‘That they might get tired of the legal process and just snatch her?’
This seemed to me a reasonable concern — so reasonable I could hardly believe Mattie had ever let her little girl go to the old man in the first place. In custody cases, as in the rest of life, possession tends to be nine tenths of the law, and if Mattie was telling the truth about her past and present, a custody hearing was apt to turn into a tiresome production even for the rich Mr. Devore.
Snatching might, in the end, look like a more efficient solution.
‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘I guess it’s the logical thing, but that wasn’t really it. I just got afraid.
There was nothing I could put my finger on. It would get to be quarter past six in the evening and I’d think, “This time that white-haired bitch isn’t going to bring her back. This time she’s going to . .
. ”’
I waited. When nothing came I said, ‘Going to what?’
‘I told you, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I’ve been afraid for Ki since spring. By the time June came around, I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I put a stop to the visits. Kyra’s been off-and-on pissed at me ever since. I’m pretty sure that’s most of what that Fourth of July escapade was about.
She doesn’t talk about her grandfather very much, but she’s always popping out with “What do you think the white nana’s doing now, Mattie?” or “Do you think the white nana would like my new dress?” Or she’ll run up to me and say “Sing, ring, king, thing,” and ask for a treat.’
‘What was the reaction from Devore?’
‘Complete fury. He called again and again, first asking what was wrong, then making threats.’
‘Physical threats?’
‘Custody threats. He was going to take her away, when he was finished with me I’d stand before the whole world as an unfit mother, I didn’t have a chance, my only hope was to relent and let me see my granddaughter, goddammit.’
I nodded. ‘”Please don’t shut me out” doesn’t sound like the guy who called while I was watching the fireworks, but that does.’
‘I’ve also gotten calls from Dickie Osgood, and a number of other locals,’ she said. ‘Including Lance’s old friend Richie Lattimore. Richie said I wasn’t being true to Lance’s memory.’
‘What about George Footman?’
‘He cruises by once in awhile. Lets me know he’s watching. He hasn’t called or stopped in. You asked about physical threats — just seeing Footman’s cruiser on my road feels like a physical threat to me. He scares me. But these days it seems as if everything does.’
‘Even though Kyra’s visits have stopped.’
‘Even though. It feels . . . thundery. Like something’s going to happen. And every day that feeling seems to get stronger.’
‘John Storrow’s number,’ I said. ‘Do you want it?’
She sat quietly, looking into her lap. Then she raised her head and nodded. ‘Give it to me. And thank you. From the bottom of my heart.’
I had the number on a pink memo-slip in my front pocket. She grasped it but did not immediately take it. Our fingers were touching, and she was looking at me with disconcerting steadiness. It was as if she knew more about my motives than I did myself.
‘What can I do to repay you?’ she asked, and there it was.
‘Tell Storrow everything you’ve told me.’ I let go of the pink slip and stood up. ‘That’ll do just fine. And now I have to get along. Will you call and tell me how you made out with him?’
‘Of course.’
We walked to my car. I turned to her when we got there. For a moment I thought she was going to put her arms around me and hug me, a thank-you gesture that might have led anywhere in our current mood — one so heightened it was almost melodramatic. But it was a melodramatic situation, a fairy-tale where there’s good and bad and a lot of repressed sex running under both.
Then headlights appeared over the brow of the hill where the market stood and swept past the All-Purpose Garage. They moved toward us, brightening. Mattie stood back and actually put her hands behind her, like a child who has been scolded. The car passed, leaving us in the dark again . .
. but the moment had passed, too. If there had been a moment.
‘Thanks for dinner,’ I said. ‘It was wonderful.’
‘Thanks for the lawyer, I’m sure he’ll be wonderful, too,’ she said, and we both laughed. The electricity went out of the air. ‘He spoke of you once, you know. Devore.’
I looked at her in surprise. ‘I’m amazed he even knew who I was. Before this, I mean.’
‘He knows, all right. He spoke of you with what I think was genuine affection.’
‘You’re kidding. You must be.’
‘I’m not. He said that your great-grandfather and his great-grandfather worked the same camps and were neighbors when they weren’t in the woods — I think he said not far from where Boyd’s Marina is now. ‘They shit in the same pit,’ is the way he put it. Charming, huh? He said he guessed that if a couple of loggers from the TR could produce millionaires, the system was working the way it was supposed to. “Even if it took three generations to do it,” he said. At the time I took it as a veiled criticism of Lance.’
‘It’s ridiculous, however he meant it,’ I said. ‘My family is from the coast. Prout’s Neck. Other side of the state. My dad was a fisherman and so was his father before him. My great-grandfather, too. They trapped lobsters and threw nets, they didn’t cut trees.’ All that was true, and yet my mind tried to fix on something. Some memory connected to what she was saying. Perhaps if I slept on it, it would come back to me.
‘Could he have been talking about someone in your wife’s family?’
‘Nope.
There are Arlens in Maine — they’re a big family — but most are still in Massachusetts. They do all sorts of things now, but if you go back to the eighteen-eighties, the majority would have been quarrymen and stonecutters in the Malden-Lynn area. Devore was pulling your leg, Mattie.’ But
even then I suppose I knew he wasn’t. He might have gotten some part of the story wrong — even the sharpest guys begin to lose the edge of their recollection by the time they turn eighty-five — but Max Devore wasn’t much of a leg-puller. I had an image of unseen cables stretching beneath the surface of the earth here on the TR — -stretching in all directions, unseen but very powerful.
My hand was resting on top of my car door, and now she touched it briefly. ‘Can I ask you one other question before you go? It’s stupid, I warn you.’
‘Go ahead. Stupid questions are a specialty of mine.’
‘Do you have any idea at all what that “Bartleby” story is about?’
I wanted to laugh, but there was enough moonlight for me to see she was serious, and that I’d hurt her feelings if I did. She was a member of Lindy Briggs’s readers’ circle (where I had once spoken in the late eighties), probably the youngest by at least twenty years, and she was afraid of appearing stupid.
‘I have to speak first next time,’ she said, ‘and I’d like to give more than just a summary of the story so they know I’ve read it. I’ve thought about it until my head aches, and I just don’t see. I doubt if it’s one of those stories where everything comes magically clear in the last few pages, either. And I feel like I should see — that it’s right there in front of me.’
That made me think of the cables again — cables running in every direction, a subcutaneous webwork connecting people and places. You couldn’t see them, but you could feel them. Especially if you tried to get away. Meanwhile Mattie was waiting, looking at me with hope and anxiety.
‘Okay, listen up, school’s in session,’ I said.
‘I am. Believe me.’
‘Most critics think Huckleberry Finn is the first modern American novel, and that’s fair enough, but if “Bartleby” were a hundred pages longer, I think I’d put my money there. Do you know what a scrivener was?’
‘A secretary?’
‘That’s too grand. A copyist. Sort of like Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol. Only Dickens gives Bob a past and a family life. Melville gives Bartleby neither. He’s the first existential character in American fiction, a guy with no ties . . . no ties to, you know . . . ‘
A couple of loggers who could produce millionaires. They shit in the same pit.