Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

Henry’s plan had been to evaluate the gravity of the situation for the first day or two, allaying his sister’s usual fear that he’d jumped to conclusions, and then raise the subject of her moving on Saturday evening, think it through with her on Sunday, and, if all went well, perhaps even look at a few places early in the week, before the Fourth of July party at the Hollands’.

Instead, at breakfast on Saturday — which consisted of Orangina and stale bread — she blindsided him with the news that she had sued the town without the aid of a lawyer, claiming that Finden had violated their grandfather’s bequest of the land.

Slipping into the backyard, Henry phoned Cott Jr. to find out what in hell was going on. The man’s father had been the lawyer for the small Graves family foundation that gave to local causes, and he had inherited the job.

“I assumed you knew,” Cott Jr. said. “Norberton over at the hall told me she’d filed pro se . Quite a piece of rhetoric apparently. But she managed to use a few of the necessary phrases so they couldn’t toss it out.”

“Why wasn’t I told of this?”

“By whom?”

“By you.”

“Ah,” he said. “I’m guessing she never mentioned firing me. The truth is, Henry, the Graves Society hasn’t been a client of mine for three or four years at least. We’d always sent the check over to the Audubon but Charlotte got into some kind of policy dispute with them — beaver habitats I think it was. In any case, she instructed me to cancel the donation. I reminded her that she had to give away five percent a year to someone. And that’s when she removed my name from the checking account. She hasn’t spoken to me since.”

Thus was Saturday morning lost to a rear-guard action of intelligence gathering. Charlotte would hear nothing of withdrawing the suit and couldn’t understand why he would want to. The hearing before the judge was scheduled for Monday and she would be delighted, she said, for him to join her.

“I know these sorts of legal matters have always been your end of things. But there’s no reason to let that upset you. It’s all well in hand.”

After a lunch of cottage cheese and grapes, Henry’s phone started lighting up and soon enough he’d been dragged into a conference call with his senior staff and someone over at the State Department, who had been getting reports all morning of a possible coup in Uzbekistan. Sitting at the kitchen table, watching his sister prepare a sauté of sirloin and carrots for the dogs, he listened to his deputy describe getting a call an hour earlier from the Uzbek foreign minister, who had phoned the New York Fed to request that ninety percent of his country’s sovereign asset deposits be wired to a bank in Tashkent. The problems being that (1) no one was quite sure which side of the coup the foreign minster was on; (2) the Uzbek president was proving somewhat hard to reach; and (3) the State Department, unable to determine if this was an Islamist revolution or a pro-Western military putsch, hadn’t decided yet whether to stand by the current dictator or throw him overboard. Eighty million dollars was an unremarkable sum for a foreign-country transfer but enough to fund a small civil war and thus endanger U.S. basing rights, necessary for the resupply of forces in Afghanistan. During a pause in the proceedings, Henry’s chief counsel, Phillip Bretts, noted drolly that the man at State had been appointed only last week to the Central Asian Desk from a job at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

“Any chance of getting a bit of that meat?” Henry whispered, holding his hand over the phone just as Charlotte emptied the frying pan into the dogs’ stainless-steel bowls.

“It’s Sam who insists on the finer grade,” she observed. “Wilkie was perfectly happy with the ground chuck.”

By the end of the call, Henry was ready for a drink.

He took his Bloody Mary out onto the back terrace and tried to ignore the weeds coming up through the mortar of the brick. Despite his anger at Charlotte’s loony behavior, he had to confess that he hadn’t seen her so animated in years. Perhaps even since they were kids, now that he thought about it. Back when she’d been queen of the realm in which he’d been so happily captive. In Rye, he used to trail her for hours from the playroom into the yard and back upstairs to the inner sanctum of her bedroom, where he’d been allowed only on her capricious wish, the air there shaded in the afternoons by the giant copper beech. Even now, he could remember how the sun used to play over her dresser and the rich, red carpet and the bed where she lay reading or writing in her diary. He doubted he and Betsy had ever created a paradise such as that for their daughter, Linda. Perhaps because she was an only child. Or maybe it was just that Henry, as an adult banished from the kingdom of mystery, could never fully credit its existence for his daughter, and could only fake a belief in it for her sake in the hope that somehow, on the far side of that impenetrable divide, the garden was still damp and lush and time had yet to be invented. Impenetrable except perhaps in the most fleeting moments, together with the person you’d adventured with there once.

What was a brother supposed to do? Charlotte was happy for the moment because her outrage had found a target closer to home than the halls of Congress and she’d managed to convince herself that she had a chance to win. But none of that changed the obvious: she was barely feeding herself; the house was more of a ruin than ever; and however you wanted to describe them, her relations with the dogs had gone beyond mere eccentricity.

Sunday he drove into town to buy proper sandwiches for lunch and insisted they go out for dinner. At the restaurant he tried to make up for lost time, keeping gently at her, drawing the conversation around to the difficulties of maintaining the house on her own.

“If it would make you feel better,” she said, “you’re welcome to hire me a cleaning lady. Though she’d only be allowed in the kitchen.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Of course it isn’t. You don’t mean anything you’re saying. You want to ship me off somewhere so the idea of me here doesn’t weigh on you. It’s not like you can hide that, Henry. From your own sister. But even if I were inclined to go, which I’m not, now is the last time I’d budge. Here on the verge. I mean, just look at what’s going on. Take a step back for a moment, and look at what’s going on in this country, and I don’t mean just the criminals at the top — they’ll do their damage and stumble out eventually — I mean the last thirty years. And then tell me if you can honestly say that the intrusion of that house, the cutting down of those woods, whoever they might have belonged to once, doesn’t stand for something, for a rot more pervasive. And then tell me I’m wrong to want to take a stand. You can’t. Not without betraying language, and I think you’re better than that. I know you are. Because that really would be the end. To accede to that. To the notion that words mean nothing anymore. That they’re pure tactics. You don’t believe that.”

And on she went, speechifying, close, he had to admit, to the height of her powers.

Letting go his mission for a while, he ordered another drink and let himself enjoy her company. Most of his colleagues didn’t read much other than the Journal . Betsy had kept up with things, novels and films and biographies, but they agreed with each other about so much that at a certain point they’d stopped discussing it all. The fierceness of his sister’s opinions had never dimmed. It was the spirit of their father in her, the old man’s crusading energy, difficult at times for their mother to bear, but so obviously the thing she’d fallen in love with.