“How’s school?” Pat asked Rose.
“Fine,” said Rose, who used to be as chatty in her own way as Pat.
“You like your classes this semester?”
“Yes.”
“The teachers are nice?”
“Yes.”
“What’s wrong with her?” demanded Frank. The words were somewhat loose, because of his drinking.
“Are you still getting along with your roommate?” asked Pat.
“Mom.”
“For some reason my roommates kept freaking out on me,” said Pat. “One tried to kill herself, and another left school and became a topless dancer.”
“What?” said Frank.
“It wasn’t my suggestion,” said Pat.
There was a silence.
“Ruby seems to have a lot of assemblies this year,” said Pat.
“Really,” said Rose, with a long look at Ruby.
“Yup,” said Ruby.
“I’m really going to miss you guys,” said Frank, putting his head in his hands.
“I’ve got to tell you,” said Pat. “I’ve been reading this suspense novel, and you wouldn’t believe what happens. It’s about this guy who manipulates the stock market out of revenge but ends up making a lot of money for himself. And he’s a good guy. He’s not a good bad guy among bad bad guys, who are all tricking each other. He’s a plain old good guy, up against a plain old bad guy.” She spoke faster and faster, and details started to fly: newspaper leaks, a change of clothes, a masked courier. “Don’t you see!” she cried, her voice soaring. “This guy is a hero! You did something not so different, and they’re sending you to prison for it!”
“People don’t mind if the fix is in—as long as they’re in on it,” said Frank gloomily.
“It’s not like you really hurt anyone,” said Pat.
Ruby was staring at them with her silent and unblinking button eyes.
“You’re going to be fine financially,” said Frank. “Unless we’re socked with a big civil judgment. Just don’t go wild when I’m gone.”
“I have to have my cellphone,” said Ruby in a self-righteous, aggrieved tone.
“That’s fine, just no castles in Spain.” He popped the cork on another bottle of Montrachet. “Do you know that one out of every eleven American men will be imprisoned at some point in their lives? It’s unbelievable. It’s emasculating. What kind of society puts that many of its men in jail? The government may end up indicting everyone in the telecommunications industry. We may not have made the best business decisions at LinkAge, but we didn’t do anything that unusual. I’m wondering how the American people will communicate once we’re all in prison. The post office?” He laughed.
“I have to get back,” said Rose, standing up.
“Don’t you want some dessert?” asked Pat.
“No.”
“No dessert?” said Frank.
Rose was adamant. “I’ve got a lab due tomorrow,” she said, as if nothing they did could compare. On her way out, she said to Ruby, “Watch yourself, kid.”
“I will,” Ruby replied with uncharacteristic anxiety, leaning forward to stress her seriousness. Then she ran upstairs, the sound as quick and regular as the shuffling of cards.
When they were alone, Frank said to Pat, “I have to talk to you.”
She tried to think of excuses for the girls. “About what?” she said, starting to clear the table.
“Whatever you do,” said Frank, grabbing her arm, “don’t sleep with that detective writer when I’m gone.”
CHAPTER
7
Pat was on guard against the obvious problems that could result from not having another adult around to talk to or have sex with. Because Frank had traveled frequently on business, consulting with his Swat Team, she was used to having dinners with a girl who said “I hate you” so often that you could almost believe it was true. Nor did Pat miss Frank when it was time to change a lightbulb out of her reach or grapple with a heavy bare-root oak leaf hydrangea; she had never gone to him for help with these things. She had always made most of the household decisions simply because he wasn’t interested. And sleeping alone in a king-size bed was really no problem. You could always lie sideways. Plus there were mysteries piled up around her now—including Lemuel Samuel’s.
Still, she detected subtle quandaries. It was hard to keep the house as it used to be. Frank had a few quirky but unyielding tastes—a stainless-steel kitchen, peeled shrimp at every cocktail party, a remote control for each electronic device. She used to give in without thinking. She didn’t much care either way, and for Frank, these were signifiers of the good life. There was no point in arguing that sometimes people liked a change. Frank didn’t. He’d got it in his head that stainless steel, shellfish, and remote control devices were classy. Just try to take such notions away.
She was not about to redo the kitchen, but losing the remote for the entertainment center did make her heart do a small backflip—“What will Frank think?”—before she realized a minute later that he wasn’t going to be saying much about it in the near future. She also knew that Frank would have freaked out if he could see how she was letting his living room slowly fill with epiphytes and thrillers and MAD magazines from the sixties that she’d found on eBay. She even added a couple of occasional tables from a consignment store. Was she insulting him, letting him down, taking advantage of him, betraying him? Or was this efflorescence an unconscious attempt to muffle her loneliness? Maybe it didn’t matter, either way. Pat wasn’t obliged to follow his preferences while he was in jail; this was the twentieth century, after all. Well, actually, the twenty-first.
When she’d first dropped Frank off at Allenwood, she’d come away with an awful feeling of emptiness. But that was not surprising. So much of their life together had been defined by Frank and his job. Pat had met some other mothers through Rose and Ruby, but she’d never had the time to see a whole lot of them. Frank entertained frequently; that was part of the fun of working for him. The High Risk boys, of course, were particularly coddled. When members of the Swat Team were in town, Frank would take them out for elaborate dinners at LinkAge’s expense. His favorites he would invite to the house.
It was time for Pat to get back to landscaping. She’d started to design other people’s property not long after Ruby was born because she got tired of perpetually rearranging her own. What she needed now was to consider some bright, orderly colors, but she didn’t exactly have any ongoing jobs, so she decided to check out some of her old work, i.e., the artificial wetland at the LinkAge building in Meadowlands Center that she’d had installed a year and a half ago. The project was a particularly important one for her. Too many of her previous jobs had been for friends or friends of friends—the sort of people who might end up coming to one of the Foys’ parties. For these clients she was forced to lug around that missing canvas bag and waste endless extra hours negotiating plant lists. The profit margin was slim. Commercial projects, on the other hand, could be unsatisfactory in other ways. Landscaping ordinarily lies at the tail end of a development, when deadlines are near, budgets are tight, and tempers are short.
How wonderful, then, to be handed commercial landscaping work unrelated to any building construction. The construction in this case was long completed. In fact, it was the problem. As LinkAge expanded, management decided that they needed more parking, and they created it by simply filling in a good piece of the tidal swamp adjacent to the existing lot. Unfortunately this was legally defined as wetland and thus protected. If anyone had warned LinkAge about the problem—and several LGT people claimed to have done so—the company hadn’t been listening. At first they ignored warnings from the EPA, unable to believe that anyone would want more of the reed-filled wasteland that already dominated the view from the turnpike. When the EPA persisted, LinkAge refused to re-create any of the trashy old terrain, but did promise to fashion at great expense an entirely new “bog” garden (to use the most modish term). Pat was charged w
ith designing a half an acre of wetland with a panache that would symbolize LinkAge’s vision, growth, and imagination.
Her employment was Frank’s idea, of course; she hadn’t even had to submit a proposal. He told Neil Culp and the rest of senior management that she “loved swamps.” Pat laughed at first; Frank could be such a salesman. But the more she thought about his statement, the more she realized how true it was.
There is nothing clean or crisp about a swamp. Its slow breath can be fetid and rank. Prehistoric plants slither from the muck. Insects thicken the air. Gothic vines glower from damp trees. All is doom, gloom, miasma, scum, froth, decay, and death. Also life. Gooey ooze is where life starts to percolate; sputters become animate; breeding begins. Fertility is spongy, viscous, spermy. A swamp may be waste. It has a hundred ideas when only one is needed. But that one will crawl out and start to walk.
Not that LinkAge was ready for such a raw presentation. Pat tried, however, to move beyond the old-fashioned lily pond and hint at these paradoxes. To do so she opted for sheer lavishness. When the asphalt was broken up and carted away, she made sure a levee was left between the weedy, invasive reeds and the dear little pond dug with a backhoe. (What a madhouse that had been! Only the overseer spoke English, and he usually wasn’t there. She might as well have been playing charades.) Then she supervised construction of a cedar boardwalk and the planting of a grove of black willow, black cherry, and black tupelo. Dozens of summer sweet, swamp rose, and serviceberry bushes followed, their fragrance strong and spicy; there were no stagnant vapors here. The flowers, too, were abundant—seven-foot Turk’s-cap lilies, startlingly spherical globeflowers, and giant swamp mallows (of course).
The boardwalk began at the outer limits of the original parking lot, where a stone bench sat amid thick stands of cardinal flowers and royal ferns. From this decorative spot, you could gaze on the star of the garden, Pat’s environmental coup, a plant so persnickety it was in danger of disappearing: the swamp pink. It needed ground that was saturated but not flooded, sunlight that was plentiful but not too hot, and soil that was rich but not overly so, since then other, stronger plants would crowd it out. Sometimes—only in years when conditions were right—it would produce a single flower, lasting for no longer than a week. This flower would sit at a slight tilt, ingratiatingly, but in truth it wasn’t much. It looked like a bottlebrush and was the creepily intimate pink of a cat’s tongue. It turned Pat’s bog garden into a living museum, though. She spent thousands of dollars on seedlings at a specialty nursery near New Hope, Pennsylvania, and the garden and its living treasure were featured prominently in the year’s (otherwise misleading) report to the stockholders.
Although Pat shrank from returning to LinkAge property, she was eager to learn how her bog garden was faring. She still knew where she could find the pass she’d been issued during the landscaping. But when she arrived at Meadowlands Center, the guard at the gate told her the pass had expired.
“Really,” said Pat, taking it back through the car window and then turning it over a couple of times. There was a photo of her looking like a psycho, also her name and title, Special Projects Director. “I don’t see any expiration date.”
“That’s the old-style pass. We don’t use those anymore. Not since the bankruptcy.”
“But you know me,” she said.
“Well,” said the guard, an old man she’d greeted pleasantly one hundred and fifty times, “I might, and I might not. But I can’t let you in.”
Pat thought of Ginny’s story “The Red Door.” She could have come up with innumerable ways to get past this guard if she hadn’t already tipped her hand. She glanced in the direction of her wetland. All you could see in any direction was reeds. Evidently her plantings were still too young to be visible from the road. It wasn’t possible to take a car around, but if necessary she might be able to sneak around the perimeter on foot.
Pat’s bright smile did not waver through this ticker tape of thoughts. “I think you’d better call then,” she said. Who did she still know at LinkAge? “I’m here to see Ellen Kloda.”
“She has to come and get you,” he said.
“Okay,” said Pat, unfazed.
“You’re going to have to move.”
Pat awkwardly maneuvered the Touareg to the side to wait. Soon another car pulled up, a green Land Rover like Oliver Gregoire’s. Yes! There he was behind the wheel! He’d always had a gentle silhouette. How perfect that there should be at last a real accidental meeting, as opposed to the one he’d orchestrated at the flower show.
Pat suddenly remembered all the little gifts Oliver had brought her when he came to dinner. A glass bottle in the shape of a tulip blossom. A recording of the Duke Ellington music from Anatomy of a Murder. And on the very first evening he came to visit, a small photography book that he said was so grisly he had to apologize for it. Pictured were the poisonous parts of plants: a glistening wink from some purplish black belladonna berries, a flesh-crawlingly hairy henbane leaf, a cluster of spiky red fruit from the castor bean, each harboring enough ricin to kill all the High Risk boys at once.
But he couldn’t resist the book, he said; it was so beautiful. “Yes,” said Pat quietly. It was one of the best presents she’d ever got, and she’d never met this man before. Funny, how she’d taken his generosity for granted. All the wining and dining the Foys had done in return was just throwing around LinkAge money.
Oliver had barely started working at LGT when Frank made it clear that he preferred him to the High Risk boys he’d been palling around with. Maybe Frank was tired of clones. Maybe he was tired of the increasingly panicked agitation in the LinkAge accounting department. His relationship with Oliver had had no depth, clearly. Yet even if this had been pointed out to the Foys at one of their dinners, they wouldn’t have cared. Why should they disapprove of corporate maneuvering? So what if they hadn’t known him long—if he might not stick with them through thick and thin? Frank believed in instantaneous sympathies, the sanctity of ambition, and the unending rise of the stock market.
Pat lowered the window, calling out excitedly, “Oliver! Over here! Oliver!” She waved briskly, then started to open the car door. Before she could get out, he was through the gate. Had he seen her? Judging by the fast pace at which he bolted to the building, he must have. Pat could not believe her eyes.
Once Ellen okayed her entry, Pat met her at the far end of the parking lot, which was less than half full thanks to layoffs. (LinkAge had not needed the additional space, after all.) At first when Pat got out of the car she thought she’d mistaken the place because all she could see was reeds. Then she realized that these cunning, indestructible plants had hopped the levee and taken over the pond, the garden, the boardwalk, everything.
“It’s too bad, isn’t it?” said Ellen. “All your beautiful flowers. I guess there was no money for upkeep.”
Ellen was small and slim with chipmunk cheeks and a page-boy so restrained it was hard to tell whether it was intentional. Her voice was as smooth as lukewarm tea.
“Where are the tupelos?” said Pat, still trying to compare what she was seeing with what she had planted. There seemed to be a couple of swamp pinks left. Maybe they weren’t as fragile as they were reputed to be.
Ellen shook her head. “How’s Frank?” she asked.
“Fine,” said Pat. When this rang sourly in her ears, she added, “His roommate is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.” Oh, God. She sounded as if she were pretending he was away at college, like Rose. So what should she have said—cell mate?
“Everyone was surprised when Frank had to go to jail,” said Ellen, still gazing into the reeds.
“Oh, dear,” said Pat.
“Lots of people complain about stuff,” said Ellen. “But it’s nothing compared to going to jail.”
“What do they complain about?”
“Oh, you know. The pension plan.”
“What do you mean?”
“I guess it was wiped out.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” said Pat. “The company is still here.” She gestured at the very solid steel and glass building behind them.
“We might get a few cents on the dollar when the reorganization is through,” said Ellen.
“I never thought,” said Pat. “I’m so sorry.”
“Actually,” said Ellen quickly, “I lost a deposit I’d put down on a summer cabin.”
“How much?” asked Pat.
Ellen shook her head.
“How much?” asked Pat again.
“Ten thousand.”
It was sad to realize that neither she nor Frank had liked this decent woman as much as they’d liked Oliver. Pat was still looking at Ellen when she had a terrible thought. She tottered, grabbed out for Ellen’s arm, and failed to reach it.
“Are you all right?” asked Ellen.
“My goodness, yes,” said Pat, righting herself. “Well, it’s time to go, isn’t it?” She smiled gamely at the one LinkAge employee who would speak to her, then escaped to her car, where she showily arranged herself with a lift of the shoulders and a perky wave.
What a fool she had been to mistake the smooth dexterity of Oliver’s ambition for any kind of emotional connection. Not that it mattered. The thought that had just struck her, that had struck her so hard that she actually lost her balance, was far worse than any brush-off Oliver could have come up with.
Frank had liked Oliver. He’d wanted him to succeed. Pat had always known that. No matter what Frank said—or what he couldn’t bear to admit to himself—he’d refrained from giving Oliver the job in High Risk because he was protecting him. Frank really was a kind man. If Frank had been shielding Oliver, then Frank knew that what he was doing was liable to get Oliver into trouble. It didn’t matter what Frank said later. He knew that he’d gone too far.
CHAPTER
8
Pat was planting bulbs on the side slope of the lawn. She loved the fall. She loved all the seasons, really, but she especially enjoyed whatever was at hand, and right now it was October. The still-green grass was papered with freshly fallen, sweet-smelling yellow leaves. Hart Ridge turned gold in the autumn. By mid-October the sugar maples, lindens, tulip trees, chestnut oaks, pignut hickories, cherries, sassafras, witch hazels, and black birches were an intense amalgam of honey and saffron and topaz, in color combinations that you couldn’t quite name. Even the light was yellow and thick—and slanted, producing a glut of tinted shadow.