John Casey - Compass Rose

And with that Elsie was whisked away. When the chauffeur leapt to open the car door and then the door to the hospital lobby, she felt ushered out rather than ushered in.

What did she expect? All those citizens were members in good standing. She’d been nothing but a disruption in May’s house. She’d thought herself the maverick spirit of woods and streams, but her merit badges were out-of-date. She was no longer a forest ranger; she was no longer being as good as a daughter to Miss Perry. She’d come to the meeting with nothing. May told Dick to tend to her, showing the gathering that she was no more than a scar on an oak branch where a vine had been pulled off.

Courtly old Mr. Salviatti had seen her out.

Her knee hurt. Her cheek hurt. The hospital smell was making her sick to her stomach. She went up to the desk and said, “I think I need someone to sew me up.”

There she was in Jack’s office again, Jack beaming again and saying, “Mary, Mary, Mary!” When he got through beaming and squeezing both her hands, he sat at his desk. “So Rose is going to sing,” he said, “and I’m very grateful for your help. I think it’s a good thing for everybody …” He sat down, spun his chair to look out over the yacht basin, spun back to face her. “I love this view, the boats, the pond and the sea. Do you ever miss the view you had from your old restaurant? The creek and the salt marsh and the dunes. And if you stand on tiptoe you can even see a bit of Block Island, can’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You know, there’s a technical name for that line of light where the sky and the sea meet.”

“The horizon.”

“Ah. In fact, it’s what makes the horizon hard to determine. That indeterminate zone is called the glimmer . A lovely word, and nice to know it has a sliver of specialized meaning. You could see the glimmer then. From your old restaurant.”

“Yes.”

“It’s going to be vacant again. My people there are giving up the food business. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the building. It has two big rooms and a kitchen — all one floor. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“An acre or so.”

“Yes.”

“On a quiet side road. I suppose it would be a nice place to live. Make the old barroom into a bedroom, the dining room into … what? A dining room. So that would be easy.”

“I imagine so. But you’ll want an architect’s opinion. I’m the cook.”

“Oh, Mary, there’s much more to you than that. It’s not many people can steal a march on me. There I was about to buy Tory Hazard’s house and barn, and what do I find? A corporation is the new owner. But it wasn’t more than a day’s work to — as we lawyers say — pierce that corporate veil. A nice Irish lawyer in Boston, who has a nice Irish brother who wrote the libretto for … You see where we end up. So my hat’s off to you. Oh, I was irritated for a moment, but now I’m … interested. So there you are, one of the holdouts in the way of Sawtooth. So I’m interested in finding out if you’d like your old restaurant back — not qua restaurant, of course. You wouldn’t want to be competing against yourself.”

“The barn on the Hazard property has to be a bookshop. The reason Tory Hazard sold to JB and me is so it wouldn’t be bulldozed. So I don’t see—”

“So she told me. I was a great admirer of her father, and I wouldn’t dream of anything that wouldn’t honor him. She seemed surprised, by the way, to learn that you and Mr. Callahan are more than business associates. ‘Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae,’ as Dido famously says—‘I sense the traces of an old flame.’ My plan for the barn is to make it the Everett Hazard Memorial Library. We have the Robert Beverly Hale Library down the road, but it’s very small, and now that I’ve brought so many more readers to the area, another library would be a public benefit. I don’t need to underline the public-benefit part — everyone seems to be learning a little law these days. But I’m sure that you and I and your Mr. J. B. Callahan have no desire to enrich a battery of lawyers. If we can reach an agreement on the real property, I can see a place for Mr. Callahan in our Sawtooth cultural program. A stipendiary position. You see? I’m looking for ways to make everybody happy.”

Mary closed her eyes for an instant. She’d been fearing it would come to this — not Jack’s iron hand in a velvet glove but facing her own wishes. She said, “I see you’re a marvel at mixing the carrot and the stick to get us donkeys to move along. Of course, you haven’t mentioned a price at all. But before you do that, I should say that there is one thing that could get me to consider your plan. If we agree to sell you our house, will you leave Dick and May alone in theirs?”

Jack sat back in his chair, spun away for a moment. She hoped that he might be satisfied with half of what he wanted, that he might be willing to imagine that there were other wishes as urgent as his own.

He spun back and leaned forward. “Mary, Mary, Mary — I’m glad to hear you say that.” She lifted her head. “It shows me that you’re thinking creatively about our problem.” She sighed. She wasn’t surprised when he said, “It shows me you’re halfway to seeing the whole picture.” And there he was doing his old soft-shoe, nimble for all his pomposity. “Sawtooth Point is a discrete piece of land with natural borders that will be on a sound financial footing and will support our traditional values of nature and culture.”

Had she sighed again? Had she raised an eyebrow? As if she’d dissented from a sacred text, he leaned even farther forward and snarled. “I’m serious, God damn it. I’m no Johnny-come-lately. I’ve been putting Sawtooth together for years — make that decades. It’s the core of my life. Piece by piece and year after year, while most people were fiddling away their lives, just one day after another. Eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep, work. So when the cat comes into the kitchen, the mice scurry around and squeal. And then dive back into their little holes.”

Mary was surprised to find herself staring at him with pity. His last speech was how he really felt — no more hoo-ha about the benefit to South County — but it was more saddening than horrifying. How alone he was … If he’d been a poor crazy out on the street with no company but the voices in his head, you’d want to find him some help, but with a fortune in the bank he could keep himself propped up in his well-staffed isolation. In that isolation, after his hours calculating the dimensions and costs of his maneuverings, he couldn’t help but think of the people involved as obstructions in front of his bulldozer, as objects of more or less tensile strength — some were pliable, some were stiff and breakable. She imagined his mind grinding and grinding, perhaps with pleasure, during the morning, with a duller satisfaction during the afternoon, but by evening and into the night, the unstoppable grinding would begin to wear the coating off his nerves. He would list his kindnesses to Elsie and Rose, and wonder at their ingratitude. And hadn’t he been good to Mary herself? And Eddie Wormsley and Phoebe — where would they be without his giving them work? But there they all were, gathering around Dick Pierce. And in the middle of the night it was cold comfort that he had his “long-standing relationships with the people who actually keep things going”—they weren’t the ones murmuring in the corners of his empty room, nothing he could make out, just a rustling of ill will. And come to think of it, the poor man would be missing his wife — whether he’d sent her away to mind Jack Junior or if she’d swept off in anger.