the heat register the next morning, and I didn't come down because I didn't want to embarrass him. I'd burned my face through my own persistence, but didn't want his guests to think that it was his fault in any way. They must have heard him spank me, must have heard me cry. I was ashamed.

When I woke, Faw was sitting in his reading chair beside my bed. “Grace,” he said, “I have something I want to tell you.”

What was he going to say? I was sure he was about to tell me that I was going to be sent away somewhere.

“It's difficult to be a parent. You're too young maybe to understand that now, but someday you may understand. What I want you to know is that I'm not happy with what I did last night, and I want you to forgive your old Faw, all right?”

His eyes were dark and tired. Of course I forgave him. I made up my mind that night to doubt everything I had heard; a dream was what I assured myself it was for years, rather than my first insight into what peculiar and possibly grotesque outposts Geiger ranged in search of its ascendancy.

The osprey, an eaglish bird, was disesteemed by fishermen, who took it upon themselves to trap and hunt and poison it wherever it was found on the island. The osprey's skill at fishing was well-known to its human counterparts, who viewed it as a competitive nuisance; and because the ospreys are given to cyclical behavior and return to the same nest every spring, it was quite easy for the fishermen to trap and kill them. It was a slaughter. What traps didn't get them, what buckshot failed to down them, hard pesticides that were insinuated into the food chain did. Once large, the population of course had been all but eradicated on the island. And even though we were too young to know about these particular wars, and who was winning, who losing, at the time, the osprey nest that was perched atop the utility pole, which leaned away from the sea winds down at the farthest edge of our orchard, seemed to us a thing of rarity, a talismanic thing to marvel at.