John Casey - Spartina

“I’m not spoiled,” she said. “If anybody was spoiled, Sally was spoiled. When Sally was pregnant, Jack hovered around her like a hummingbird. And he kept telling her how beautiful she was. I used to laugh at him. I don’t now. Everyone should get to be a little spoiled when she’s pregnant.”

Dick said, “I was just guessing when I said May might have thought you were spoiled. And anyway that was about the way you were last summer. I told you May wants me to put up my share of what it’ll cost.”

“What exactly does she mean by that?” Elsie said. “I think I see, but I’m not sure.”

“She doesn’t want me owing anything,” Dick said. “I understand that part. That’s one way of making things come out quits.”

Elsie said, “Well, as a practical matter, I’m on Blue Cross. And as for the kid’s clothes, Sally’s got trunks full of hand-me-downs. Trunks. Girl’s and boy’s, so we’re covered both ways. But if May wants you to do something—”

Dick said, “ I want to do something.”

“Okay. I won’t argue about it. But I don’t want to feel I’m making things hard for Charlie and Tom. I mean, there’s still Charlie and Tom, even with Miss Perry’s books. God, it does get complicated. We’ll all be taking care of someone else’s kid before we’re through.”

“Miss Perry’s books?” Dick said.

“Oh,” Elsie said. “Oh dear. I thought … Of course it was a surprise to me too. Oh shit, you’re going to get mad at me again.”

Dick said, “What’re you talking about?”

“When I was talking to Miss Perry about the loan for your boat, I asked her about selling some of Charlie’s and Tom’s books. Not the readers’ copies they’ve got but the good ones in Miss Perry’s library. She said no, they were for Charlie’s and Tom’s college. I didn’t ask what she thought they were worth, but it sounded a little grandiose. I mean, college. I thought she might be a little addled. But I looked the books over one day — she’s got them all together in her library — and I made a list. I could tell that some of them are first editions, but some I wasn’t sure of, so I took down the date and city, all that stuff. When I was in Providence one day, I went to a rare-book dealer and showed him the list. He said a lot depends on the condition of the book. They looked pretty good to me, and I told him that, and he gave me a rough estimate.… Look, I know I stuck my nose in again.…”

“What’d he say?”

“Tom’s are worth more than Charlie’s, though Charlie has one that—”

“What’s it all come to? All totaled … more than a thousand?”

“Twenty thousand.”

Dick laughed. “You must’ve got something wrong.”

Elsie said, “Nope. You know what amazed me? The Wizard of Oz. A nice edition is worth more than five thousand dollars. That’s what put Tom’s books up so high. That was on Tom’s Christmas shelf. Louisa May Alcott, Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier … I can’t remember them all. I’ve got them written down, but the list is back at my house. There’s one the dealer couldn’t price exactly— The American Practical Navigator by Nathaniel Bowditch. That one stuck in my mind. It’s a little beat up, but it belonged to Oliver Hazard Perry, it’s got his name on the fly leaf. If it’s his signature — and I’d guess it must be — it may put Charlie’s share up to Tom’s. Of course, Commodore Perry may have owned several. It’s sort of a manual, right? It came out in the early 1800’s, but it kept getting updated, so he may have kept getting new ones. The Navy probably issued them.… You could sell it back to the Navy!”

Elsie was cheery by now.

Dick felt a weight pressing at an odd angle. He said, “I didn’t know she was up to anything like that. I surely didn’t know.”

Elsie came round the sofa and knelt in front of him so she could see his face. “I was afraid you’d take it this way,” she said. “But it’s good news.”

Dick shook his head. “It’s too much money.”

Elsie said, “It’s a lot of money, but it’s not that much.”

Dick snorted. Elsie sat back on her heels. She said, “What I mean is that it won’t pay for four years of college, not with room and board. Even if they just go to URI.”

“Just,” Dick said. “Everyone can’t go to Brown and Yale.”

Elsie moved a few steps on her knees and hoisted herself up, her hands on the arms of a chair. She said, “Don’t take it out on me. And don’t start that class-rage shit.”

Dick didn’t say anything.

Elsie said, “You know, it’s just as spoiled to be as touchy as you are about everything as it is to think you can get away with anything you feel like.”

“No,” Dick said. “You can’t say I’m just being touchy. There’s something strange about not knowing how much your own kids have. There’s something strange about all that money growing in the dark.”

“Well,” Elsie said, “she didn’t give anything to you, she gave it to Charlie and Tom.” Elsie laughed. “You aren’t jealous, are you? You’re not worried she loves them more than she loves you? She did lend you some, but you have to pay yours back.”

Dick looked at Elsie. She’d turned impish again, grinning and poking. She said, “Maybe you’re annoyed she’s setting your boys free from you. You are sort of a tyrant, aren’t you? But there isn’t anything you can do about this. As soon as the boys turn eighteen, it’s just between Miss Perry and them.” Elsie laughed again. “There is an irony here — last summer you were scrabbling hard for every penny. You conned Schuyler into paying for the spotter plane, poached clams out of the bird sanctuary, ran drugs.… There was no stopping you. But now — now you want to give it all away. Pay for my baby. Make poor old Miss Perry take back her presents to your children.”

Elsie was nettling him, but she was also jostling him out of his sense of oppression.

“You know,” Elsie said, “Miss Perry sold me my five acres at way below market value. Why can’t you be as cheerful and grateful as I was?”

Dick said, “Passing money from rich to rich isn’t the same.”

Elsie laughed at him. “I wish I was as rich as you keep thinking I am. Get it straight, will you? I’m not rich, I’m privileged.” Elsie cracked herself up over that.

Dick didn’t laugh. He still hadn’t made his good reasons clear to her. “Look. I’m as fond of Miss Perry as anyone, but there’s a mockery in it. Whether she meant to or not, it mocks me. For four years I tried to borrow money from the bank. We didn’t eat red meat but once a week and that was hamburger. An awful lot of fish, which none of us like all that much. I was hauling pots, building boats for other people when I couldn’t afford to work on my own … and that whole time, all those years, one of my kids has some … storybook … worth five thousand dollars! Goddamn. I built a whole catboat and didn’t get five thousand gross.”

“I understand,” Elsie said. “I agree that what some people get paid is crazy, how people get money is crazy. Miss Perry thinks the whole thing is crazy too. She sold an old painting she’d never liked much — she was horrified at what it brought in.”

Dick said, “Horrified. Yup.”

“She knows that people get rich by chance. At least she’s a rich person who admits it. And at least she’s generous. I admire what she’s done, and I think you should too. If she’d said straight out to you, ‘I’m going to help send your kids to college,’ you might have given her a flat no. She’s given your kids some things she owned. It didn’t cost her anything. She let them catch a ride on this crazy inflation. If you weren’t such a prickly bastard, you’d be generous about it. You could be a perfectly nice man, you know. You are a perfectly nice man when you’re not being a tightwad.”