The Bittering Weed

By Tom Neely

In 1968, the Millwees were not the typical couple next door. Jasper and Lecky had crammed several lives into their time together. During the seventies, they adapted to the “low dishonest” decade—moving and risking everything on development projects and asset-juggling investment jobs. As a backdrop, Jasper still worked anonymous contracts for the U.S. State Department.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tom Neely
• Release date: Dec 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781942150060

Tom Neely

Tom Neely is the author of nine books including five novels. He grew up on his family’s farm in Piedmont Carolinas. After graduating from the University of North Carolina, Tom served with the Army in Thailand and Vietnam. He was a diplomat in Latin America and Washington for the Department of State. Tom has worked in management consulting, publishing and business analysis in New York and New England. He owns and manages a small investment business as well as breeds and trains Trakehner eventing horses in the Berkshires.

Book preview

The Bittering Weed

Tom Neely

Third novel of the four part series Quadrille

Copyright 2013 Thomas W. Neely, Jr.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

Summerlea Publishing

PO Box 1398

Northampton, MA 01061

www.Summerlea-Publishing.com

Manuscript Editor: Ted Gilley

Book and Cover Design: Zane Lumelsky

Distributed by Smashwords

ISBN 978-1-942150-06-0

For Elaine, Matt, and Bree.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

About the Author

Discover Other Books by Tom Neely

Sample Next Book Sequelae

Chapter One

After a year or two of embassy lush life, ordinary people would be filled to the gills. There were also reasons not to be. One may have grown up starved for touches of sophistication. At another level, if family party life meant cookouts and cocktail parties, a need to keep going could run deep. Just circulating was, in itself, often taken for fruitful effort, as in, Guess who I met. During child-rearing years, it was far less tiring to leave the twilight hours to the ministrations of servants and sitters.

If people were truthful, they admitted that loneliness was the primary pull for the dogged survival of surplus entertaining. Imprudent candor was in fact not welcome when neighbors mentioned spending too much on effortful partying. Its draining effect, though, was all too visible on guests who were much in demand. So it was that months had passed before my wife’s grandmother simply had to stop taking no for an answer. She would go ahead and give us the welcoming reception she had been planning since our move, and we were in the thick of it.

Jas Millwee. I extended my hand but not enough that he didn’t have to lean forward.

Ben Vanlingel. Hope this isn’t yours, he said. He was looking at an architect’s sketch I had hung. I smiled in the neutralizing style learned from my wife.

Where I’m from a person does what he wants. But what others want interests me too. I presume your view’s informed, I said.

Well, not really, and no offense. What I’m doing is trying to restore waterfront construction in New England, he said.

That sure gives you the right to a strong opinion. Where exactly? I asked.

Right now Portland, Boston north shore, and my eye’s on Nantucket, he said.

Well, glad to meet you, I said.

Are you going to save that elm tree? he asked.

It’s perfect, isn’t it? I asked.

Well, are you? he asked.

It’s up to nature. I’m resigned to Dutch elm myself, I said.

Some of us are spending money on an unproved antidote. You’ve heard of it?

Think so. Good luck, I said.

Want to join us? he asked.

Why should I not be as direct as he?

Not interested. Farmers adjust to change. Fighting nature takes more money than we’ve got. Another smile.

You won’t be so sure when a thousand trees fall, he said.

I’ve seen a lot more land cleared in one day. Smelled pine sap a mile away.

Well, good to meet you. Nice jacket, by the way, he said.

Not too Clan MacGarish? I asked.

I can adjust to change too, he said.

I went outside to smoke, then decided against it. Guests shouldn’t stay too much longer. To my surprise, I saw Vanlingel get into an aging Bentley.

What’s this guy Vanlingel do, the guy with the car, I asked a local kid who was handling parking.

It’s not him; his family. Contests with coupons? Why I like A&P in twenty-five words or less, that stuff. The company does it all including judging whatever coupons or answers they’re doing. You know, in the contest, he said.

Thanks, I said.

Tony LeCompte, my boss, had said I could smell money. My nose must have been congested at the party.

_______________

In a way I was only teasing myself about the money. My job in New York took up three or four days a week and paid more than one would hope. My wife, an ordained minister, ran a business called Services for the Home. Every Monday she shipped a truckload of envelopes to subscribers containing a religious service for the next Sunday. Hymns, prayers, readings from Scripture, a sermon she had written, and occasionally a notice. Donation levels were suggested. If you gave nothing but signified you still wanted the services, my wife’s outfit sent them at no charge. Lecky did not conceal her Presbyterianism. As a first-rate thinker, she did shy away from the divergence she saw seeping into mainstream Protestant preaching. Her flock overwhelmingly supported her direction. New subscriber after new subscriber volunteered how they disliked instruction from the pulpit on, say, foreign policy. Newcomers often reported a boost to their faith. It came from the barrier-free intimacy felt in living rooms or dens. This was the way Christianity had been born.

Lecky had long predicted that many of her mail-order congregation would identify with references to our life in rural Berkshire. The animals, relatives, distinctive seasons, trifling crime rate, winding, hilly roads. Schools in some cases were cited, as were museums, theaters, and nearby access to year-round recreation. One logical response to any such collective yearning, should it come to anything, would be to plan and build a community for like-minded souls. Others who might also like to try the life wouldn’t be weeded out.

I slipped back in through a French door behind the bar. Standing alone was our neighbor Norman Sloane, who farmed next door. We had met the previous summer. I was spending one or two days a week cutting and burning small trees and brush. Not everyone, in fact almost no one, appreciated the importance of keeping fields and open spaces clear. It escaped note that the beautiful landscapes of America and Europe relied on blends of trees and open areas that required work. The head of our country’s natural resources group said our number one enemy was tourists—true. But the naive audience frowned when he named trees as number two. Norman knew this was true. He also knew, as did I, that this cause was lost. The coming decades would witness an erasure of open space by scrub and encroaching hedgerows. It took an unimaginable toll of physical effort and expense to approach even a holding action. Norman’s thousand acres was devoted mostly to dairy in one way or the other. Feed for his large herd of Holsteins thrived vigorously amid the rocks of our icy Eden’s fields.

I like the job you’re doing on those back acres, Norm said.

Hey, thanks. The fire wardens haven’t figured out where the smoke’s coming from. When I get caught I’ll move up front, I said.

What time do you start burning? he asked.

Four a.m. in the summer, couple hours later in the winter, I said.

Are you going to cut in that thicket between us? he asked.

One day I’ll get rid of it, if you don’t mind. First have it logged after a survey, I said.

Make sure you don’t do anything on me, he said.

Surveyor thinks, and I don’t give a frig, that it’s all on us. The whole thicket, I said.

Tell you what, just to rest my mind, I’ll split the survey, he said.

OK. We’ll try to hurry it up, I said.

How’s your wife like it up here? I met her when she was fourth or fifth grade. She played with one of my kids, he said.

She’s always pushed to live at Garland’s. We’re not joiners. Those she hired are good workers. What we expected, he said.

I’m not religious, you know, he said.

You’ve still got time, I said.

As if in reply he pulled out a Lucky and offered me the pack. I thanked him.

Got to get to milking. I’m real glad we’re two of a kind, in a way, he said.

Me too, I said.

I refilled my drink and waved at my wife. My expression must have been questioning. Guests came from worlds that overlapped, even crisscrossed. Most, however, would not have met each other professionally. Lawyers and doctors were exceptions. Some wives worked, several with their spouses, and a great many did not. Inn owners and restaurant people dropped by, as did one New York couple who had resigned from Royal Dutch Shell to purchase the ski area on Petersburg Pass.

Lecky presented me to Bob Fluor, a shoe manufacturer who kept horses. A Catholic wed to an overpowering Protestant, he saw in Lecky a familiar unknown.

What will you do with your energy, your moxie?" he asked.

He flashed a wide grin, and so did Lecky. She exchanged greetings with a pair of women she knew.

Can I trust you with a secret, Bob? Remember I’m a woman of God, she said.

You’ll find my wife and I are unique here. We never gossip. No matter what, he said.

Worthy, but this isn’t gossip, it’s a business secret. Long range, Lecky said.

I won’t even tell my wife. Nobody, Bob said.

Already I’m getting interest in living here from my subscribers, flock, whatever you call them, Lecky said.

So? he asked.

"So? You are a Yankee," she said.

‘This is the Bay State," he said.

I guess. ‘So’ means you’ve given up. To me it’s more opportunity lying there waiting to be embraced. Mr. Fluor checked his drink and dribbled. Lecky smiled when he squirmed.

You’re a bright spot around here, he said.

Lecky was silent.

What’s the secret? Note the improvement. No ‘so, what’s the secret?’

A community where my people live. Houses, apartments, condos, she said.

Here that would be an accomplishment, he said.

You can place bets that it’s in the bag. I of course can’t gamble, she said.

‘Why not?" he asked.

God wants us to apply ourselves and live by the rules. Gambling is cheating, trying to beat God’s system. Don’t you see that? she asked.

Why do you think it’s in the bag? he asked.

To me it’s simple as pie. Here they are used to backing down. They’re pliable, don’t know how to fight, she said.

You do? he asked.

It’s in my blood. Not so much fighting, which takes time and energy, but winning. Reject defeat. She flexed a developed bicep.

Well, I feel defeated, but may I give you some advice? He chuckled. Assuming you go to permit and then prevail, your problem will be unions, he said.

Never. If you’re right I’ll have a backup plan and move the project, she said.

You don’t need to risk overreacting. There’s only one time really to worry, he said.

Slump? asked Lecky.

The opposite. Round here, unions sign up more during prosperity, he said.

Now that’s worth the cost of the party, she said. Lecky lifted her glass to Bob.

Let’s go riding some day, he said.

Things finally appeared to be winding down. Garland was a generous hostess. People gathered in a comfortable space. No matter what she was thinking she didn’t treat strangers in the prickly way I did when annoyed. Good lesson.

An older woman approached and introduced herself as a neighbor, Leonora Ziesel. Her last name rang a bell. A number of my acquaintances had mentioned that the whole area from Chatham to Bennington had attracted artists, art critics, and art historians. This phenomenon waxed and waned, but practitioners were more likely to relocate than professors. Mrs. Ziesel was married to Leon. Tony had mentioned seeing him during the war and later at a historians’ convention. They didn’t know each other. Tony had been interested in Professor Ziesel’s close involvement with repairing the Nazi and Russian looting of Europe’s cultural heritage. This was a long time ago. The slog to right things was still inching forward.

That was not to be her subject.

I’ve been meaning to talk to Garland about how that hemlock’s getting too close to the house, she said.

I wasn’t sure I’d heard properly.

You’re the second person here who offered an opinion about something that surprised me. Let’s change the subject. I didn’t smile. Garland’s lesson gone. What’s your husband up to these days? That might annoy her in return.

He’s speaking more and visiting museums he had missed over the years. More active than ever. Do you mind if I ask where the heck that house is going? she asked.

I pointed out the window.

Breaking ground before too long. Then you can look at it all you want. The site is that bend in the driveway, I said.

It doesn’t fit in around here, she said.

That is the very last characteristic I would list as important. Why don’t you pass these vintage views on to your husband’s college? I asked.

Believe me I have, again and again, she said.

From Route 2, at least, I sort of like their school of higher miscellany. I haven’t toured the campus to see what else is squirreled away.

She laughed freely, seeming to enjoy a scrap, as did I. I put my arm around her shoulders.

Thank you for coming. You are fun, I said. She scurried off.

When the last guests had driven away, I took Garland’s old collie for a walk. Usually placid, he would pace and vocalize when near a lot of bipeds whom he could hear but not see. An airliner flew miles overhead in the evening sky of winter. I thought of where it could be headed, of the airports around the country I had walked through. Dallasites looked different from Bostonians. Chicago terminals had little in common with Atlanta; that was true of the majority of people using them. Superficial, clichéd comments? Many friends would say so. But south, north, west, east, whole quadrants of the country were clearly unlike the others.

People looked different, spoke differently, and even had different health problems. New England’s magnetism was real, but many Americans were immune. The same might be said about Los Angeles, New York, New Orleans or DC. Places could give off a certain pungency that attracted or rebuffed. It was more than the weather or the job market. It was cultural assumptions, typecast halls of learning. Even shopping.

Tonight, of course, I hadn’t seen the hangdog drudges who still shuffled out of New England factories at shift change. But at Garland’s there had been an assortment of cranks and bitter obsessives in the crowd. True, New England stereotypes weren’t any worse than the hatchet-faced peckerwoods we pigeonholed as trash in the South. Just different.

The walk and cold air had sobered me up. I could picture our new house on another cold night. It would glow, it would stand out, it would beckon. I wanted it more than ever. One of my putdowns for critics long ago was, The only thing that would bother me is your approval. No, I didn’t say that to Ben or to Leonore, but it was true.

A lesson I had learned from the world of modernist culture was to not shun what initially turned you off. Giving it a try needn’t mean an everlasting embrace. Along with that attitude came a knack for appreciating contradictions. Unlikely mixtures—challenging, upending convention. If you looked at LA, for instance, whatever its particular character, the trick was to respond, to reexamine, to see. It might be beauty in ugliness, as in an oil refinery or a polluted sunset. As the Japanese put it, the beauty of rust. The art of the imperfect.

It’s not as if I don’t see that fellow every few days anyway, but what he said was interesting. He wanted your opinion on Vietnam but you were occupied, Lecky said.

The name Bill Stringer was seen about in national-election seasons. He was a distinguished-looking public-opinion authority with his own small firm. His daughter exercised Lecky’s horses after school.

He wanted to know if you were for the struggle continuing as it has so far. I said you were either a patriotic pacifist or a pacifist patriot, Lecky said.

That’s pretty good. Did he say how he felt? I asked.

He really only cares about public opinion, I think. Habit, she said.

Thanks anyway. Half the time I don’t know what I think. I just tuned out Humphrey and Nixon.

I told him you knew we will lose even if we don’t have to and that pulling out was proof of weakness. But just pretending to be tough wasn’t worth dying for. He didn’t know I’d been there, she said.

Did you tell him how you thought it would go? I asked.

He asked, so I spoke. I told him I was one of very few who knew and cared, she said.

What did you say? I asked.

I said that what I still call my country will be complicit in things like the Japanese atrocities in China and it won’t matter to anyone.. We didn’t help the Hungarian revolutionaries, she said.

Was that the end of the Lecky interview? I asked.

Just about. What I wanted to tell you is his surely-you-jest public-opinion inkling. Many in the antiwar faction think we’re not fighting hard enough.

No kidding? I asked.

So the domestic right fattened after the summer of love and riots. Add to that the rightists in the peace movement and there’s a Nixon majority, she said.

This is too much to take in, I said.

Our problem is we talk only to those we know, she said.

I sense that we may be slipping away from news or public problems, I said. It’s important to change priorities when the time comes. In a couple of months our child will dominate all things.

So true, dad.

"Any names yet? I asked.

As a matter of fact Alma if it’s a girl and Sylain if it’s a boy.

Alma was my mother’s name and Sylvain was Lecky’s middle name. Bravo, I had come up dry.

_______________

In the city Lecky left me a message to call Olivia and Chan in Chicago. Until Lecky arrived, we three had been closest friends in the Caribbean for a big part of my tour. After her stint ran out, Olivia was next being sent to INR at State for three years. Intelligence and Research in Washington was like giving a Boeing engineer a job at Burger King. Chan had professional practice in the subject. He dismissed State’s short tour system. It cut into the long-term seasoning and judgment building relied on by Brits and Israelis. We had run out of respect for Britain’s spies, anyway, excepting those of Fleming and Le Carre. Olivia’s response was: no soap; don’t bother me with options. But she didn’t tell personnel until her leave was over. Olivia personally handed the ambassador in Rabat her letter of resignation. An identical copy was sent international mail without his knowing. Chan wanted to poke about in Africa for a few months, or until one or the other was bored. Between them they had several friends strewn among U. S. outposts around the continent. Now back in Chicago to see Olivia’s family, they had decided to marry in city hall the next day.

I’m there! I yelled into the phone.

Several of Lecky’s Connecticut subscribers had earlier chartered a bus. They were coming to meet her and have lunch the day of the impromptu wedding. I of course went alone, catching a plane to O’Hare that afternoon. Because of such short notice, central command was at Olivia’s sister’s Wrigleyville house. A few members of the Soto family took cabs downtown after the perfunctory ceremony. They chose a convivial Mexican restaurant. Waitresses and waiters sang and played guitars, button accordions, violins, horns. The mixture was joyous and intoxicating.

Move to San Francisco, said Olivia.

Why there? I asked.

We’re going to meander around the Pacific. Then we may find a house on a park in town. We’ll settle down, get jobs, and have a bunch of kids, she said.

Tell you what. I’ll steal your sis and move here if we can live in this joint, I said.

As my present, I asked the manager to call a photographer in to take pictures that I would pay for. When I showed my copies to Lecky, she asked about their honeymoon plans.

Samoa, Fiji, places like that across the Pacific, I said.

I had spared her details of my close calls at Wake Island. Now I faced a familiar impasse with foreign vets who had pulled through. Either play it down or scare the hell out of somebody or be charged with embellishing. And our flameout was only civilian-airline related. Could my part have been more passive? What sounded more hazardous than transoceanic flight, itself close to risk-free, was sailing a yacht to Los Angeles from Hong Kong. Two of Chan’s friends from high school had for years been delivering boats ordered from Hong Kong to the West Coast. He explained to me that the cost savings over there on a large yacht were so immense that they made it worth a year’s income for the couple. Time on the water didn’t vary as much as one feared, longer craft having good hull speed. Winds wrangled with a lot of variables, but traveling east put the westerlies at your back. Door to door, their worst experience was less than three months. They suspected that long-distance rifle shots had been taken at their boats, although there was no tangible evidence. Pirates didn’t know what they carried for defense but rightly assumed there had been precautions. Once Olivia heard that they docked here and there on the way home, she dropped any qualms about joining the pair. The physical fear angle she barely recognized. That the wife was a nurse reassured Olivia but also Chan.

‘Wow, was all I could think of to say. That and the fact that if either of my friends had been with me in Phu Bai, they would have faced week upon week of nonstop reading with more apprehension. Save for, well, Albany, I toted up in my head two score of men and women I had called friends in the last several years. The number dwindled down to a precious few" when I wondered which of us could have abided even a month alone together on a sailboat. Moving to a beloved but obscure corner of the northeast changed the Millwees’ social life beyond measure, but not in ways that mattered to us. We had kept our old friends. We just never saw them—our way of joking with a truth. Sure, we were often in New York and Charleston—I worked in New York—but there was less chance to sit around with nothing to do but talk.

_______________

Then there was the potentially momentous matter of the poisoned apple. Lecky and I meant by that the real but unofficial ties to the past, when military and diplomatic efforts were official. The legal fiction that the CIA did not operate domestically was preserved in part by the Tony LeComptes of the world. If there was an embassy, it was an FBI’s secret office. Except for the Hoover-arranged Caribbean exemption, Feed Bag Investigators were supposed to avoid foreign work. The Agency had people like my boss, Tony. Or Jim Thompson in Siam. They took on, supervised, and even carried out surreptitious projects for the government. Well, for part of the government, at least. People like that lived lives wholly apart from the huge but concealed apparatus of behind-the-scenes activity and research that bloomed off budget after World War II. These men and women did have reputations, and connections counted. Their loyalty was documented and double-checked, one assumed. Locker room chatter was that compensation was flexible and not tight-fisted. Many of those doing secret work had their own money. Others held jobs in law or law enforcement or libraries or journalism that kept travel untracked, and easier. Openhanded advances and reimbursements were crucial in such instances. Down a layer in authority but adding adventure and danger were characters like Tony’s friend Charles Rolo, whose nom de guerre was Jacques. My impressions were that they were secret agents in the popular sense. In essence working on a contract or deal basis for perhaps more than one employer, they lived outside the normal world.

Making up the last layer to which we might have had connections outright were employees of shops like the CIA. Identities came and went with the jobs they were on. Their lives were both boring and exhilarating, even terrifying and lethal at times. Woe betided people like young Jas Millwee who wished not to let go of career undercover friends like Pam (not her real name). On that score time would run out in 1969.

Pam Fleming had three lives, or even four. The three that counted began with her pretending to be his real girlfriend to a KGB agent who was passing as a nuclear engineer. For cover she worked as the operations manager of the small investment office I ran. The third job was appended to her like an extra body part. In an inexplicably unwise variance from professional codes and procedures, Pam was given more than one fake identity at the same time. This operational blunder was such a misstep that its motive may have been sheer pettiness gutting the first mission or writing off the agent, and by implication the agent’s supervisor, may well have been on the table. Pam’s fourth life was her true self in agency files, her original ID before being recruited.

In late spring the engineer boyfriend was told that he would be reassigned to the Ukraine in July. He informed Pam and his compatriot friends, even telling American comsymps, as the slur had it. Expressionless, each faked a response. All knew his real job was in Moscow. It was a few weeks later that Pam’s boss told her a decision was being made as to how to replace her on the second job. Two factions weighed in as to whether the job concerned a cakewalk anyone could handle or a hypersensitive warhead that could cost us a prime asset.

Not if. How, Pam said.

This time Pam didn’t show her feelings. I was more nervous than I could remember. At an insurance physical my blood pressure was 130 over 90 and the doctor gave me a prescription for a diuretic.

Don’t sweat it, it’ll go down. This crap is so nerve-racking, then you adjust.

Do you get, uh, hypertensive? I asked Pam.

Not yet. I have beta-blockers if I need them. They say never use them when there’s going to be anything rough. Dulls your judgment, she said.

Why not diuretics? I asked.

You hide in a house for hours and you have to take a nuclear piss, she said.

But aren’t you pleased? I am. Your mission being put first? I asked.

Going around with Jacques and Brodskaya wasn’t even a mission. It was rookie role play, or street whoring, she said, spitting Russian style.

Harsh, I said.

Look. I’m proud to be a pro. But any girl could do that, second week out.

So, you move to Moscow. You won’t have your own place, she said.

Maybe. Sascha’s nobody in KGB, he says, but they live way above their job.

Then what? I asked.

What, then what? she asked.

You invited me over, I said

This is hard. I’m like I need, I deserve, a vacation, she said.

You’re owed a sabbatical, I said.

Another drink? she asked.

Sure. Any snacks? I asked.

Yeah, I should have put something out. I’m nervous, too, she said.

I’m very, very glad just to be with you, I said.

Before I start, let me say that if I were married and you were single, I think you would initiate things.

I couldn’t imagine missing clues like I must have. I had no idea what to say. It wasn’t my turn, anyway.

You’re not right for me. I don’t know how to say it, but you always do the soft things. You set yourself up in this job. You retreat from your New York apartment to your sanitized ‘farm,’ she said. She made quote signs with her fingers.

Guilty, I said.

You always have safety nets. If you miss quota or blow a meeting, well, I’m not competitive. Not a businessman, I’m not a lifer, on and on, she said.

I asked to use the bathroom. In the mirror I looked normal—well, a little cornered. She spoke the truth. You don’t risk rejection. You married a high school girl ten years later, a square, a preacher. She won’t cheat, Pam said.

If you weren’t so good at psyching people out, I’d put up a defense, I said.

Don’t you even care how I feel? She did look exasperated.

Once you said to me, sort of a throwaway line, ‘the gift of a lifetime.’ I have held that near my heart, knowing I may not have heard it correctly, I said.

You heard right, she said.

OK. Then, and even now, and we haven’t known each other long, I saw myself as raw material. The person I am is phobic and insecure, but the person I married lives with my imperfections. I think I have good points. But compared to you, maybe not, I said.

See, you’re doing it. You confess it, but you don’t own it, she said.

We seldom say what we really mean except in a screaming match, I said.

Oh, Christ. You’re not thanking me, are you, wimp? Please don’t, she said.

I finished my drink.

Not the way you mean it. But I think you have feelings for me, I said.

She calmed down, lit a cigarette, opened a window.

I’m confused, she said. What I want is not to love you, not to make love with you, but even that comes and goes. What I want is to be with you. Physically present. Just us, she said.

A vacation? Marriage, I said.

Not marriage. I’m a long way from that, she said.

Man, I didn’t want to ruin this pivotal exchange.

I think about you more than anyone except my wife. What could we, you and I do, exactly, to be together?

Half a cigarette this time. Two or three ballet-like exercises. Probably secret Israeli self-defense moves.

I don’t know. I have fantasies, she said.

Are you followed when you go places? I asked.

Depends, she said.

One thing we could do. It’s a big compromise, I said.

Go out in a group? she asked.

No. Visit me, us, at the farm. Lecky won’t interfere with your and my time together, no matter how much, I said.

Peachy, she said.

No, it’s true. I leave her alone with sexy guys all the time. A horse thing. She knows I’m at your place tonight.

You guys downhill? she asked.

Almost every week, I said.

It sounds dopey, but OK, she said.

We were sitting on the sofa. She swung her legs away from me and lay back, putting her head in my lap. I held her hand, and in a few minutes she fell asleep. In a few minutes more, she woke, sat up, and it was time to go.

Night, sis, I said.

I’ve never had a brother, she said.

That wouldn’t stop us. I’m a southerner, I said.

Walking home I thought of Penny and Van. And T., and Willie and Blaise.

_______________

T. was an unfortunate parent in most ways. He was the father of Mitty Medlock because her mother’s lover at the time was functionally sterile. During the ten years since her birth, T. and Mitty had not met. Penny, his ex-wife, gave birth to a girl who died soon after. Her next child, also with T., was alive and well but living in the South, hundreds of miles from T. An irony in T.’s life separated him from the great majority of his Don Juan brothers. Since adolescence, he had consciously placed romance above sex and filial love above romantic love. Yet sex came to him effortlessly. For that reason?

But with children he had no more than tragically mixed outcomes. And as for romance he had had no lasting relationships. His recent lover, Willie, had briefly had me hoping she was looking for that.

After lunch T. and I walked over to Fifth and up to the park. Abandoning any bittersweet discussion of Willie, I tried again to learn more about why he and Penny had to split up.

Jas, you dated her. What exactly happened? he asked.

We were so similar, like friends but not friends. When we made out in her rec room, she didn’t seem to me excited at all. She was agreeable, but I wasn’t pushy beyond, you know, halfway there. One of her friends and I played strip poker with her on Christmas vacation. Penny lost all her clothes. I got in bed with her and jacked off. But for some reason it took me forever. After that, it tapered off, I said.

What about her brother?

We’re OK, I think. That very spring we had a shouting match about my unconventional attitudes toward college and success. ‘You’re just a fucking loser,’ he yells, and I popped him hard with a left, knocked him on his ass, I said.

Were you sorry? T. asked.

I guess, but it was an unthinking reflex. A long time went by before we talked again. He had said, ‘OK, that’s it.’ The rest of the Penny story you know, I said. To myself I said: I know nothing.

Remember the rough draft of our rocky road. I miss her every day. She was the right woman for me. Except there’s something insurmountable. I prayed, asking for help and strength. Like an invisible boulder in the road, he said.

T. had trouble with the last couple of sentences. Embarrassment, but genuine remorse, too.

You saw a therapist. I said.

But Penny either doesn’t know or she can’t tell. Or won’t tell. My divorce lawyer and I got friendly and one night he told me about his wife. Twenty good years but something isn’t right. He hears everything in the world from his clients, T. said.

That can’t be good, I said.

So he starts asking her, you know, about her past. Nothing. Silence. He goes back over everything he remembers about their early life. The conclusion he comes to is that her father, a politician, messed with his daughters, he said.

They split? I asked.

Yeah, but not cheerfully. And the funny thing is, I knew them socially, that when I told her about some people I know who are regret-free swingers, she looks at me—this is before the split—and says ‘I’d be interested in something like that.’ She wasn’t cold, he said.

One reason I knew you’d be good for her was she said she was a virgin, I said.

Ah, I’m not sure things she’s done make her squeamish over sex, he said.

We sat on a bench facing the late winter sun. I loved the park this time of year. T. looked sad, but in a Cary Grant kind of way.

They try to diagnose or treat this stuff, I guess you’d say physically. Dyspareunia? It’s one of those things like impotence where you’re way ahead if it’s physical. And on the other hand, you resist taking the ‘all in your mind’ easy way out. There are at least five or six items they look at, said T.

The day was shot. We went to the St. Regis for a cocktail before T. met Pauline after work. I called my office and left the number.

T., I met a girl who told about pain losing her cherry in school. For years getting off was hard.

Yeah. This wasn’t that. One of the atypical things about our fix was that we really clicked sexually from day one. I think by now that I can tell. But it was not long before it hurt enough to ruin it for her. She wanted me to continue if I enjoyed it. I didn’t, so we came up with other stuff. I couldn’t figure why she couldn’t tolerate nonvaginal or nonpenetration, you know, he said.

Service was a little slow here, a good thing as their drinks were so strong.

Did you ever make any progress? I asked.

"Just maybe, but it sure doesn’t help, and it’s a stretch," he said.

Your secret’s safe with me, I said.

Yeah, I know. Well, our phone bill was so high I looked through it. Lots of long calls were to Van. I thought little of it. I did note that it never slacked, T. said.

Apropos of phones, I did get a message. We were interrupted by the waiter.

On an unrelated thing, I mentioned to Penny that my sister and I didn’t seem to be able to keep a phone conversation going. I asked Penny ‘What’s your secret with Van?’ She was startled. ‘We never talk,’ she said. I said, ‘Take a took at the phone bills some time.’ She got out of bed and I could see her spread them out on the kitchen table, T. said.

Did it start a fight, I asked.

No. She got back in bed and said ‘You were right,’ he said.

I don’t know how to interpret that, I said.

Or any of it. Don’t know if you’ve experienced this. Your love life isn’t good with somebody. She implies to others that it’s your fault. Like you’re supposed to be the authority, the Mr. Fixit. It’s worth the effort with a keeper like Penny, even if it doesn’t work in the end. With someone like Willie, it’s futile when another man is bound to rake that hay shortly. If not already, he said.

It implies having you cure this some way was not Penny’s pressing goal, I said.

So, putting it into a bag of evidence, I’m of a mind that Penny’s in love with or something so strong with her brother that having another man is too conflicting with her true desires. Pain works its way to get between her and the new guy after a while, he said

I remember this subject has been brushed by others, I said.

Whenever I had alluded to Penny’s oddball maladies, everyone from Linda on had assumed they were self-induced. Linda was ten years ago. I kept mum.

_______________

My first call went to Maisie’s store, Bricolage, I left a message, which she returned from home. My opening gambit was to congratulate her for getting and keeping the Farrners Desk off the ground.

Did you notice my order for six? I asked.

Oh yes, what’s that all about?

I’m going to store them in a barn here until Christmas, then put the contents of my usual gift basket inside. Couple of bottles of wine, candy, cheese, nuts, prosciutto, all from around here. Personally deliver them from our pickup. A thirty-six Dodge Lecky’s grandmother had and we just got back from restoration. Two big customers who live close by here, the rest are in Manhattan. And no, you do not fucking get one until you open an account, I said.

I’ll open one, but do you know a decent broker? I sure don’t, she said.

Very funny, wiseass, I said. Listen, I had lunch with T. You predicted that one head on. He still says she’s the one for him but it’s hopeless. In a non-serious way he’s been seeing my old girlfriend, I said.

The tramp? Don’t answer that. How is he? she asked.

Not bad, considering his great life is squandered on a guy with needs that are old-fashioned.

Did he allow as how his life got trashed?

He has a reasoned-out idea. Good chance of being right.

‘What would you say?" she asked.

You first, I said.

The baby dying, but they had that other problem even before, she said.

Dyspareunia? I asked.

Yes, doctor, she said.

"He thinks in a sense the pain’s a sign her true self is saying you shouldn’t be doing that with that person," I said.

Is she a dyke? You never know, she said.

Nurses! A crush on her brother is T.’s best guess, I said.

It’s not totally uncommon, but the cause is physical, as a rule, she said.

They’ve really been there, I said, not exactly sure what I meant.

Something I witnessed in hospitals is a group of people in real pain with nothing, zero, wrong with their bodies, only their heads. Mass hysteria. Solo hysteria? Is that it?

I wonder if we’ll ever know, I said.

Or care. And you’ll sure never know, she said.

I care. And what do you mean I’ll never know? I asked.

Let’s drop it. I can’t keep my big mouth shut, she said.

I’m waiting, I said.

Everyone knows that Van is a little light in the loafers. Remember how furious he got when you forgot the Florida trip? People say you don’t know, she said.

I was, as usual, coldcocked by this supposedly common knowledge.

I still care about Penny, I said.

But a doofus doesn’t count. Hey, can’t you at least get the desk stocked in your town? she asked, already tired of my sexual-orientation cluelessness.

_______________

Our town had one large local grocery run by a family, one pricey grocer of greater quality with fewer aisles, and a couple of even smaller corner stores still butchering and being picky about vegetables. Two bakeries. Farm stands. Liquor stores. An A&P anchored our curious twist on a strip mall.

The town was still real, according to definitions we found applicable. Cities slapped together after the war used a different tongue. We also had several stores for clothing, shoes, and sporting goods. Three new-car dealers, a jeweler. Grouped together away from smaller retailers were hardware stores, an old survivor with oiled floors, nail bins, even a toy department.

I was driving slowly around town in an overdue attempt to assess places that might carry my farm desk line. There had to be a furniture store, or did there? I’d noted not much of an excuse for bookstores in this college town. And the bar scene was the closest to imaginary I’d laid eyes on anywhere. I needed to get directions but I didn’t want to ask an antique dealer or even a gift shop owner.

Our pharmacy served coffee and eggs at a marble soda fountain. The counter girl told me what I needed to know. Per local tradition, furniture stores and funeral homes were often part of the same family enterprise. That was our town’s situation. Kirk Nation was the chief funeral director, or undertaker. About eighty, he looked the part of a historical figure. The business clothes he wore I had seen only in old pictures. Already six foot two, he had a black hat with a three-inch crown. Just about halfway between knee and ankle swirled the hem of Kirk’s black coat. His fixedly downcast features were not chalky, just white in the extreme.

Kirk’s son, Odie, also an undertaker, ran the family furniture store alongside the funeral home. A driveway separated the buildings. After starting my tiny furniture manufacturer at the end of the fifties, I’d been attuned to a range of places to buy furniture—what they stocked, and how they were priced. Odie’s showrooms, however, were unique. One imagined that the building had been sealed in a giant autoclave. Under great pressure and heat, all evidence of taste, cultural reference, style, quality, and even functionality had reached a red-hot reductio ad absurdum. The farm desk was a tough sell to Odie. My manager’s innards bristled with contempt at his gestures. Odie’s charmless delivery was horribly wrong for dealing with customers, or any English-speaking biped. I started to say, sorry to bother you. But what I carefully said with good humor was, don’t do me any favors. Clapping him on his back, I replaced my sample in the truck bed.

It was a nice bright day. I was a little dressed up for slouching around the house and I liked poking about in the old pickup. Never having learned the town properly, I worried that I might have missed something.

I drove by the record store that would open and then close, as did the art gallery. Most of what was left was a collection of banks, doctors, dentists, lawyers, insurers, realtors, photographers, and architects. If I didn’t go home, I’d soon be poking about service stations, feed stores, and oil and coal dealers.

_______________

Pam has a few days off. Can she spend some time with us? Here? I asked.

Good idea. I’m very pro Pam. When? she asked.

A weekend when we can ski, I said.

Pick one and tell her, she said.

You definitely don’t mind, I said.

Look. It’s not a secret you two hammered this together, she said.

No, Lecky, I—

Don’t bother. It’s transparent. I couldn’t care less. I may be wrong, but the way I see it is you may be sweet on each other, but not falling in love, she said.

Why would you not get upset? I asked.

I trust you on big stuff. She’s not your type.

I still feel I’m causing trouble for us, I said.

"The only J’accuse from my side is not leveling with me. But I admit I may be off-key here myself."

I quit when I was no longer behind. Lecky felt something for Pam. That was the message. And Pam’s stand-in mother had shared herself with her husband and Pam’s father. The only unworldly character in our penny-dreadful was beginning to resemble Jas Millwee. My fear was more about being dropped from the team than having to play hardball.

That Friday I picked up Pam’s Stratos and put them on the Triumph’s rack. They looked a little short. Against Pam they reached less than head high.

Listen up, schnorrer, I was fitted at Rossignol’s plant, she said.

"Je suis desole, Mlle. Froggie," I said.

This is good, we’re fighting, right? she asked.

Only if you want to fuck and get married, I said.

You take the cake for ambiguity, she said.

Well, I wouldn’t be confident you’d be true, I said.

You’re not confident about women, period, she said.

I’m indeed not, but only about women who are my superiors, I said.

Those who aren’t your superiors are only true hoping you’ll stay hooked, she said.

Reductive, sly vixen. But then, why would you be true? I asked.

I’m not a hot blood, barely a warm blood, she said.

Not the dreaded cold blood? I asked.

Dreaded? Dreaded? Don’t you know anything about yourself? she asked.

You tell me, I said.

You’d be violating me each time, my lack of desire guaranteeing it. The proud, strong beauty humbled by the virile sire, she said.

OK, you win. My pulse rate just doubled; but why would that last long? I asked.

It wouldn’t, because nothing ever does. Almost nothing, she said.

Why would we be different, Pam? I asked.

I would see to it, she said.

Unable to sleep, I took the pieces of the Pam puzzle apart and put them together in different patterns. The most convincing redo was also the most outrageous. In my paranoid fantasy Tony had hired Pam to extend the LeCompte legacy. Seeing me as the most likely to succeed of those he would meet in his remaining years, he bade Pam win me away from Lecky. Not to keep me, but to drop me so Willie could pick me up off the floor. Cured of lust for the wholesome, denatured, I plough all energy into business. As to love and life, I become not a satyr but a cured sybarite. Like Tony himself, in a number of ways.

Lecky had sat up late snacking and Pam smoking.

There’s a fact about Pam that sends chills. Nothing we can’t handle, I said.

I’m listening, Lecky said.

She works for Tony, I said.

Blaise’s dad, Willie’s dad, Tony LeCompte. That connection just worries you now? What about when you debriefed her at the Mark? she asked.

Then I worried that she would disclose our plotting to him.

Wait, was this true?

Now it’s about her and us and her between us by design, I said.

Want an instant cure? Watch it as comedy, not tragedy. Poof. It’s gone, she said.

The aging king wants a spouse for his errant daughter. A spouse to succeed him. Only thing is, the perfect spouse is married to his perfect niece. King: David Niven. Jas: Ryan O’NeaI. Willie: Faye Dunaway. And you: Julie Christy. Pam: Diane Ladd, I said.

If you’re up, will you get me an air sickness bag? she asked.

Blaise: Warren Beatty. Marget: Katherine Ross, I said.

SHUT UP!

_______________

We had put snow tires on Gatland’s very large Pontiac Catalina station wagon. Until this weekend, though, we had not planned to cram it full of skiers. What had happened was that Louise Medlock had called Lecky on Friday afternoon. Not exactly spur of the moment; the plan to visit us took form once they remembered how snowy our hills were even last Thanksgiving. When flying over from the Vineyard for holidays with us, they ran the Cessna’s heater full blast half the way home. Now western Massachusetts was under snow cover for the duration. Skiing was overdue. Lecky arranged a sitter for the Medlock baby. I loaded their equipment on the wagon’s rack with Pam's and ours. Mittie’s little skis fit in the rear of the twenty-foot beast. Prospect, a small ski area half an hour away, had a good school. The director, Hal Arthur, was a fiend of ours. Several members of his talented family lived in or visited our town frequently. Hal had been the first black player on NYU’s varsity basketball team. Margaret Arthur, Hal’s aunt, had taught Pringle Latin before he transferred to Deerfield.

The Medlocks rose early and with the light behind them touched down at Harriman-and-West just as I drove up. I left the motor running during breakfast. Driving without effort on dry roads, I appreciated the huge 428-cubic inch engine. Grundy’s had convinced Garland it was perfect for towing a horse trailer.

Do you know any of the Arthurs from Hickory? I asked Louise.

I know there are a number of them, she said.

After going into how the Arthurs settled in town after the Civil War, I mentioned that Hal had met a few Degraffenreids while visiting relatives on trips to North Carolina. I hoped Louise wouldn’t think this was my obsessing on black people. It turned out that Louise had become as indifferent to skin color on the Vineyard as Hal on the other end of the state. And if she were just practicing diplomacy, it was a polished job. Hal took over Light’s teaching himself, one hour in the morning and one in the afternoon. Mitty was part of a kids’ group and Lecky skied with Pam, both fairly advanced. After lunch Louise and I spent a few hours up and down the T-bar lifts. For the first time she showed the same interest in T. that she would have in a casual friend. Maybe I was over thinking the eccentric ties among us all. It was a logical assumption, however, that getting pregnant with Light as the natural father let her off the T. hook. Until then, the possibility that T. might be needed to father another child may have delayed her sorting out their past give and take.

Light and Hal had fought in cold-weather wars, respectively the Ardennes Offensive and Korea. Louise’s father later died of wounds received in the Battle of the Bulge, where black Americans went into combat. When Hal joined us at the Bluejacket for a drink and fondue, Pam clarified several points about the pre-Christmas Allied liberation of Strasbourg and its New Years’ Day attempted recapture by he Germans. I alone knew that her shop had posted her there not long ago.

We needed to get home for the Medlocks’ baby and to eat dinner. Lecky invited Hal to stop around if he had any free time that evening. Pam wasn’t the kind of woman you met in a tame college town. Thus we knew we’d be seeing him. Louise