------- ------- NEWHOUSE ------- Part I – The Life ------- ------- Chapter 1 ------- ------- ------- "If it's any of my business, how the devil did you ever get into that bally jungle?" ------- "I was born there," said Tarzan quietly. "My mother was an ape, and she couldn't tell me much about it. I never knew my father." ------- ------- Martin Newhouse closed the tattered paperback and slid it under the thin hospital pillow. He lay with his fingers laced behind his head and inspected his ample stomach and spindly legs. “Bird legs” Eve called them, but they’d carried him without complaint for nearly sixty years. ------- As a young man he’d been slim and strong, a fine athlete although only five feet six inches tall. He was captain of the soccer team at the Malanthy School and played varsity football for three years at University City High. Even the biggest men went down with Martin clamped to one leg. In 1928, he won both the hundred yard dash and the javelin throw in a St. Louis County track meet, a performance unlikely ever to be duplicated. His hero in those years was Johnny Weismuller, the Olympic swimmer who would later play a lumpish movie Tarzan. ------- Martin threw himself into every sport with such enthusiasm that it was rarely noticed he didn’t seem to care who won. In a game with Ferguson High during his senior year the other team came to the field a man short, and Martin offered to change sides. He knew City’s plays and held them scoreless until they assigned two men to sit on him. Eve Frohock, a Ferguson cheerleader, yelled herself hoarse for the handsome right end who’d taken on his own school. His hair was thick and black in those days, and he was thought vaguely to resemble Clark Gable. They called him the Cleated Sheik. Eve had caught his eye, but when Martin looked for her after the game the cute blond was nowhere to be found. ------- Martin studied his small feet and wiggled his toes. He felt like hell, but he was damned if he was ready to die. He glanced up and saw a large man just outside the door to his room, staring at him with distaste. The stranger’s overcoat was draped over his shoulders. He had short sandy hair, a well-trimmed beard, and stood like a military officer. Merchant marine, Martin fantasized. When he raised his eyebrows, the man walked on, and Martin felt relieved. He’d been reminded for some reason of his stepfather at the dinner table, waiting to backhand him with his heavy ring for any wisecrack. ------- Paul Russell Newhouse had been dead for nearly twenty years. Martin rarely even thought of him. Paul hadn’t kept his promise to adopt Martin when he married Lulu Jenneman, and he hadn’t been much of a father in any sense. He spent his free time playing golf or bridge. In later years he took up deep sea fishing and the stock market. Martin was never one of his interests. ------- The last time he saw his stepfather was on a visit to Florida during the war, when Paul took Martin and his young son fishing at John’s Pass near St. Petersburg Beach. Bud snagged his hook on the rocks and Paul muttered something about expensive tackle. Martin was so angry he stripped to his underwear and dived into the dangerous current to untangle the lure. -------Bud managed to choke down one of the gluey tongue-on-rye sandwiches that Paul had brought for their lunch, and Martin was proud of him. They never saw P.R. again. ------- “Sir, would you like a magazine?” ------- Martin looked up to see a pretty girl in a candy-striped jumper waving a copy of U.S. News. ------- “Do you have anything else?” ------- “Newsweek, sir, and I have Time.” ------- “Time? Lucky you,” Martin said. “Sorry, miss,” he added. “Not right now, thanks.” ------- If P.R. spoke to Martin at all it was only to criticize him. Martin learned to stay out of his sight. He spent most of his time at friends’ houses or running for miles on the high school track. He was glad to take a job as a clerk on a pipe-laying crew that Paul found for him the summer before he left for college. -------The patch of blue he could see through the window of his hospital room reminded him of the Oklahoma skies that long ago July. The job was nothing, someone’s favor to his old man. He felt foolish making check marks on a clipboard while the sweaty crew ignored him. But when the half-witted kid they had kicking down the forty-foot steel pipes from the railroad cars onto the big flatbed diesel trucks managed to get both his ankles smashed, Martin eagerly volunteered to replace him. -------They laid an oil line across Southern Oklahoma and into Texas. Martin jumped the rolling pipes and landed on his feet as skillfully as he’d carried the ball for City. The crew respected him now, and the rank old villain who shared scruffy hotel rooms with him and slept in his boots all summer became a friend. Some days Martin walked beside the silent Navaho who went ahead of the trenching operation to shoot rattlesnakes with his long-barreled revolver. He’d kept a few yellowed snapshots of oil pipes being loaded onto White diesel trucks and a picture of the whole crew, with Martin among them looking small and mean. ------- He had too many beers one night in Wichita Falls, Texas and woke in the morning to find his initials tattooed on a scroll inside his forearm. His colleagues were dismayed. Several of them had been identified by their tattoos on wanted posters. For years Martin wore long-sleeved shirts, but the initials had faded over time and were almost lost among the bruises from his I-V. ------- "Belly dancing, Martin?" The floor nurse was grinning at him from the doorway. "That’s a no-no, hon. It puts pressure on your heart." ------- Martin smiled and lowered his arms. ------- “What did you say to that poor girl?” ------- “Miss Peppermint? I told her I didn’t want a Time magazine.” ------- “You upset her.” ------- “Sorry,” Martin said. “I wasn’t thinking. I’m tired of reading about the damned war. The politicians should go at each other with samurai swords and leave the kids out of it.” ------- “Good idea, just save the anger.” ------- “I know, it’s bad for my heart. Peppermint’s a swell kid, but maybe slapping down old farts isn’t her thing.” ------- “You could be right,” the nurse said. ------- P.R. was a millionaire on margin by the late twenties. He couldn’t refuse Martin a college education, but he insisted on a business course. Martin would have preferred to study journalism. -------He boxed and wrestled for his fraternity at the University of Missouri and was their social chair as well. Under his direction the Sig Eps spent an entire week folding paper roses to cover the ceiling of their ballroom for a sweetheart dance. Martin's academic efforts were less focused, but he’d learned the basics of business administration before flunking out in his senior year. -------It hadn’t mattered to him back then. He’d gotten all he really wanted from college, which was Eve Frohock. He’d recognized the little Ferguson cheerleader as she danced the Black Bottom on a parade float and had stumbled down the fraternity house stairs before she could get away a second time. -------Eve and Martin carried on a casual courtship for the next three years. They both came from wealthy families, but only Eve had pocket money. She drove a ’29 Chrysler convertible and loaned Martin a dollar every Sunday so they could buy onion sandwiches. They eloped a month before Eve's graduation. ------- That all seemed like a very long time ago. Martin had been Corporate Secretary of U. S. Tobacco Products for the past five years. He was listed in Who's Who once but was just as glad to be dropped the next year when he didn’t buy another copy. ------- He listened to the beep of his heart monitor. It was annoying, but most of the time he didn’t hear it at all. Bolo Anderson said they were pulling for him at the office. Andy was the president and his best friend. Andy considered him an honorary North Carolinian, because Martin could mimic the southern drawl the other officers had retained through decades of living in Rye and New Rochelle. -------"Cain't lose our Happy Warrior," Andy said. ------- Andy called him that because of his cheerful practicality more than his round-faced resemblance to Hubert Humphrey. Decades of office work had softened the rakish Clark Gable look-alike. Martin was a capable manager who was generous to his staff, and Andy cherished a belief in employee loyalty. Andy had begun his own career as a stable boy on J.B. Andrews' stud farm in Winston-Salem and had been the old man's protégé as Martin was his. Martin assured him that he was doing fine. ------- The joke about his looking like the Democratic Vice-President was better than Andy knew. Eve and Martin had left the University as devoted followers of Emil Schute, a charismatic sociology professor and Trotskyite. Newly married and jobless, they spent the summer after Eve’s graduation reading poetry in Eve’s back yard and stuffing envelopes for Norman Thomas. It was another source of irritation for Eve's father, who mistakenly blamed their liberal politics on his son-in-law. ------- They’d voted Republican since 1952, when Martin became a junior officer at UST, but he admired Humphrey as a compassionate man and a skillful politician. ------- There were voices in the hallway. The chief cardiologist swept through with half-a-dozen medical students. Their white coats and twitchy faces reminded Martin of nervous laboratory rats. The students avoided eye contact while Hirschhorn described a fifty-eight year old sedentary male, a heavy smoker who’d survived a major heart attack and appeared to be recovering. It sounded like a moral judgment. ------- “What about family history?” Martin asked. They all looked at him in astonishment. -------His mother and grandmother had both survived serious heart attacks in late middle age. They each carried two hundred pounds on five-foot frames and continued to scrub their houses with Teutonic fury into their mid-eighties. ------- “It’s a factor,” Hirschhorn snapped and continued his lecture. -------Martin wasn’t entirely sedentary. He cut the grass and raked the few leaves that blew onto their lawn and sometimes he walked the twenty blocks from Penn Station to his office. Naturally he smoked. Everyone smoked at U.S. Tobacco. Their response to the Surgeon General’s Report had been to buy a cat food company and to begin importing scotch whiskey. Martin’s liquor cabinet was always full. Just thinking of it reminded him how much he missed the cocktail hour with Eve, and despite the formulaic quality of the doctor’s assurances he’d begun to think he might live to enjoy these small pleasures again. He badly wanted to. In the aggrieved last words of Cecil Rhodes, he had too much to do. ------- He dozed off and wakened again when a middle-aged woman set a tray on his bedside table. ------- "Good morning, Mr. Newhouse! You're looking chipper today. Don’t you think it’s time we did something about those whiskers?" ------- "Whiskers?” Martin said. "Let me see them.” ------- "What’s that, dear?" ------- “Do you have a mirror? I’d like to see how I look.” ------- The woman left and came back in a minute with a mirror. She was laughing. Another nurse grinned at them from the hallway. Martin studied his face. It was pale and battered, but his whiskers were nearly a quarter of an inch long and were coming in evenly. ------- "I’m going to grow a beard," he told her. The possibility had just occurred to him. ------- "It's your face, hon," she said. Something about him seemed to puzzle her. ------- "Hubert Humphrey," Martin said resignedly. ------- Her mouth dropped open and then she laughed. "Don't you though! If it wasn't for the whiskers... That must be interesting." ------- "It’s a pain in the butt!" ------- A guffaw erupted from beyond the nylon curtain beside his bed. He’d acquired a room mate. ------- The woman smiled. "My hubby swears by the Hump. I'll have them put it on your chart about the shaving, Mr. Newhouse.” She hesitated in the doorway. “You know, dear, a beard could give your face some character.” ------- Another laugh. ------- "She’s right you know." The voice was deep and authoritative.. ------- “It could use some,” Martin said. “And you, sir...?" ------- "Kostas Kikapopoulos. I teach history at the University." ------- "Martin Newhouse. The history of what?" ------- "Excellent question!" ------- “Is it?” -------"Absolutely. Most people think of history as one long, dull story, but it’s more like a battlefield piled with unidentified corpses. The past is all we really have, though. The present and the future are just words." ------- Unidentified corpses, just words? Martin had always visualized history as a giant hourglass that funneled the sun-bleached stones and broken columns of Greece through the narrow neck of Palestine before it opened into the confusion of the medieval and modern world. -------"I read somewhere that the present lasts three seconds," he said. It was awkward not to see the other man’s face. ------- “That’s the ‘remembered present’, my friend. It’s as much in the past as Napoleon and Plato. Are you a reader?" ------- "I read a little," Martin risked. “I don’t feel I know very much." ------- "The wisdom of Socrates, amigo. None of us knows very much. What are you reading now?" ------- He thought about the paperback under his pillow. -------"I’m partway through Millicent Whatley's History of Early Medieval Europe." It was in his bag, but he hadn’t felt up to it. ------- “Whatley,” Kostas said, sounding doubtful. “I'll give you my book on the Byzantines. So, who are you really, Martin? When you’re not in the hospital growing a beard." ------- "I’m just a businessman. I'm... I’ve been the Corporate Secretary of U.S. Tobacco Products for the last few years." ------- "A captain of industry who reads! What do they think of you at your office?" ------- "We don’t talk about books, and I’m hardly a captain of industry. The Secretary's Department pays the taxes and writes the Annual Report. The president says we don't earn a dime." ------- "I’m sure he's worth every penny of his generous salary?" ------- "Andy’s a good guy. His predecessor was fourth generation Carolina gentry. Dumb as a stick, but he was generous to me. It's thanks to him I'm not a chicken farmer in Missouri. That still has its appeal." ------- "A chicken farmer! I’m sure there are better alternatives to the rat race, Martin. I hope you aren’t planning to go back to work. I don't mean to offend you, but writing annual reports is no occupation for a thinking man." ------- "It pays very well, Professor, and I have a thick hide." ------- "Will they let you keep your beard?" ------- "God, no. We’re much too serious. We’ve been called a bank with a tobacco front. I'll ask me my wife to take a picture." ------- "So it’s your money or your life? That wouldn’t be a difficult choice for me, mon vieux." ------- Mon vieux? Did he sound that old? ‘Your money or your life’ was a fair way to put it. He and Eve had been looking forward to his retirement when it could include a house at Boca Raton and a cottage on Casco Bay. They'd talked of a cruise through the Greek islands. But Kikapopoulos was right. If not now, when? ------- Martin’s mental checklists rarely settled anything, but they helped him live with his decisions. This time the choice appeared to be between retirement while he was able to enjoy it and the income to make it possible. ------- ------- ------- Chapter 2 ------- ------- "Mikinos, my friend, is the most beautiful island on earth. It's a paradise of olive groves and whitewashed stone, purified by sunlight and set in the bluest of blue seas." ------- "Sounds nice," Martin agreed. ------- Eve and Martin liked to travel. They’d been to Europe twice in the past five years. Martin’s photographs filled several albums, and he had a shoebox full of match books and beer coasters as well as a doughnut-shaped pebble from Brighton beach, a piece of granite picked up at Stonehenge on a rainy morning when he was alone with the megaliths and a stray goat, and a chip of marble from the Coliseum. His prize find was the finial bottom of an amphora that he’d unearthed with the toe of his shoe at Ephesus. ------- They’d even enjoyed the drive from New Jersey to St. Louis the previous July for the first and only Jennemann family reunion. West of Chicago, U.S. 30 crossed northern Illinois through nearly deserted towns that reminded Martin of his childhood. The white clapboard houses, worn storefronts, and dusty streets were little changed since the long drives from St. Louis to his uncle’s house in Redbud fifty years before, but now the countryside seemed emptied of life. They roamed south and west on back roads through central Missouri to visit the University before heading for St. Louis. -------Most of the Jennemanns had done well in life, but they were no more interesting than they’d ever been. Missouri, too, had lost whatever appeal it might once have held for Martin. ------- The only other Missourian at the New York office of UST was Harvey Moss. Harvey and his wife spent every vacation on the hog farm in Joplin that they owned with Harvey's brother Pete. Martin mildly envied them their pedigreed Hampshires, but he'd been glad to leave St. Louis in 1947 and had no wish to return. He’d been back only twice in twenty years, the second time for his mother's funeral and that was the better trip. Lulu had lived a full life by the age of eighty eight. She’d survived two husbands and several lovers, enjoyed a long stretch of financial independence, and had spoiled five grandchildren. Martin had to remind his doleful cousins how much Lulu would have enjoyed her own wake. ------- At Eve’s request, they drove past the brick row houses Martin had helped his uncle Lee build when he was eighteen. It brought back memories of hide-and-seek in the back alleys and among the ash pits, the prickly feel of horsehair sofas on bare legs, of portieres and doilies, and the smell of sauerkraut. Lee's houses were in good condition, but the streets around them had deteriorated badly. It was a slum. ------- He was suddenly aware of Kostas’s voice. ------- "Mikinos was an island where each man was king, but not even kings could make a living. We left after the First World War and began our long journey to the Promised Land. It’s a grand bit of social history, Martin. I'm sorry I didn’t realize it soon enough to collect my parents’ stories while they were alive. They say exiled Greeks die of homesickness, but my mother passed on last year at eighty-five and my father went the year before, full of life at ninety. The aunts and uncles are dead now and the younger generation has no interest in the past. It’s a pity. ------- "Just imagine a mountainous countryside dotted with temples that were already in ruins three thousand years ago and weekly markets that have been bustling since the Bronze Age. The Greek islands saw the beginnings of Western civilization while northern Europeans hunkered in caves. Our children depress me, Martin. Do you know anything of your own roots, my friend?" ------- "A little," Martin admitted. "My wife and I have done some genealogical research." ------- "Begats!" Kostas snorted. ------- "More than that. Eve's ancestors fought in the Revolution. My own background is hazy, but the stories are entertaining. I’ve told our kids that all four of their great grandmothers were barmaids." ------- "A noble profession." ------- "Two of them owned taverns. Our families were earthy but colorful." It was a strangely intimate conversation to be having with someone whose face he’d still not seen. ------- "I assume you were referring to the American Revolution a moment ago?" Kostas said. ------- "My wife's a member of the D.A.R.,” Martin told him. “She thought our children might find it useful. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t, and Eve hasn't been to a meeting in years." ------- "These are the ladies who turned Marion Anderson away?" ------- "As painted with their tea cups by Grant Wood. She sang at the Lincoln Monument instead, which turned out to be a better location. They’re prejudiced and snobby, but so am I. I sneer at bankers and business executives. At least the D.A.R. gives scholarships and funds historical preservation. Don't you find our Revolution interesting?" ------- "I'm familiar with the events, Martin, but I haven’t studied the period in detail. I gather that not that many Americans have. Must your wife’s forebears have been combatants for her to be a member?" ------- "I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure the descendents of the merchants who supplied the troops with tainted beef at a high price would qualify. How else would most of the D.A.R. have gotten in? But Eve’s great, great, great, great grandfather, Thomas Frohock, was a regular foot soldier in the New Hampshire militia. According to the Maine Historical Recorder he was pressed into the British navy and jumped ship in Portsmouth, New Hampshire to join the Colonials. I’m sure life on an eighteenth century brigantine was grim, but I’d like to think he knew an opportunity when he saw one. He wasn’t a coward, and he didn’t escape the fighting. The War Rolls say he marched from Maine to Canada with Benedict Arnold and was in the platoon commanded by William Eastman that dug entrenchments on Bunker Hill. There was a relief every two hours, but Thomas worked all night and earned a commendation. It may have been mostly self-preservation. The fortifications at Bunker Hill are quite small. I know I'd have been terrified." ------- "You can’t know that." Kostas sounded surprisingly serious. "It seems your Thomas was a regular Yankee Doodle." ------- "My wife's Thomas, actually, and I’d say more a Yankee-come-lately. 'Jan Cheese' is what the New York Dutch called the clod-hopping English settlers in Connecticut. Unless ‘Yankee’ is from the Cherokee for ‘coward’. At any rate, Thomas became a New Englander after the war. He was given £9 and a piece of land in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. We mean to look for his grave some day. -------“He married a Katherine Kelly, an Irish girl who they said peeled boiled potatoes with her fingernails. They had fifteen sons and daughters, and most of them lived to raise their own families. Kate must have been tough as leather. ------- "Their fourth child, another Thomas Frohock, was born in 1785. As a young man he moved to Lincolnville on the Maine coast and married a local girl. They had thirteen children, and their offspring stayed in the area long enough to have a mountain and a creek named after them. We ought to be up to our eyeballs in Frohocks." ------- "They can't have all survived, Martin. The settlers had to be fruitful, because their children died in droves when the crops failed or the flu struck." ------- “We did see lots of pitiful little gravestones in Lincolnville,” Martin said, “but I’d always assumed the big families just happened over the long winters." ------- "Without television? They practiced birth control when they wanted to, amigo. But children were their social security and their status symbol. I suppose they’re a basic human desire as well, just not one of mine. Individual human beings were considered assets back then. If they were healthy, they earned their keep, and if they weren't, they died young and without expensive medical care. Fifteen children does sound excessive, but you can't count on the nurturing instincts of every child. Your wife’s from New England?" ------- "She grew up in St. Louis, but she was born in East Boston. The Frohocks farmed along the Maine coast. Their descendants shipped out as fishermen and whalers out of New Bedford. A Captain Frohock was captured by the British in 1812. ------- "Eve's grandfather left the sea in the 1860's to join the Boston police force. He must have been a good cop, because became a lieutenant even though he wasn’t Irish. His son Maurice, Eve's father, was the first in the family to get an education. He won the Latin Prize at Boston Latin School and was planning to go to Harvard on a scholarship when he got the girl next door in trouble. The families kept the marriage secret while my grandmother finished high school and Maurice got a job. He’s the one who should have stayed in school. He had the intelligence and the moxie. It's another reason he was upset when his daughter eloped with a college dropout. ------- "You eloped! How romantic." ------- "It was purely practical. We wouldn’t have had a chance in St. Louis. A man was supposed to be able support his family, and I couldn't even support myself. I’d flunked out of college and was lucky to have a job pumping gas. I drove up to Columbia on a Saturday night, and when Eve got back from a date, we collected her best friend and my drunken former roommate and woke up a Baptist minister. My roommate went to prison with the Pendergast gang a few years later, and the minister ended up in an asylum. We decided to consider these good omens. ------- "Maurice was a conductor on the Boston & Lynn Railroad for two years before he moved his family to New York City. They lived on Columbus Circle, near the old Madison Square Garden. I can’t imagine Eve's mother as a New Yorker. Emily was sweet and not stupid, but she always acted helpless. I think Maurice liked her that way. She was a beautiful girl and still attractive in her eighties with skin like a china figurine. I don't mean I didn't like her, because I did. Our kids adored her. ------- "Maurice got a job as a time-and-motion man for the Kerry Company in New York, one of the world’s first systems-management firms. F. W. Taylor had just done his experiments with shovels and published Principles of Management. Self- advancement may have been easier back in the days of Horatio Alger, but I think Maurice would have succeeded in any age. He was the vice-president of a chemical company when I met him. He wore expensive three-piece suits and smoked Havana cigars. He knew I wasn’t good enough for his baby girl, but getting married was her idea, and he was pretty decent to me in the long run. ------- "He was offered a management position with Malinkrodt Chemicals in St. Louis in 1917. The Malinkrodts were Jewish, but Maurice was red-haired and olive-skinned. He looked more Jewish than they did. They called him Morrie and managed to forget where he came from." ------- "St. Louis is where the Frohocks and the Newhouses got together?" ------- "Not right away. My biological father was a building contractor named Martin von Engle who claimed to be descended from European nobility. His grandfather was Baron Johann Friedrich von Engle, a Prussian general born in 1788 and killed in 1848 in the war between Denmark and Schleswig Holstein. The Baron’s lands were confiscated, and his one surviving son, also named Johann, sailed for the U.S. with his mother and sister. Both women died on the voyage, and Johann arrived in New Orleans alone and with no assets but his size and strength." ------- "The classic immigrant, Martin, only he’d have inherited his father's title." ------- "If the story’s true. Apparently my old man was a champion bullshitter. His sister used to say, 'There goes Marty clearing his throat, getting ready to tell another lie.' It’s more likely that John Engle was one of the starving peasants who were forced to leave Germany in the 1850’s. In any case, he found a job on a Mississippi side-wheeler around the time Mark Twain was working as a river pilot. I've wondered if he and Twain ever met and if Engle could have been the inspiration for the Duke in Huckleberry Finn." ------- "A charlatan as I recall.” said Kostas. “Some say that hucksterism was the basis of American civilization." -------"It still is. The Duke was a medicine show man and a good model for Engles to come. Johann made money somehow and went north to Cairo, Illinois and then up the Ohio and the Wabash to Terre Haute, Indiana. He bought a farm outside Indianapolis and married Nancy Flesher, a girl from a Pennsylvania mining family. But it’s also possible that he was the John Engel that the 1870 Census says was born in Illinois. ------- "At any rate, my father was definitely born on a farm in Indiana in 1872, the oldest of five children. He said he couldn’t be a farmer, because farm work was never finished. So he taught himself carpentry and was bossing a construction crew by his late teens. He claimed to have built half the barns within a hundred miles of Indianapolis. German barns, the English had built dinky little barns until the Germans showed them how do to it right. ------- “My father was a bastard, but evidently he was a good builder. He owned a construction company in St. Louis by the time he was thirty. They built houses and office buildings and a few barns, he said, for old time's sake. His Princess Theater was famous for its stonework, one of his specialties. Years later, he ran an ornamental masonry and iron-work company in Chicago. He helped put up some of the iron clad buildings they're just beginning to restore." ------- "An impressive man. So why aren’t you an Engle." ------- "My mother divorced him in 1912. The last time I saw the Baron was during World War II, probably not long before he died. He came to visit us in St. Louis, and my son shot him in the head with a marble. I guess I’d told too many nasty stories. The rumor was that he’d finally run through nine wives.” ------- “Good Lord! Couldn’t he have just...” ------- "No, God would have struck him dead. Engle was a brawler and a ladies man, but he was also a lay preacher in the Methodist church. My mother said his sermons were so loud they could have waked the dead. It must have been a noisy marriage, but I don’t remember much from those years. ------- "He was handsome, and evidently he could be extremely charming. My aunt Adeline said he was the most fantastically beautiful man she'd ever known. 'He used to roar with laughter,' she said, 'and he'd pick me up as if I were a feather and kiss me. I wouldn't get over it for a week.' ------- "In 1907, a young man named Peter Jenneman went to work for Engle as a carpenter. They became friends, and one winter when things were slow in the construction business Martin started Pete on his professional boxing career. He'd threaten the promoters with hellfire and damnation to get Pete good matches. During the war, Pete was light-heavyweight champion at the Great Lakes Naval Station. He fought professionally again after the war, but he drank. ------- “They must have been quite a pair, the ranting teetotal preacher and the boozy boxer. Uncle Walter said they cleaned up in small towns all over Kansas and Missouri. They'd pretend to let Pete be suckered into a match with a much bigger fighter, and Pete would put him away in a couple rounds. Sometimes they had to get out of town fast. Pete died of alcoholism in his mid-thirties. ------- "Martin Engle met Peter's sister Lulu on a moonlight riverboat cruise in 1908. Louisa Jenneman was twenty-two, short and plump, and she had more admirers than her sister Lydia who'd won a beauty contest. Lulu was with Paul Newhouse that night. She'd met him at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904 and had dated him off and on ever since.” ------- “Paul was your stepfather?” ------- “But not until nearly ten years later. This is soap opera, Kostas. Lulu liked Paul and strung him along, but the rest of the Jenneman family despised him because they said he was arrogant and he dressed like a fop. The neighborhood kids threw rocks at him when he came to call. "Two more of Lulu's admirers, Herm Zuchel and Adolf Schittie, were with them that night, but none of them was a match for Martin Engle. He and Lulu were married a month later." ------- "A party girl and a Don Juan." ------- "Neither of them was as shallow as I’ve made them sound. They were both just a little nuts. I was born in 1909, in what they called a ‘railroad flat’ on Labadie Avenue in North St. Louis. The rooms opened off one side of a long hallway, and there was a coal bin in the back. ------- “My bother and I loved our mother, but she wasn’t an easy person to live with. She was very smart, and she spoke both fluent German and flawless English, but she was extremely stubborn and emotional. She insisted on naming me Russell Martin, after her husband and her former boyfriend, Paul Russell Newhouse. You can imagine how that went over with Engle, but she'd been married to him for a year by then, so maybe she was already hedging her bet. ------- "My father couldn't talk her out of it, so he just refused to use my name. He called me “Billy Bones” because I was such a skinny little kid. That was also the name of the old blind horse that hauled a trash wagon in our neighborhood." ------- "Martin, I hesitate to ask...." ------- "No, it's all right, Kostas. Engle was six two, and I’m five feet six, but I was definitely his son. Mom was barely five feet and weighed two hundred pounds. I’m lucky to have split the difference. Her mother was the chief cook for the Buschs of Anheiser-Busch, and Lulu was a scullery maid. At least they always had plenty to eat." ------- "Impeccably plebian origins,” Kostas said. “My family were peasants, too, of course. They made a meager living from the sea and burned sheep's dung to warm their stone hut. I was just a child when we left Mikinos, but I dimly remember the smell." ------- "I'll bet, but I think I'd rather be poor on Mykanos than in Red Bud, Illinois. It gets cold in Illinois.” ------- “You have a point, amigo. The Umayyad Turks weren’t that disappointed about losing at Poitiers for the same reason. I’ve always wondered how the West Indians can stand to work in the London Underground. ------- “By the way, Martin. Do you know a large man, probably in his fifties, short hair, dark overcoat? He was standing in the doorway staring at you before that woman came in with the razor. Do you have enemies?” ------- “Not that I know of, and, no, I don’t know him, but I saw him earlier.” -------“I’ll keep an eye out for him. Tell me about Red Bud.” ------- “It was the little German farming community in Illinois where my grandmother was born. We went there a number of times when I was a kid. It was a hundred miles from St. Louis, an all day drive on dirt roads. Eve and I thought it was pretty when we drove through there two years ago, but it still smelled like cow manure.” ------- “Sheep is worse.” ------- "Yes, it is. Lisa Lotte Rosemeier went to school in Red Bud until she was sixteen, which was more education than any of her children got. She was sent to St. Louis to be trained as a cook for a wealthy French family. All German girls had to go into service for a while, to learn to be housewives. The husband translated his wife’s instructions from French to German every morning. ------- “Lisa met Uncle Pete’s father, Peter Jennemann, in St. Louis. He was a Roman Catholic saloon keeper from Alsace. She married him, quit her job, and cooked the free lunch for his saloon. ------- "When Lisa’s father died and she inherited his house in Red Bud, Peter decided it would be healthier for their children to live in the country. He sold his saloon and opened another one in Red Bud. Apparently he never considered a career change. Grandma Jenneman continued cooking the free lunch." ------- "What was the free lunch, Martin?" ------- "Just what it sounds like, but it was a come-on, like salted peanuts in a bar. You've heard the old saying, 'There's no such thing as a free lunch.' Food was cheap, and they made their profit selling beer." ------- "A nation of hucksters.” ------- "The business of America is business. Peter was doing okay apparently. I once asked Grandma what sort of a man he was, and she said she hadn't really known him that well. They worked long hours at the saloon, and the only time she saw him alone was in bed." ------- "That’s too bad, Martin. Family history shouldn’t be lost. We had to leave my grandparents in Greece. They couldn’t read or write, so we never heard from each other again. It was as if we’d all died. Illinois may have cold winters, but it sounds more prosperous than Mikinos. We had just enough food, and surroundings of great beauty, but our cultural resources were limited." ------- "I doubt there was much culture in a nineteenth century Illinois farm town. Grandma's stories of making blood sausage and force-feeding the geese were pretty barbaric.” ------- “They produced fois gras in rural Illinois?” Kostas was incredulous. ------- “No, hardly. They’d just stuff a few pounds of grain into the geese to make them heavier for the market. I always enjoyed Grandma’s stories, especially the one about the molasses barrel. I remember seeing it on their porch. It was filled with blackstrap every summer. When the children complained about hair in the molasses one spring, Grandma got a rake and fished out an old barn cat that had been missing for months. ------- "The Jenneman sisters were all great talkers. I was never sure what to believe, but both Mom and Grandma told the same story about Grandpa Jennemann's death. The town of Red Bud caught fire on Christmas Eve in 1899. Grandpa carried buckets of water all night and saved his saloon, but he died of pneumonia a few days later. ------- "Grandma had to sell everything to pay his debts. She took the children back to St. Louis in a farm wagon. That’s when she went to work as a cook for Adolphus Busch the beer baron. None of her children stayed in school past the fourth grade. They learned to read and write and do simple arithmetic, but after that the girls went into domestic service, and the boys worked at Busch or at the Bemis Bag Company. My mother grew up as a highly intelligent but almost uneducated woman.” -------"Which brings us to her meeting with Martin Engle on the river boat, your birth in the railroad flat, and the reintroduction of Paul Russell Newhouse?" ------- “Too long a story? ------- “Not at all, and you tell it well. I don’t suffer fools, Martin.” ------- “I suppose that’s good to know. Engle went off to Denver on a construction job the year after I was born and didn't come back. After a few months, my mother left me with Grandma and went to find him. Naturally, he'd settled down with another woman. Mom let him come home that time, but when it happened again she divorced him. Paul Newhouse showed up soon after that." ------- "The arrogant fop had waited for her?" ------- "No, in the meantime he’d married a woman named Kitty and moved to Mexico, but Kitty fell down a flight of stairs and broke her neck, so Paul came back to St. Louis. If there was anything suspicious about that no one ever said so." ------- "And the Newhouse dynasty was finally established?" ------- "If there’s a dynasty I established it. Nothing to do with Paul. He looked like a gentleman, and he knew how to make money, but the Jennemans were right. He was mean-spirited and stingy. Mom had made him promise he'd adopt me, but he backed out after the wedding. He couldn't stand the thought of my ever getting any of his money. And he wasted as little as possible of it on me. He cut my hair himself until I was old enough to complain. I was Martin's kid, so he didn’t care what I looked like. He'd have called me Billy Bones, too, if Mom had let him. I don’t acknowledge him as any kind of father." ------- "It occurs to me, Martin, that this isn’t a happy story. Presumably things improved? You've kept your biological father's given name and your stepfather's surname." ------- "I wanted to be called John Carter Warlord of Mars. I couldn’t decide which of my so-called fathers was worst, but I didn’t know Martin so I took his name. I’ve always called myself Martin Newhouse even though I was legally an Engle until I was twenty six. I was going to have my name changed by the court before our son was born, but Mom finally browbeat P.R. into coming through with the adoption. It was the easiest thing to do, and it so obviously annoyed him." ------- "So your son would be a Newhouse?" ------- "So he'd be something. She may have thought I’d inherit something from him. Mom could be practical. And I did, actually. He died in Florida, where they don’t let you cut children out of your will. Do you have children?” ------- “No, nor a wife. Like your P.R., I have other interests.” ------- When it was evident that Kostas wasn’t going to elaborate, Martin continued. “Children are trouble, but I’m very glad we had them. As I said, I like to think that I or my son is the first of a brand new line. My life did get a lot better after I went to college. In fact it was never really bad again. Paul was a millionaire on paper by 1928 and he was shamed into paying for my education. I was already nineteen, and he wanted me out of the house. He insisted I study business, although I wanted to be a journalist. I’d have been a good.” ------- "You were nineteen when you started college?" ------- "We’d moved a lot. My mother kept me home from school for a whole year when I was eleven. She taught me to cook and iron shirts. The ironing came in handy when I needed spending money at college. Mom played golf every day in the summer and won tournaments. She was a champion bridge player." ------- "Forgive my saying so, Martin. I'm sure she was a good woman, but she doesn't sound like an ideal mother." ------- "Someone called her a good woman once and caught hell for it. She knew she was trouble. I suppose she was a poor mother by any reasonable standard, and a fruitcake besides, but my brother and I adored her. And she certainly loved us. She was always warm and affectionate, and when she wasn't flipping out she was fun. She'd literally shake all over and sometimes fall on the floor when she laughed. She never worried about her dignity. When she was really upset she'd yell and scream. Once she ran down the street in front of our house in her nightgown, howling like a banshee. She wasn't easy to live with, but you couldn't entirely blame her, considering what she'd put up with. ------- "She calmed down after she was on her own. She took a factory job during the war, even though she didn’t need the money. Paul had paid her a whopping divorce settlement so he could hurry up and marry his popsie. She worked her way up to master mechanic and shop foreman. Mom was in her sixties then, and she could dismantle a printing press the size of a football field. The girls called her ‘Mother.’ ------- “I’m glad she lived to see me be moderately successful, not that she cared, and that she could be there when our son graduated from high school. I’d been the kid the family voted as most likely to end up in Leavenworth.” ------- “They thought you’d be a criminal?” ------- "Some of them did. I gave them a lot of trouble. I didn’t respect my father, so why should I care about my aunts and uncles, except for Uncle Lee. My brother Norman tagged along and got in trouble with me. Once when Mom threatened to leave home, we stuffed her clothes in a suitcase and took it out to the street. We were lucky she didn't go. It's funny now. I've told these stories to our kids many times, but you're right, it wasn't very pleasant to have your parents screaming and cursing at each other. I tried to lose myself in books and daydreams, and I went out for every sport in high school. I swore it wouldn't be like that when I had a family." ------- There was silence on the other side of the white sheet. ------- "I never got to Mars, Kostas, but other than that it's been as good as anyone could ask. Which is why..." ------- "Quite so," Kostas agreed. ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 3 ------- ------- "You're looking much better, love." Eve sounded so relieved, that Martin laughed. She'd walked over from the college after her ten o'clock class and talked her way into the hospital before visiting hours. She looked extremely alive to someone who still felt half dead. ------- "I feel better," Martin agreed. "I'm ready to go home as soon as the chief nurse lets me do a belly dance." ------- "We have to talk about that, Martin." ------- "My belly dancing?" ------- "You're not going back to work." She glared at him. "I've never interfered before, but I'd be terrified all the time. I’d be afraid you’ll collapse on the subway, or...." Martin's hand was raised an inch above the sheet and waving tepidly. ------- "I'm not going back." ------- "You're not?" ------- "No, I'm retiring. Tell Andy next time he calls." ------- "Oh, my darling. That's...so wise. And it can work. It truly can. I've talked with Will Watson. He says you can get medical tax breaks and disability. I'm sure I can find a teaching job in Florida. And it’s cheaper to live there. With your pension and our investments we'll be just fine. I was so afraid, Martin. Honestly, you're the most sensible man I know." ------- "Probably," Martin agreed. “I can really get disability? I’m not planning to be disabled.” ------- There was a chuckle from the other side of the room. ------- "Pull back the curtain, Eve,” Martin said. “I want to see this lunatic." ------- Eve slid the curtain to the wall, revealing a large man in his mid-sixties. A grizzled beard covered the lower half of his face. Beneath bushy brows, the eyes of an expensive teddy bear glittered at them. ------- "Kostas Kikapopoulos, professor of history,” Martin introduced him. “My wife, Eve. Eve's a math instructor at the University. Kostas approves of my decision, although he plans to go on working." ------- "Teaching's not a job. It's a privilege. Isn't that so, my dear?" ------- Eve nodded, and Martin felt a pang of guilt. Eve had been the first to mention Florida, but he knew how much she loved her work. After the effort it had taken to earn a master's degree with honors in her late forties and her good luck in landing a job at the University.... ------- He was rescued from this dreary thought by the arrival of an attractive and expensively dressed woman. She nodded to Eve and Martin and embraced Kostas. ------- "Eve and Martin Newhouse, Liebchin. Eve teaches at the University, and Martin’s a business executive who reads history. My dear friend, Helena Megairos." ------- Martin and Eve chatted with Helena for a few minutes and then talked quietly to each other. Martin didn't mention Florida. There would be time to assess Eve's feelings when he was home. Eve and Helena left together. ------- "The ladies seem to have hit it off, amigo. We’ll have to get together in more agreeable surroundings. Your firm doesn't import Cuban cigars by any chance?" ------- Martin explained that cigars were another business altogether but that he knew someone who might help. ------- "That would be splendid. There are few greater pleasures. Is it true, my friend, that smoking sharpens the mind?" ------- "I very seriously doubt it, Kostas. They called them coffin nails a hundred years ago. Hirschorn tells me I have to stop smoking because nicotine constricts the capillaries." Martin offered to supply Kostas with scotch. He commented that Helena was an attractive woman. ------- "Mrs. Magairos is the wife of Benton Cortenay. Cort is the world's leading authority on Malebranche. He's been working for years on a definitive life and works and doesn't have time for Helena." He smiled. "We'll all get together. You'll like Cort." ------- "Fine," Martin agreed. "Assuming we survive." ------- ------- Kikapopouolis was rolled away shortly before lunch and returned late in the afternoon, groggy and subdued. Martin was hungry for the first time and ate a good supper. Eve and Helena came for evening visiting hours, but Kostas was sleeping and Helena soon left. Eve talked about her day and gave Martin a letter from their son. After Eve left, Martin read for a while and slept. The floor nurse looked in on them just before midnight. ------- ------- Martin wakened in semi-darkness, aware of someone bending over him. He thought it was Kostas for a moment, but it was a tall, thin man with a goatee rather than a full beard. The man turned away and walked around the screen towards Kikapopoulis. Although he was wearing a white coat, he hadn't looked like any of the doctors Martin remembered, and why would a doctor be in their darkened room in the middle of the night? Martin pressed the call-button that lay beside his hand. ------- The lights came on a moment later. ------- "You there!" The nurse stood blocking the doorway. Martin had done the right thing. ------- The man shoved the nurse aside and ran from the room. She gasped and stood leaning against the wall, her hand on her chest. ------- "Are you all right?" Martin asked. ------- "Stay calm, Mr. Newhouse." ------- "I am calm, nurse. Check on Kikapopulous." It was an order. ------- "Nurse!" ------- "He's asleep. He's all right." ------- "You're sure?" ------- She came back around the screen. "He's fine, Mr. Newhouse. Did you know that man?" ------- "No," Martin said. "I think he was looking for Kostas. Shouldn't you call Security?" ------- "I will, but it won't do any good. They’re worthless Just go back to sleep, dear." ------- It was some time before Martin slept. ------- ------- "Tall and bearded? No idea." ------- "Not Benton Cortenay?" There was the slightest smile on Martin's lips. ------- Kostas laughed. "No, Cort’s short and fat. He doesn't care about me, Martin. Why can't the man have come to see you?" ------- "He did see me and he wasn't impressed. I'm not visited in the middle of the night by assassins." ------- "You think I am?" ------- "Maybe he was a thief or a nut who likes to prowl around hospitals in the dark." ------- "A ghoulish notion. Your colorful family has made no enemies?" ------- "I’m sure they must have. Two of Eve's cousins spent time on a Georgia chain gang, and there were all the Baron's abandoned women and their husbands and boyfriends. Eve's uncle Gene may have bilked investors of millions. He owned a gold mine in Upper Porcupine, Ontario. The stock was overvalued, and when the bubble burst Gene disappeared. The feds found his yacht sunk off Cape Hatteras, but he and his mistress turned up in Switzerland. He was friendly enough the only time I met him. He was wearing plus-fours." ------- "A kind of shoe?" ------- "Golf pants, knickers with elastic below the knee. They were fashionable in the thirties." ------- "Golf." Kostas' scorn was evident. ------- "It's the chief pastime of American businessmen, Kostas. Their only leisure activity other than booze and TV. Apparently your family hasn't become fully acclimated." ------- "To games? I'm often puzzled by the greatness of our nation." ------- “Don’t Europeans get excited about sports?” ------- “Certain classes do.” ------- "It’s freedom, Kostas? Our government doesn't tell us how to waste our time. Both our families had their faults, but mostly a long time ago, and I doubt that their victims ever had it in for me. I don't gamble or chase women and I have no ties to organized crime. If I didn't make money for my company, at least I didn’t steal any. You're sure we're not going to be murdered in our beds for some skullduggery of yours?" ------- "Skullduggery? Not entirely, Martin, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it." ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 4 ------- ------- "Your husband’s an interesting man, Eve." ------- "He comes from a long line of interesting characters. Martin's far from the most peculiar, but he's definitely the nicest. I have difficult relatives too. In fact I'm probably the only completely normal person in either family for generations." ------- Kostas laughed. "You’re pretty sure about that." Eve was slim and cultured, a Bostonian certainly, whether or not a Brahmin. She was both good looking and sharply intelligent. He imagined she was quite effective as a math instructor. ------- "I'm sure of myself,” Eve said. “My ancestors were Yankee traders. They were capable and dangerously charming men. Martin's were all clever humbugs. Did he tell you his uncle Lee invented the airplane?" ------- "Shortly after the Wright brothers," Martin explained, "but he did his own research. He was probably the first man to fly a plane west of the Mississippi. We have a photograph of him, standing in the wreckage of his third airplane. He’d been paid to fly over a circus but snagged a telephone line on takeoff. He was lucky in his crashes. His wife made him give it up after that. That was only one of his inventions. He air-conditioned his chicken coop sometime before 1920 and spent the summer in it with the chickens. Reading, he read a lot. He was a successful contractor and a master plumber who retired in his fifties to collect books." ------- "He sounds like a sensible fellow. A hero of yours, evidently?" ------- "Well, he was a thoroughly nice man, and I was very fond of him. I wouldn’t have said he was a hero. Tarzan and Jesus Christ were my heroes when I was a kid, and later Johnny Weismuller, the Olympic swimmer who played Tarzan in the movies, and Jesse Owens the runner. I swore off heroes after that. Lee was odd. You had to know him to appreciate him. He was tall and gawky like Lincoln. In fact he might have had Marfan’s Syndrome. The family thought he was lazy because he never stood when he could lie down, and he put a lot of effort into inventing labor-saving devices. He could have made a fortune with his automatic furnace stoker." ------- "Why didn’t he? ------- "Too much trouble. He moved to his own beat as much as anyone I've ever known. He said he walked barefoot from Arkansas when he was a boy and took a job at the Brown Shoe company in St. Louis, but he realized right away he couldn't work for somebody else. He got into the plumbing business and did well. Lee married one of Lulu's calmer sisters, and they raised two boys and a girl, my cousins Virgil, Ann, and Pinky. ------- “Pinky...?” ------- “Red hair. Lee went into housing construction when I was in high school. I worked with him a couple summers and got to know him pretty well. It was through Lee I learned that not all grown men were bastards. He taught me about craftsmanship, too. Not how to be a craftsman but simply that it was a possibility. His houses are holding up petty well fifty years later. Unfortunately, Lee re-invested all his profits in the business and had half a dozen unsold properties in 1930. He made wooden toys until the economy recovered, and then he retired.” ------- “Your Lee sounds like a good man.” ------- "He helped me a lot, but he was a strange roll model. He hated work, and yet he was always doing something interesting. That's part of what was so appealing about him to a kid. He’d never entirely grown up. Sometime around the First World War he put together a crystal set and made a mechanical amplifier for it. He invited the whole family over to his house to listen to one of the earliest radio broadcasts in St. Louis. P.R. said it was nonsense, but Mom made him take us. Lee had built a giant wooden trumpet that filled one end of his living room. It was so loud you could hear it a block away, and they had to stuff pillows in it to lower the volume. He was too independent to patent his inventions, or too lazy." ------- "He was more than independent," Eve said. ------- "He was slightly loopy," Martin agreed, "but that was part of his charm. He got away with being himself in a family that was always hurling moral invectives at one another. He was even religious in his own way. He knew the bible almost by heart and liked to point out contradictions to his fundamentalist cousins who barely knew it at all. ------- "He was a lifelong teetotaler, but he brewed first rate beer all during Prohibition. People came from all over St. Louis to get his strain of yeast. He gave it up the day the Volstead Act was repealed. He just wouldn't be told what to do. He boasted once that he could build a car from junkyard parts, and his brother-in-law made him a bet. Lee paid fifteen dollars for a couple of wrecks and put together a contraption that he drove in his business for years. There are lots of Lee stories." ------- "My favorite is the beans," Eve prompted. -------"It was a contest put on by a drugstore chain," Martin explained. "You had to guess the number of beans in a huge apothecary jar. It was filled with bands of different kinds of bean. Lee bought a jar just like it, and filled it exactly the same way. Eve and I were married by then, and we’d stop by Lee's house in the evening and help count. Someone else won the car, Lee figured that was fixed, but the Brukmann family took all the other prizes. The drug company yelled foul and tried to weasel out, but eventually they gave in." ------- “Your Uncle Lee sounds like a marvelous character." ------- "Kook that he was. You seem to have a thing about role models, Professor. I’ve read that history as the accomplishments of famous men was out of fashion." ------- "We study demographics and cultural forces, but history is still the interplay of individual personalities and circumstance. It's the kooks that make it interesting." ------- "Lee was certainly an individual. I guess that’s the quality I most enjoyed in him. It’s what I’d like on my own tombstone.” ------- "Of course," Kostas said. ------- ------- Kikapopoulos went home the next morning. He assured Martin that they’d talk again when Martin was out of the hospital. ------- Hirschhorn popped into the room, and having impressed on Martin the continuing uncertainty of his condition, announced that he'd be fishing for two weeks in the Florida keys. Bonefish were inedible but a challenge to catch on light tackle, he explained tersely in answer to Martin's questions. Martin grinned and wished him luck. ------- He knew he wasn't out of danger, that he’d never really be out of danger again, but it no longer bothered him. He’d resumed his life. ------- He watched a line of absurdly puffy clouds drift past the window. He’d always found clouds delightful but incomprehensible, like modern art and contemporary music and so much else. Except for spectral fish bones, he never saw the exotic shapes that others claimed to see, but a dramatic sky could sometimes produce in him a feeling of wanderlust, a vague longing to see whitened stones and olive groves and to sit in the sun in some distant place and drink wine. Martin enjoyed nearly a whole day of relative peace. ------- ------- Late in the afternoon, there were loud voices in the hall, and a large man was wheeled into the room. He was directing the move himself. "All right, girlie," he bellowed. "Straighten this thing out and give it a shove. I can climb off the goddamn cart myself. I'm not the kind of guy who makes a fuss." ------- After a great deal of fussing, the man was finally settled. Martin sank into his bed and pretended to be asleep. ------- "Hey, there, buddy!" his new room mate called out to him. "Name's Bert. What's yours?" ------- Martin told him. ------- "Well sir, Marty, it seems the good Lord meant us to be bedfellows, so I reckon we'll get along fine. Say now, girlie, I don't like to trouble you, 'cause it ain't my nature, but I gotta ask you to poke up this here piller. I like my pillers puffed, and these are on the skinny side for a coconut like mine. I see my buddy's got a bigger one," he added hopefully. ------- Martin explained that his pillow was quite ordinary. Bert had more to say, but Martin tuned him out. Bert didn't appear to notice. ------- ------- That night, Martin dreamed of their first trip to Maine twenty years before, when they’d stayed in a primitive cottage on a deserted lake. They'd been wakened by the loons each morning and had breakfasted on white perch that he and Bud caught the night before and cleaned under the porch light in a cloud of mosquitoes. None of their vacations since then had quite matched that one. -------They’d explored the rugged Maine coast, climbing the rocks and finding broken lobster traps and driftwood. He and Bud had set up tin cans on the hillside behind the cabin and fired off a box of 22's. He could almost smell the cordite. They'd done a lot together in those days, and they’d stayed friends through Bud's college years and his marriage to Susan. ------- Martin woke up once, with the odd sense of being in a strange room, but all rooms were strange now. Everything was dark and different and out of his control, and he was drifting on a loon lake in an oarless boat. ------- ------- Bert's bed was stripped in the morning. No one offered an explanation for the sudden disappearance of his oafish roommate. The usually talkative nurses seemed subdued. Bert hadn't appeared to be in such precarious health, but presumably he’d gotten the call and gone more quietly than might have been expected. Martin wondered briefly whether in a case like Bert's the staff were ever tempted to misuse the power of life and death. ------- ------- He woke from a nap late in the afternoon to find the other bed occupied again, this time by a distinguished looking man with white hair and a patrician nose. He appeared as lifeless as a corpse. ------- "Wake up, Mr. Stanton," a nurse was saying querulously, "I have to take your temperature." ------- Mr. Stanton didn't move. It was obvious to Martin that he was dead. ------- "Mr. Stanton, can you hear me?" the nurse persisted. ------- She put the thermometer in the man's mouth. It fell out. Martin began to wonder about the quality of care at St. Peter's. ------- The woman went away and came back with the head nurse, who immediately shook the man's shoulder and roared at him. ------- "We need to take your temperature, George." ------- George opened his eyes. "So goddamn do it," he said. She held the thermometer in the man's mouth until she got a reading. George had closed his eyes again. ------- ------- Before Eve arrived for her evening visit, an elderly woman came into the room and approached Stanton's bed. ------- "I'm here, George," she said. ------- "Bully for you," George said. Martin hadn't seen him move for hours. ------- "How are you are doing?" ------- "I'm terrific, Margaret. Why did you bring the cat?" ------- "The cat, George? There's no cat here." The woman seemed genuinely puzzled." ------- "Don't tell me what I see. There's a goddamn dirty-faced pussy on my bed." ------- The woman turned to Martin. "We don't own a cat." ------- "No cat," Martin said. ------- "George hates cats. George, shall I ask Bob and Agnes to come see you?" ------- "Hell no," George answered with considerable force. "Tell them I died, and take that thing with you." ------- "All right, George." Mrs. Stanton patted her husband's shoulder and left. She hadn't seemed disturbed by his hallucination. ------- When the woman had gone, George turned towards Martin and winked. Then he closed his eyes and resumed his wax-like immobility. ------- ------- Two weeks later, dressed in his own clothes for the first time in a month, Martin was being wheeled towards freedom by a cheerful orderly. He heard the head nurse bellow from the room across the hall. ------- "Let's see your bed pan, Arthur. Oh good work, Arthur, good work!" Martin concentrated on the approaching elevator door. ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 6 ------- ------- His first weeks at home were quiet. Eve was persuaded to return to her classes after only a day, and Martin spent his mornings reading and trying to answer an accumulation of mail. It was a time of waiting, a time for recovery as well, but that was rarely in Martin's mind. ------- In the afternoons, he began to organize his long neglected stamp collection. Philately was the ideal pastime for an invalid, he decided, a kind of cerebral golf which occupied the mind while barely using it and provided a sense of accomplishment with minimum effort. It might even be considered mildly altruistic in his case, as he specialized in the attractive series issued as a source of income by third-world nations. ------- Eve came home at noon each day. They ate shrimp salad sandwiches in front of the television and watched Jeopardy. They always won. Eve went to teach her afternoon class and then did their errands. She was generally home by four. ------- Occasionally Martin looked through the picture window at the foot and a half of dirty snow that covered their yard and was heaped beside the walk and driveway. He had no desire to go out into it, or to go anywhere except to Florida later in the spring. ------- Their old friends, Helen and C.B. Smith, were looking into real estate for them. Boca Raton was out of their price range now, but they had pleasant memories of visiting Eve’s parents in St. Petersburg in the years before and after the war. They wavered between a new house in a development and a condo on the bay. Martin knew they would eventually make a decision and not look back. A trip was finally planned for the end of March. ------- They never had the talk about Eve's career that Martin was dreading. The doctor made it clear that his chances of long-term survival would improve in a milder climate, and Eve said there was nothing to discuss. Martin hadn't forgotten that only a week before his heart attack she’d asked him how he felt about moving back to the city. ------- Christmas was good. Bud and Susan came in the morning and stayed for an early dinner but left before the grandchildren became cranky. Martin watched television for a while most evenings. He wasn't sure whether this indicated a softening of his brain or just a more accepting attitude towards life. He didn't care. ------- ------- Two weeks after his return from the hospital, shortly after Eve had left to teach her morning class, the doorbell rang. The young man at the door introduced himself as Sergeant Leland Murray of the New Castle police department. ------- "It's about an incident that happened when you were in the hospital, Mr. Newhouse. I called your Dr. Hirschhorn, and he said it would be okay to talk with you if you felt up to it." ------- "Sure," Martin said, "I feel fine. I'm glad to have the company." This wasn't entirely true. Martin had begun to enjoy his solitude. He'd briefly considered the life of a hermit when he was young. It still had some appeal. ------- He hung the detective's coat in the hall closet and pointed him to the living room. The chief nurse must have reported the intruder after all. ------- "Coffee, Sergeant? I'm supposed to go easy on caffeine, but life without coffee isn’t worth it. We grind our own beans." ------- "Thanks. I take it black. You're really feeling all right then, sir? You look well." ------- Martin said he'd looked even better before his heart attack. Murray decided to take this as encouragement. -------"You may not be able to help us, Mr. Newhouse, but we have to ask. Do you remember Bert Hanley? He was a heavy set man who shared your hospital room for a day." ------- Martin's eyebrows shot up. Not Kostas. ------- "I couldn’t forget Bert, Sergeant. He was a cheerful loud-mouth. He called the chief nurse 'girlie'." Martin smiled. "I assumed he died." ------- "He’s dead, but it wasn't his heart. He was murdered, Mr. Newhouse. Shot in his sleep in the bed next to yours. You didn't know, did you?" ------- Martin was open-mouthed. Murray was afraid for a moment it might have been too much for him. ------- "I certainly didn't. That's...shocking. Someone fired a gun in our room? Why didn't I hear it?" He suddenly remembered the dream and the smell of gunpowder. ------- "The shooter probably used a silencer. No one heard the shot. The night nurse looked in on you around one thirty and found Hanley with two bullet holes in his forehead. We had them wheel you into another room while we went over the scene. The hospital did its best to keep it quiet. It didn't get in the papers until several days later, and the details were left vague. Hanley had no family to make a fuss. ------- "That was weeks ago, and we’re out of leads. We haven’t found anyone with the slightest reason to kill him. He seems to have been quite an ordinary man, a feed salesman and something of a self-taught expert on pig diseases. He was a widower with no children. Can you think of anything that might help us, Mr. Newhouse? Anything Hanley might have said." ------- "Nothing that I remember, sergeant. I did everything I could to avoid talking to him. I wasn't feeling so hot, and I’m sorry to say he came across as a jerk. More ridiculous, though, than unpleasant. I can't see anyone shooting him. There was something that happened at the hospital, but it was before Bert came." Martin told Murray about the mysterious visitor. ------- "Yes, sir. Miss Wales mentioned it. You thought he’d come to see Dr. Kikapopoulos?" ------- "He didn't come to see me. I kidded Kostas about it. I said I hoped we weren't going to be murdered in our beds for some stunt of his. It was a joke. I guess the man could have come back." ------- "And shot Hanley thinking he was Kikapopoulos, a large bearded man where he expected to find him. It's a possibility we've considered." ------- "What does Kostas say?" ------- "Dr. Kikapopoulos says he knows nothing about it. He says there's no reason anyone would want to kill him. How about that, Mr. Newhouse? I understand you two were pretty friendly." ------- "He was a friendly man, and he was good company unlike poor Bert. He's a character certainly, an extrovert with a high opinion of himself. I liked him a lot." ------- "A character in what way?" ------- "Nothing bad. Just larger than life. Apparently he runs around with another man's wife, but from what he says it's in the open and not a big deal." ------- "Helena Courtenay. She and her husband vouch for each other. Dr. Kikapoppoulos is a member of a Greek patriotic organization that supports resistance to Greece's military dictatorship. Did he say anything about that?" ------- Martin sensed that this was what the man had really come to ask. "No,” he said, “nothing like that. He talked about Greece. My wife and I want to take a Greek island cruise some day. Kostas said we should go despite the political situation. He said the ruins have been there for thousands of years and every government is glad to get the tourists' money. He didn't say anything about his own activities." ------- The policeman thanked Martin and asked him to call if he thought of anything. It seemed obvious that the police believed Kostas had been the killer's target and that it had to do with Greek politics. ------- ------- “How was your morning, love?” ------- “More interesting than usual,” Martin said. “I had a visit from the police. Why didn't you tell me about Bert?" ------- "Would you have told me that a patient in the bed next to mine had been murdered?" ------- "I would have eventually." ------- "Well, you did find out eventually. To tell you the truth I’d half forgotten about it. You think he was after Kikapopoulos?" ------- "We could ask him." ------- ------- Kostas telephoned in mid-January and invited Eve and Martin to dinner. They accepted with some misgivings. An amusing character in an adjoining hospital bed had been a welcome diversion. An evening at the home of someone involved in international intrigue and targeted for assassination was an adventure. ------- Kikapopoulos' penthouse overlooked Bugler Park. Martin could see across the river to where the ornamental street lamps of the university merged with the lights of the town. The six large rooms were filled with Mediterranean pottery and statues that Martin was sure were genuine and valuable. It was almost a museum. Eve was glad she’d dressed more formally than she might have for supper at a bachelor's apartment. ------- Helena Magairos was the only other guest and acted as tour guide and hostess. She fixed their drinks while Kostas sat in a big leather chair and talked. They discussed Kostas' and Martin's recovery and the usual scandals at the university. Eve brought up their Florida plans and their projected trip to the Greek islands. This had its intended effect of inspiring a lecture on ancient and modern Greece and eventually a detailed account of the Kikapopoulos’ early life. ------- In order to leave their beautiful but impoverished island, the family had had to pass through a gauntlet of corrupt officials and greedy ship's officers. After months of hardship, they entered Boston Harbor in good health but as penniless and ignorant of their new country as any immigrants before them. ------- "It was how your own ancestors arrived," Kostas pointed out, "your Thomas Frohock and John Engle, with nothing but their minds and bodies. From peddler and farmer to college professor and corporate executive in a generation isn’t bad, Martin. ------- "My father began with a borrowed pushcart, hawking onions to Boston housewives. It was vegetables or fish for the Greeks. Papa's cart grew into a succession of wholesale food businesses, but he always meant for me to be a scholar. There was no point in success, he said, if it produced only wealth. I was happy to go to college and finally be able to sleep past four in the morning.” ------- “Poor baby,” Helena said. “You’ve been making up for it for fifty years.” ------- "Let me ask you, Martin. Does it ever worry you that we've had things easier than our parents and that our children have even less demanding lives? What becomes of the human species without challenge?" ------- "Toynbee?" Martin suggested. "Their lives are easier in some ways, but they'll always have challenges. There’s Vietnam. Greece has its troubles. Poverty and greed and human predators seem here to stay, and if the world’s population keeps growing, things will probably get worse. Is the university really an ivory tower? I had to watch my ass even in a stodgy company like U.S.T." ------- “Oh bosh, Martin.” Eve laughed. “You’ve always done what you pleased at the office and played dumb when they objected. You’ve told me so.” ------- “That’s a survival skill, too, an effective one. People let you get away with a lot for the pleasure of feeling they’re smarter than you are. What about it, Kostas? It was a serious question.” ------- "No, you're right, Martin. The university can be nasty, as I'm sure Eve has told you. I have tenure despite the machinations of my colleagues, but I'll never be the chairman. I might have cared a few years back, when I could have done some good. My interests are entirely academic these days. Tell me about business. It doesn’t sound as cutthroat as I’d have thought" -------"At U.S.T. it was more whose ass you kissed, and mostly it was just boring. As you say, taxes and proxy statements. At the last directors' meeting I went to we spent an hour discussing the price of scalded ox lips." ------- "Not a tobacco additive I hope?" ------- Martin laughed. "We own a cat food company." Kostas made a face. "It's a natural complement. Cat food, popcorn, liquor, and tobacco. It's the food business, Kostas. The same distribution patterns. We're developing other products. The company is I mean, I keep forgetting I'm out of it. They read the surgeon general's report. ------- "My last ten years weren't bad. After Hendricks retired, I was able to get the Secretary’s Department into shape and start taking time off. Hendricks.... God, I haven't thought of him in years. I gave up on heroes after Jessie Owens, but I did have a nemesis. Bolo Anderson says my sticking it out under John H. was the best recommendation I could have had. It was the main reason I got my title. They felt I'd earned it." ------- “You did earn it, Martin,” Eve said. “Don’t listen to him, Kostas. He worked like a dog. Hendricks was a monster.” ------- "What was wrong with him?" ------- "An incompetent, a crackpot, and a vindictive son-of-a-bitch,” Martin said. “He tried to get me canned about once a month, but in those days U.S.T. never fired anyone, not even Hendricks. We let one lush sleep off his hangovers in the mail room for thirty years. There's a lot to be said for loyalty, but we carried it pretty far. ------- “It sounds comical now. There were so many Hendricks stories, even back in St. Louis. He used to spend his summer vacations at a dude ranch in Arizona. He'd come to work wearing a cowboy outfit the day before his vacation, and they’d send him home early, which was what he wanted. He bought a Navajo rug in Arizona, and when the colors ran he complained to the Indians who sold it to him. They told him he had to soak it in horse urine to fix the colors, so he brought back a dozen rugs and collected a barrel of piss from the Peavely Dairy. His house smelled like a barn, but the rugs looked good. -------“He got drunk at a party once and chased my mother around the dining table.” ------- “Kostas told me about your mother,” Helena said. “She sounds like quite a character.” ------- "She could handle men like Hendricks. There was a big celebration in St. Louis when he was transferred to New York in '46. The next year they closed the St. Louis office, and I was given the chance to go to New York to work under Hendricks for a year and take over his job when he retired. That’s when I seriously looked into chicken farming. ------- “It was a hell of a year. Besides doing my own work and most of Hendricks’s, I had to eat lunch with him every day. He made me go with him to his tailor while he tried on suits, and sometimes we went to a warehouse to admire his rug collection. He knew I was trapped. I was making good money, and we had a house in the suburbs, a mortgage, and two kids. ------- "When I’d get thoroughly sick of him, I'd sit in a toilet stall for a while and read. Eventually Hendricks figured it out. He came in the men's room and shouted, 'You'd better get your ass out here, boy.' ------- "I knew he'd make it a big deal of it. Tell everybody I was hiding out in the crapper. He had no sense of decency. He used to tell everyone how he drank mineral oil for his constipation. ------- “The men's room was in a public hallway because U.S.T. shared the floor with Robert Harwood, the producer. Harwood was six foot seven and weighed three hundred pounds, but he had a high-pitched voice that was easy to imitate. I took a chance and squeaked at Hendricks, "I'll come out all right, fellah, and I’ll break your face.” I heard Hendricks say, 'Oh shit,' and the door banged. He never bothered me after that. ------- "I was happy to go to his retirement party. He patted me on the back and told me to carry on the good work. He said, 'It's over for me, Newhouse, but there's one thing I can say. In my forty years at U.S.T. I never made a mistake.' He may have been right, considering how little he did." ------- "I gather you're not going back for your retirement party?" ------- "God, no. I left the office at 5:00 pm eight weeks ago, and I don't plan to see it again. I told Andy I didn't want a fuss, so he's taking care of things. He’s determined to keep me on the payroll for a year, in case I lose my mind, but I couldn't go back, Kostas. I can't lie to them any more, and I certainly can't tell them the truth, not Andy anyway. I'm happy as hell to be out of it, and I've already forgotten what most of them even look like. I am sorry they can't see my beard." ------- Kikapopoulos smiled and nodded. "It’s coming nicely,” Helena said. “Didn’t you leave things in your office that you want?" ------- "Just junk, some of it was left over from Hendricks. Thirty different kinds of paper clip." ------- "Remarkable," Kostas said. ------- "I never even brought in a picture of Eve and the kids. I could remember what they looked like." ------- "It seems sad, though,” Helena said. “You spent a lot of time there." ------- "Thirty-two years with the company, Helena. What was sad was spending my life at a pointless job. If someone had just given me the money and told me to live a good life I might have made some difference in the world, like Kostas has." ------- "We made fine use of your money," Eve chided him. "It fed and housed us and put two children through college. Tobacco’s given the world more pleasure than mathematics." ------- "Maybe, but I’m glad to be out of it. I wonder what they'll make of my lockbox." ------- "I didn't know you had one," Eve said. ------- "Every officer had a box in the company vault for his personal papers. I don’t have any personal papers, so I never used mine. I didn’t leave it empty, though." Martin grinned. "I wanted the last word if I dropped dead on fifty-second street, but I never expected them to open it when I was alive." ------- "What’s in it, Martin?" Eve asked, alarm struggling with amusement. ------- "The biggest bathroom syringe I could find." Martin made a jabbing motion. ------- "Oh, Martin." ------- Kikapopoulus laughed until the tears ran down his face. ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 7 ------- ------- After so many weeks of inactivity, Martin found it difficult to complete even the smallest project. His thinking was fuzzy, a side-effect he supposed of the colorful pills he took throughout the day. Hirschhorn had explained the purpose of each, but Martin hadn't listened. He'd never been preoccupied with his body, and he didn't see a reason to start now. He paid the doctors to manage his health, and he followed their advice when it made sense. ------- He told himself it was the transition that was getting him down, shedding one life to take on another. It was the problem of the hermit crab who outgrew its shell and had to scuttle bare-assed down the beach to find a bigger one. Even so, he was puzzled that he should feel so much turmoil in exchanging three decades of dreary responsibility for a carefree retirement. ------- At the end of January, after Eve commented on his resemblance to an aging rock star, Martin got his first haircut outside the Concourse at Rockefeller Center in over thirty years. It was satisfactory as a haircut, but it was accompanied by a stream of senseless patter about the Celtics and the Knicks. His barber in the International Building had long ago been bribed to silence. The man trimmed his beard nicely, however, and seemed to find a modest tip most generous. ------- The beard had become a major factor in Martin's life. It needed daily shampooing and frequent combing, and it effectively concealed the former clean-shaven executive. For a while it dominated conversations with family and friends. In public, it attracted attention like a friendly dog. ------- Beards were still rare on men his age. They were associated with foreigners and hippies. In the shadow of the University it was natural for waitresses to address him as ‘professor’, and he didn't correct them. He'd been a far bigger fraud as a businessman, he felt, discussing productivity and market share as if he knew or cared about any of it. He knew more about archaeology and ancient history than the tobacco business. ------- It was the effect of his beard on children that was most gratifying. In the past, they’d walk into him as if he were a lamp post and still seem unaware of his existence. Now children not only noticed him, they approached him cautiously, as they might edge near the brink of a chasm. xxx ------- Occasionally a child asked him if he were Santa Claus. Martin always said he wasn’t, but that he was one of Santa's helpers. ------- He considered this undeserved attention to be a judgment on his former life. When you could end more than thirty years of honest, if undistinguished, labor without receiving the slightest recognition and then, with a bunch of whiskers, become an instant celebrity, what did that signify? ------- Whatever they thought they now saw in him, it made him feel as much a humbug as the Baron. He knew he'd be called to account for it someday, but in the meantime it was becoming clear that his effort to be a good and useful man had obscured a higher calling. Like his father he was a born charlatan. ------- ------- The trip to Florida at the end of March was wholly successful. Eve and Martin arrived at the Tampa airport on time and without a side trip to Cuba. Martin was almost disappointed. It would have been a good story. ------- They drove their rented Buick to St. Petersburg and found a motel not far from where Eve's mother and father had lived from 1939 until Maurice’s death in the early-fifties. Their two-story Spanish style house was in good repair, but the street looked smaller and less trim than he remembered. The Smith’s had assumed that Eve and Martin would prefer to look in a newer area, but Martin had to see the old place. Vacationing with the Frohocks had been pleasant so long as Maurice got his way, and Florida itself had more than made up for any difficulties. ------- Eve and Martin explored the northern reaches of Pinellas County before supper. They drove through new developments with names like Seminole Hill Estates and Tamarack Villas. Some were little more than a sales office and a model home. Newly paved roads and sidewalks meandered off into an expanse of roiled sand and scabrous underbrush. ------- As Martin pointed out, it looked much like the abandoned developments they’d found oddly romantic when they came to Florida in 1933. The infamous bank holiday had trapped them in Bradenton for a month, but they'd lived well on the generosity of Eve's Aunt Oriana. It was then that Martin had fallen in love with the palm trees and perfumed breezes. ------- Helen and C.B. collected them at their motel the next morning. Martin and Eve were pleased to renew their long acquaintance with the Smiths. C.B. was an encyclopedia of information, and he and Helen were cheerful company and made the prospect of a move less daunting. ------- C.B. had retired from the Columbia physics faculty some years before and moved his large family to Florida, where the climate was kinder to his crippling arthritis. He earned a good living though his investments. C.B.'s knowledge was broad and impressive. Tax law, securities analysis, history, politics, and all areas of science were neatly compartmentalized in his mind, along with a surprising expertise in building construction and industrial processes. Martin always found him to be a fascinating and flamboyantly opinionated companion, precisely the kind of person he warmed to. Martin's own mind, as he was well aware, tended to flit from one interest to another like a dragonfly, but unlike C.B.'s his observations weren't channeled in any particular direction, nor were his conclusions pre-ordained. ------- “You’re a lucky son of a bitch, you know,” C.B. told him. “You’d have been sitting on the pot up there for another seven years, pushing coffin nails.” ------- “None of that’s fully understood, you know,” Martin said. “The scientists think tobacco, alcohol, and hard drugs may all do about the same kind of damage to the body. Maybe we should be banning booze and pushing marihuana.” ------- “Why ban anything?” C.B. asked. “Let the sheep separate themselves from the goats.” ------- “Maybe,” Martin agreed. “Except for my flock. How did you feel when you had to come down here?” ------- “Angry as hell,” C.B. said. “I loved my job. It took about two weeks before I realized I wasn’t hurting any more and could get around without my wheelchair. To hell with winter. We raised four kids and a greenhouse full of orchids, and I haven’t worn an overcoat in ten years. I hobble around like an old man now, but the part that matters is still ticking.” He tapped his temple with a nicotine stained finger. “Don’t know why I haven’t counted all the books I’ve read. It’s the sort of thing I usually do.” ------- ------- Helen drove them through half a dozen nearly identical housing developments and across the causeway to Tampa where they toured the University. They dropped in on a friend of the Smiths, a faculty member who was recovering from surgery. -------Martin never got her name, and the visit itself seemed pointless, unless it was to provide Eve with a university contact. But it was pleasant, and it occurred to Martin that he didn’t care where they went or what they did. C.B. was right. There was nowhere else he’d rather be. He could sit all day in a stranger's living room and enjoy C.B.'s witty observations on Florida. They would buy a house or an apartment, tomorrow or next week, in Largo or Tarpon Springs. They could live on a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale or a shack in the Everglades. It simply didn't matter. He loved all of Florida, the over-bright flowers and the absurd palm trees, the spongy lawns alive with fire ants and little green lizards, the encompassing sky and water, and most of all the bright sunlight. He gloried in it as he had forty years before. ------- ------- In the late afternoons he paddled in the lukewarm surf and walked the beach, scrunching the fine white sand between his toes and looking for shells along the high water line. It was far more gentle and luxurious than the raucous Jersey shore. ------- They tried a new restaurant each night, most of them inexpensive and good and with the effortlessly gracious service that could not be found in the north at any price. He understood its shallowness, he hadn't worked for a southern company for thirty years without learning that, but it was a conspiracy that was easy to join. ------- They sat by the pool until late in the evening, and Martin enjoyed the softness of the tropical nights and the unfamiliar scents and sounds. Even the improbable colors of the gaudy neon signs along the road were soothing. He was in his element. ------- ------- They bought a house. Or rather they signed a contract, with the promise of a house by July. It was in a new development of mid-priced two and three bedroom homes that ringed a golf course. Neither Martin nor Eve had played in decades, although Martin had been a near par golfer once, but the broad expanse of lawn, dotted with palms and ponds, was definitely agreeable. The clubhouse lake was rumored to contain a six foot alligator. ------- The model they chose had two bedrooms, a large bath and separate powder room, modern kitchen, and good-sized living, dining, and Florida rooms. The latter was a twelve by fourteen foot covered porch with adjustable glass blinds. They were to learn that the blinds failed to keep the room comfortable on cool winter days, but they did shed torrential rains and deflected golf balls. ------- ------- The final months in New Jersey were busy yet anti-climactic. There was no single event that marked their break with the past. A series of minor chores each day cut some small tie and moved them closer to the end. There were countless phone calls, many documents to sign, and half a dozen going-away parties. It was so much like their normal existence that none of it seemed to be preparing them for the giant step they meant to take. ------- A series of earlier moves dating back to Martin's transfer from Saint Louis had already winnowed their belongings, and they were able to rid themselves of another two decades of accumulated junk with ease. There was no tradition of valued heirlooms in either of their families. Martin had lived in over forty different houses and apartments by the time of his marriage. The only baggage that survived his youth was the semi-comic tales of domestic turmoil. ------- Martin had left U.S. Tobacco Products without a backward glance. Saying goodbye to the friends they’d made through Eve's years of study and teaching was more difficult. They hoped to see many of them again. ------- They’d certainly not lose touch with Kostas and Helena. Kostas overwhelmed them by his gift of a magnificent set of luggage, '...for your trip to Greece'. It had been custom-made, he told them, for an elderly cousin who had died inconveniently. Martin wondered about this unlikely story, but Kostas could clearly afford the expensive gift. ------- "You'll have no excuse not to travel," he said. "You have your freedom and your health. I've provided the bags, and you'll bring your own good company. You must see the world, Martin, and then explain it to me. I know no one better prepared to make an objective judgment." ------- "Really, Kostas...." ------- "Listen to me, amigo. Most of us are analysts. Brilliant or stupid, educated or ignorant, we can take the world apart, but we can't put it together they way you can. You don't draw on a lifetime of accreted prejudice." ------- Martin laughed. "You make me sound like some sort of idiot savant. I just try to see things as they are. I can't imagine doing anything else." ------- "Precisely," Kostas agreed, as if this proved his point. ------- ------- The head of Eve's department gave a picnic supper for them. There were brief and amusing speeches of the sort that might be expected from mathematicians. Martin sensed that their regret was genuine, and he was happy for Eve. One of them should be missed when they folded their tent, and it was better that it was she. He was included in the well-wishing, however. He liked Eve's friends, and like many academics, they were curious about the business world and pleased to find someone who could speak of it with authority and disrespect. ------- Ken and Marion took them to the faculty club, and Dorothy Denning and the Rawls hosted dinners. Their good friend Francis Stein, a widow who lived across the hall, was openly saddened by their leaving. ------- They’d moved many times before with few regrets. In those years they’d socialized mostly with their neighbors, people living in the same circumstances as they but often quite unlike them. Eve's friends from the University had less money, but they took pleasure in the same activities that she and Martin enjoyed. A few, like Ken White, had become Martin's friends as well, the first new friend he'd made in decades. ------- Martin had long ago concluded that the vast majority of human beings were morally weak and that a good number of them were rotten to the core. He'd begun to wonder in the last few months, however, if his perspective had been too limited. Ben at least, a brilliant and sensitive gay man, was both principled and courageous, and Kostas, for all his posturing, was a serious scholar and perhaps a good deal more. ------- Their son's friends John and Betty came to dinner near the end of June to say goodbye and collect a marble coffee table that they'd been offered. As they were leaving, John said sadly, "It’s the end of an era, Mr. Newhouse." ------- It was, although it seemed to Martin to be ending on a surprisingly hopeful note. His forced retirement could be considered a quiet call to adventure, and although he didn't think of himself as a brave man, he'd always been ready to try something new. ------- As a child, he’d copied the lifeguards at the old Tower Grove pool in St. Louis and taught himself to swim because it had looked like fun. In the half-century since then swimming seemed to have become a duty rather than a pleasure. Television advertisements for the YMCA threatened 'danger in the water' and promoted swimming for safety. It was a depressing comment on the contemporary world, although it was true that a boy had drowned in the flooded quarry where he and his friends liked to dive. ------- ------- Along with the packing and errands, Martin found time to read a book on underwater archaeology and to work his way through Tolkein's trilogy a third time. Bilbo's song as he left Bag End seemed particularly apt. 'The road goes on and on...and I must follow, if I can.' ------- He read the Times each morning and listened to the news. The conflict in Vietnam and its cost in lives and political turmoil and still higher taxes might be thought disturbing to a man entering early retirement. Eve and the children were vehemently against the war. Martin would have liked to agree with them, but humans had been such violent creatures for so long that conflict seemed to be as natural to them as it was pointless and destructive. He was inspired to write a fable for his idealistic children: ------- ------- ------- "We must have peace," said the dove. "We will lay down our swords and show the fox our true intentions." ------- ------- Many had been wishing the end of a war they did not understand and did as the dove suggested. But when they called on the fox to do the same he began to slaughter them. ------- ------- "Why do you kill us when we offer you peace?" they cried. ------- -------"You shall have peace, my feathered friends," the fox answered them, "and I, as is my nature, shall enjoy a fine repast." ------- -------If war were as inevitable as it seemed, it was better to be on the winning side. It would be best, of course, if only old men fought, with staves and swords like the Samurai blade he'd found in a shop on ninth avenue and kept razor sharp in their bedroom closet. ------- The agreed-on mid-July closing date was approaching, and the house in Florida was far from finished. The Smiths made weekly visits to the building site and reported on its slow progress. Late in June, C.B.'s sharp eyes had spotted crates containing a 'Sea-Foam' tub and sink, instead of the 'Sand-Tone' models that had been ordered. Armed with this information, their Florida lawyer, Arthur Hallam, was able to refute the contractor's apologetic claim that the fixtures had already been installed. ------- There were more delays and nothing to do but put their much reduced belongings into storage in New Jersey and find an inexpensive motel in Florida. ------- ------- They felt no regrets at leaving the three bedroom ranch which had been their stopping place for the past two years. It was now more associated with Martin's illness than anything else. It wasn’t one of the homes in which they'd raised children. The last and best of those was a three-story Dutch Colonial set among the big oaks and elms of an affluent old neighborhood in a north Jersey suburb. It was here that they’d decorated a dozen oversized Christmas trees, celebrated many birthdays and graduations, and held the rehearsal dinner for their son's wedding. That house had been hard to leave. It was too big for them, but they’d moved to the apartment and later to the smaller house as much out of restlessness as need. ------- By the time they finished sweeping the empty rooms, it was too late to begin the drive south. They found a motel for the night and had dinner in their favorite Hungarian restaurant. The refugees from the Hungarian revolution of '58 had been held for some months at old Camp Kilmer and many had found their way no farther than the nearest city. ------- Martin ordered a spicy goulash and drank two bottles of imported beer. He and Eve reminisced about their thirty-five years of marriage, their jobs, and their highly satisfactory children. They spoke more optimistically about the life ahead of them than either felt. ------- Fueled by alcohol and heavy food, Martin's dreams that night in his unfamiliar bed included a strange vision of an uncertain future. ------- He was standing in the middle of a large room, wearing jockey's silks. There were other riders and race officials in a semi-circle around him, and he had apparently been addressing them. ------- "Based on these facts, gentlemen," he was saying, "I feel I should have the right to ride my horse." ------- "Very well," an official said. "The committee has decided that in spite of the fact that you are ridiculously large for a jockey, you will be permitted to enter the race. Our decision is based mainly on the fact that your horse will allow no one else to ride him." ------- Martin picked up his saddle and went to the paddock with the other jockeys. His mount was small and nondescript and seemed neither pleased nor sorry to see him. Apparently they were already acquainted. ------- There was a good deal of fuss at the starting gate. The horses were nervous and jumpy, except for Martin's which stood quietly and seemed disinterested. When the gates opened, Martin's horse took the lead immediately and held it throughout the race. He won by three lengths. ------- Back at the stables, Martin dismounted and patted the horse's nose. "I don't understand how you won so easily against much bigger horses." ------- "I'm not a horse," the animal replied. "I'm a dragon." -------He told Eve about it at breakfast. ------- "It's your sort of dream," she said. If Eve had dreams, she kept them to herself. ------- -------Chapter 8 ------- ------- Martin turned off U.S. 301 at Lumberton, North Carolina and stopped at the large and cheerful looking Chafee’s Family Restaurant. Although it was nearly 11:30 in the morning, there were few other customers. A bored young woman approached their table. ------- "I'm sorry ma'am," she said. "We've just stopped serving breakfast." ------- "That's all right," Eve said. "We'll have lunch." ------- "Waaa'll, it's a little early for lunch." There was a long silence. "But if y'all want to wait...." She looked at Martin with sudden interest. ------- "Wha..., aren't you Colonel Sanders, sir?" she asked in a hushed voice. ------- "I'm afraid not, miss," Martin told her. "The Colonel’s an older man, and he has a goatee rather than a full beard." The waitress nodded and left them without another word. A short time later a large woman approached their table. ------- "I’m Mary Lee Chafee," she said rather sternly, despite her cheerful smile. "I'm the owner of Chafee's, and I do believe, sir, that you are indeed Colonel Harland Sanders." ------- Martin considered showing the woman his driver's license, but he doubted even that would convince her. ------- "Well now, if I were he, Miz Chafee ma’am, I'd rather not raise a ruckus about it." His voice had softened and reflected the woman's drawl. It was something Martin tended to do without thinking. ------- Mary Lee seemed satisfied. She studied Eve a moment. ------- "Haven't I seen you somewhere, my dear?" ------- "I don't think so," Eve said coolly. ------- "Uh huh. W'aaall, we're greatly honored, sir. I'll bring you our menu. Y'all have a nice lunch now." ------- "Why did you say that?" Eve asked. "Now she's sure you're Colonel Sanders." ------- "She was already sure, and it's a better story this way. The Colonel traveling incognito with a beautiful woman." ------- Their juicy hamburgers and crispy French fries were served in an atmosphere of cheerful conspiracy. ------- Before they left, Miss Chafee returned to their table. ------- "Ah hope y'all enjoyed your lunch, sir, and you too ma'am," she added. "If I could prevail on you...." She was holding out a menu. ------- "Of course, my dear." Martin flourished the expensive gold fountain pen that Andy had insisted on bringing him from the office and wrote across the menu in a large neat hand, 'Good eating at Chafee's. All the best, Harland Sanders.' "A grand lunch, Miz Chafee," he added, in a deeper drawl. ------- "Would y'all have any suggestions for us, sir? We're trying to make Chafee's the finest restaurant in the county." ------- Martin smiled. "Just keep up the good work, my dear. We cooks are the last of the rugged individualists." He waved a finger at her. "Value the old ways and never change them for unworthy reasons. And at all costs keep your sense of humor." ------- ------- "Poor Colonel Sanders," Eve said, when they were back in their car, "he'll have a lot to explain. Maybe he was the mysterious man in your hospital room." ------- "A preemptive strike? What was wrong with what I told her?" ------- "Nothing," Eve said, "but it’s just not the Colonel." ------- "And what is the Colonel?" Martin asked, ------- "The Colonel is fried chicken,” Eve said. ------- ------- Contrary to Martin's hope that the television ads were overblown, the South did appear to have experienced a considerable rebirth since their last visit. When they’d come with their children in the fifties they were often the only tourists staying at a six dollars a night motel in the July heat. They'd have the pool and the restaurant to themselves. Luxury of a sort. Now some motels were filled by five o’clock. They stopped at three. They were in no hurry to get to Florida, where only uncertainly awaited them. ------- The accommodations were far more comfortable than the cinder block affairs with noisy in-room air conditioners that had been the best available in the previous decade. Southerners ate better, too. Martin twice ordered Smithfield ham for breakfast, and once it was the real thing. The eggs were large and flavorful. ------- Segregation might be ending in the South but not without a struggle. Quite a few cars displayed Wallace stickers, and a billboard near Wilson, North Carolina pictured a hooded horseman carrying a firebrand, over the caption, "This is the Heart of Klan County -- Join Today." It wasn't unexpected, but it was still a jolt. The Klan had always seemed like cartoon figures, hardly real at all. ------- There were other cultural differences. Churches, and even individual pastors, advertised their spiritual services. A large billboard showed a man lying on the ground with a tankard in his outstretched hand. "A product of the brewer's art." Florida was not the South, of course, not the part they were moving to, but even so he found these marks of an alien society disturbing. ------- Martin was tempted by the gaudy displays of fireworks that were offered at Stuckeys and Lloyds. He could think of no good use for them, however, and Eve refused to have them in the car. Their presence, and the pervasive culture of auto racing, guns, and hunting suggested a libertarian ethos that seemed to clash with the promotion of religion and sobriety. Many southern counties were in fact dry, but Martin carried his own supply of scotch in a handsome leather case he’d bought for the trip. ------- A more agreeable difference was the steady fall in prices as the miles fell behind them. Their motel in New Jersey had cost $23. A similar room in South Carolina was $12 and a good dinner was a third of what it would have been in the north. ------- They had left New Jersey at noon on Wednesday the 24th of July and by Saturday had driven only 860 miles, approximately eleven miles an hour by Martin's calculation. -------Florida, when they at last crossed the border, appeared grayish green and much subdued beneath the summer sun. It was hot and the air was thick with moisture, but daily life went on. Road crews and construction workers labored in the steaming heat. ------- They reached St. Petersburg on Sunday. Despite the slow pace of their trip, or perhaps because of it, they were exhausted. They pulled into a motel only two blocks from the end of the causeway at Indian Rocks Beach. McMurray's Abbey Apartments was on the water. It was clean and utilitarian, and its small grove of palms offered a pleasant oasis of shade. It was at Indian Rocks that they first swam in the Gulf of Mexico back in the 1930's when the coast was thinly populated and still half asleep. ------- They chose a one-bedroom cottage set back twenty feet from the line of seaweed that marked high tide. It had a small kitchen, an air-conditioner, and a TV and was furnished with saggy twin beds and ancient rattan furniture. Eve disturbed a giant roach-like creature in the cabinet beneath the sink. It was a palmetto bug, McMurray explained, quite harmless. He sprayed insecticide around the baseboards, and they saw no more insects until the storm. Was there some genuinely harmful quality about cockroaches, Martin wondered. Did they carry disease or destroy food? Or was it mainly their threatening appearance, which was in fact remarkably like that of the large but innocent palmetto bugs? ------- Apart from the house pests, their temporary quarters seemed to be the almost effortless realization of Martin's dreams. The life of a comfortably situated beachcomber had appealed to him ever since he’d first heard of such a worthless existence. It wasn’t simply that his work had been unsatisfying. Nearly all the frenzied activity in the streets and offices of Manhattan had seemed to him ultimately pointless. Jammed in with other commuters on the Seventh Avenue subway, he’d often imagined himself in a place very much like this one. ------- Martin would have been content to sit on the beach for the rest of his life, watching the gulls and reading books on history and archaeology, but he was concerned about Eve. While he had easily adapted to the heat, she spent much of the time inside their tiny cottage with the air-conditioner roaring. ------- The St. Petersburg Times said it was the hottest summer on record. On most days it would be midnight before it felt even slightly cooler and still not be sleeping weather. -------Everyone talked about the heat, comparing Florida with the places they’d come from in the northeast and the upper middle-west. And it wasn’t just the heat. The weather in New Jersey had seemed to be good or bad almost randomly but without malice. The weather in Florida was generally fine, but somehow it always contained a threat. The clouds could pile up quickly over the Gulf. Lightning would flicker on the horizon and distant thunder rumble for half an hour. The wind would pick up and the waves climb higher on the shore, and then more often than not the threatened storm would simply fade away. ------- Martin frequently suggested shopping expeditions and other diversions, and they tried a new restaurant every day for lunch or supper and sometimes both. Restaurant meals cost little more than the ingredients for a home cooked meal back north. ------- Eve was determined to make the best of it, but Martin feared that she’d been quietly devastated at having to leave her job and to take herself so completely out of the lives of their children and grandchildren. However satisfying Martin found their musty Shangri-la on the Gulf, it clearly wasn't Eve's cup of tea. ------- The children claimed to feel that their parents weren’t that far away. But of course Bud and Mary hadn’t gone anywhere. Their letters were gratifyingly frequent and informative. Bud’s wife had developed the useful habit of collecting his unfinished notes and sending them along with additional comments. When Bud was in the army they had periodically received a fat envelope filled with a week’s worth of fragmentary thoughts and observations. ------- They were surprisingly busy with their shopping expeditions and long lunches, appointments with their lawyer, their tax consultant, and Martin's new heart specialist. They frequently had dinner with the Smiths. ------- Even so, Martin was able to begin reading the books he’d acquired over the past few years for a quieter time. He made steady progress in the Greek grammar Kikapopoulos had given him, and he knew that he was happier than he’d ever been before in his life. Eve knew it too. ------- Much of his pleasure came from the beach itself. He walked a mile on the firm sand each morning in the relative cool of pre-dawn. The sun would rise above the palms as he strolled along the water's edge and he could feel its heat on the return trip. He looked for shells and driftwood that might have washed up during the night. The exotic specimens he remembered from forty years before were rare now, but a small shark's tooth or an immature tulip shell easily satisfied him. ------- ------- On a broiling August afternoon as Martin lay on his stomach, his bifocals dangling from one ear, and poked through a mound of tiny shell fragments with a toothpick, he became conscious of someone standing over him. It was the quiet teenaged boy he'd seen reading in the shade of the Abbey's palms. The boy was living in one of the larger apartments with his mother and sister. His grandparents visited frequently, but there didn't seem to be a father. Martin always observed the behavior and interactions of the people around him, although it would be Eve who would finally strike up a conversation. ------- "Are you looking for something?" the boy said. ------- "I'm trying to find the smallest coquina on the beach," Martin explained. ------- "Why?" the boy asked. It was impossible to walk on the sand without crushing hundreds of the tiny butterfly shells with every step. ------- "Just curiosity. I already have a miniature turkey wing and an olive shell a sixteenth of an inch long." He brushed the sand off his hand and held it out to the boy, who hesitated a moment and then shook it firmly. ------- "Martin Newhouse." ------- "Harold Stern,” the boy said. “What will you do with them?" ------- "I’ll admire them for a while and then glue them to a piece of cardboard and send them to my granddaughter in New Jersey." ------- "Does she collect shells?" ------- "Probably not. She's only two years old. But my son might like them. He used to collect shells when he was a boy. Shells and rocks, arrowheads, matchbook covers, almost anything. I don't think he collects much now. He says possessions weigh us down." ------- "That sounds like a hippy." ------- "He is sort of a hippy. Or maybe more an upper-Bohemian like me. He's a librarian. He's married to a very nice woman, and they have one little girl. He reads and paints. He isn't interested in money." ------- "You don't mind?" ------- "That he isn’t interested in money? Why should I? It's his life." ------- "My granddad would mind. I'm going to the University of Florida next year. I’d like to study French, but Granddad says I have to get a degree in business." ------- "That's what my father said." ------- "So did you?" ------- "He was paying for it. Working your way through college wasn’t really an option during the Depression. I've talked to your grandfather. He seems like a nice man." ------- "Oh he's great. He's taken good care of mom and me since my dad died. It's just that he used to be the World Greatest Salesman." ------- "I know," Martin said, "he still is. You do what you have to in life, Harold. The company I worked for made cigarettes and cat food." Martin smiled. Harold smiled too. ------- "Look, Harold, why not get the business degree your granddad wants for you and also take as much French as you can? Maybe you could work for a few years and then go to graduate school. We had a house built for us by a contractor with a master's degree in the cello from Julliard. He played in a local string quartet. Or maybe you could get a job in France." ------- "That's a really good idea, Mr. Newhouse. Is that what you did?" ------- "Call me Martin, Harold. No, I’d never have thought of anything like that. And I probably wouldn't have done it if I had. I didn't know what I wanted back then." ------- "I always see you with a book. What are you reading about?" ------- "Everything, but mostly history and archaeology. I've been working through an introduction to classical Greek that a friend gave me." ------- "You're learning Greek? That's grreat." ------- "I’m trying to. Polla pion kai polla phagon kai polla kak eipon, anthropos keimai, Timocrion Rhodios" ------- "That sounds good. What does it mean?" ------- "It's an epitaph. 'Having drunk everything and eaten everything and done everything, I lie here a man, Timocratis of Rhodes'." ------- "Sounds like you, Martin. Except, I mean..." ------- Martin laughed and shook his head. "No, they haven't written my epitaph. It’s just as well, because I haven’t done much except in my dreams." ------- They talked until Harold was called in to dinner. He turned to Martin as he was leaving. ------- "Do you know a tall man with a beard? I saw him in your cottage the other day when you and Mrs. Newhouse were out." ------- "Maybe it was the exterminator," Martin said. "We have bugs." ------- "So do we, foot long cockroaches that McMurray calls palmetto bugs. I’ll see you, Martin. I really liked talking to you." ------- "It was nice meeting you, too, Harold. We'll talk more. Take it easy." ------- "Okay. And uh...Martin, you can call me Harry." ------- "Sure thing, Harry." ------- Martin watched the boy walk away. A nice kid, with a family that didn't understand him. Nothing new about that. The tall fellow with the beard sounded like the man he'd seen bending over his hospital bed ten months before, but that couldn't have had anything to do with him. He'd ask McMurray. ------- ------- Martin had discovered the local-interest shelves at the public library and had become an instant authority on the history and biology of the Florida coast. There was little competition. ------- He was soon able to distinguish the herring gull from the ring-billed and laughing gulls as they swooped noisily over the beach. He could name the terns and plovers and the snowy egret and he took particular pleasure in watching the sandpipers dash after the receding waves. The disheveled boat-tailed grackles that walked pigeon-toed to the water's edge and launched themselves into the air screeching wildly when the water hit their feet reminded him of foolish old ladies wading in high-button shoes. ------- Although Martin delighted in the baking heat of the summer sun, Eve made him buy a fringed straw hat to protect his bald spot. The leathery skinned old men who slumped on the benches near the fishing pier had boiled their brains, she said, and she wanted Martin compos mentis for as long as possible. With the hat and beard and a pair of baggy white pants, Martin hoped he no longer looked like a tourist. ------- One morning he identified a flock of Bonaparte's gulls for a vacationing couple from New York who might have passed him on fifty-second street the year before. ------- "Have you lived here all your life?" the woman asked. ------- "As long as I can remember," Martin told her, and they were satisfied they'd met a native. ------- He noticed with approval that women's bathing suits had become skimpier since he’d seen his first bikini at St. Cast on the Riviera. He generally wore long pants and covered his stomach with a loose Hawaiian shirt, but Eve commented that he was approaching the color of a toasted muffin. ------- Late each afternoon, he and Eve took a brief dip in the warm surf and then sat in beach chairs with the other Abbeyites and sipped gin and tonics while they watched the sun sink into the Gulf. There was always a small round of applause. It was hokey and absurd, but Martin happily joined in. He knew he’d regret leaving their seedy beach colony. ------- There were minor imperfections. McMurray began each day by sweeping the walks and shuffleboard courts with a huge gasoline-powered vacuum. There was a period of relative quiet after that, but sometimes, on otherwise pleasant mornings, a kid would bring a portable radio to the beach, and the frantic pounding of rock music would compete with the crump of surf. The traffic on Gulf Boulevard could be heard all day and well into the evening. ------- At dawn the beach was Martin's, and by ten at night the hardiest swimmers had left, the boulevard behind him was empty, and he could hear the waves hiss out in the sand. He let the warm water wash over his feet and feel its pull. He stared into the darkness and sometimes shuddered at the terrifying fascination of the Gulf. ------- ------- A violent August storm raged for two days. The surf thundered nearly to the door of their cottage, and the howling wind drove rain through the cracks around the window frames until half an inch of water covered the floor. Palmetto bugs were flushed from the walls, and there was an invasion of infuriated earwigs. Eve and Martin escaped for a night to a motel further inland. ------- ------- Eve kept up a steady pressure on their contractor. She accused Carson of treating them as a numbered building lot. Work would progress more quickly for a few a days after one of her controlled outbursts and then return to its normal pace, but Eve was determined that they’d be in their new home by the end of September. ------- Over the course of a single week they bought an entire houseful of furniture and appliances at the big Maas Brothers department store in Clearwater. A sofa and living room chairs upholstered in a silky off-white fabric seemed right for Florida. A dining room table with high-backed caned chairs in light wood and quite modern. Their dresser and night stand were made of distressed pecan. Martin had asked the salesman what this meant and was informed coldly that it was just a name. ------- For their Florida room they selected a round, glass-topped table, long a desire of Martin's. It was a symbol of impracticality that contrasted with the dark furniture and horsehair sofas of his childhood in North St. Louis. Buying a truckload of furniture for a house that still lacked doors and windows was in itself a satisfying rebellion against good sense. ------- His mother-in-law would have been delighted. Shopping for dresses at Maas Brothers had been the high point of her existence until her death two years before at eighty-five. Eve and Martin had a cup of soup and split a sandwich at the Maas tearoom three days in a row. ------- They stopped at the house on the way back to the Abbey one afternoon and found that the drywall had been taped and compounded. Two of their new neighbors introduced themselves. Edna and Elsie were retired office workers who lived directly across the street. Edna reminded Martin of Joan, his formidable secretary of many years, a woman who was far more competent in financial matters than he and who now owned many acres of priceless Long Island real estate. ------- While they were talking, a golf ball landed in their back yard. One of the gray-haired men in the foursome shouted a joking suggestion as to how Martin might deal with duffers. Martin glumly anticipated more such merriment. ------- ------- Chapter 9 ------- ------- The nearest Episcopal Church was quite large, and the ten o'clock service was well attended. Martin and Eve sat near the open rear doors on their first visit. Many Episcopal congregations were like private clubs, proud of their traditions but half reluctant to share them with newcomers. They could slip out if the atmosphere were oppressive. ------- They were pleasantly surprised by St. Peter's. Several parishioners introduced themselves and seemed genuinely friendly. They’d begun to notice a consistent warmth on the part of Florida’s large population of retirees, compounded perhaps of genuine interest, abundant time, and the steady loss of old acquaintance. Any acceptable candidate was immediately a part of whatever group he stumbled into. ------- The scent of oleanders mixed agreeably with the ecclesiastical aromas of floor wax, moldy kneelers, and the faintest hint of incense. The handsome stained glass windows, the familiar liturgy, and the passable choir seemed surprisingly at home among the tall palms. ------- The rector of St. Peters proved to be a transplant from New England whose scholarly sermons were as satisfying as they were unexpected. Episcopalians leaned towards faith, but as they didn’t wish to discourage profitable good works they generally stayed away from the topic of salvation altogether. Dr. Neville seemed to have thought the matter through. He pointed out that as they had already been saved from the consequences of sin, they might show their appreciation by taking pleasure in their lives and sharing their good fortune with others. ------- Neville's Harvard doctorate in 18th century French literature had been earned in middle age and was carried lightly. His sermons touched on literature, philosophy, and history in a witty manner which seemed both vaguely spiritual and yet down to earth. They later learned that he was a fine watercolorist and an excellent tennis player. It seemed almost unfair that one person should enjoy so many talents. They liked Neville’s quietly beautiful wife as well. ------- After the sermon, Martin's mind was free to wander. He knew the prayers and responses and could growl the words of florid nineteenth century hymns without disturbing his train of thought. ------- He believed himself to be a reasonably good Christian for a pantheist, and to be as decent a man now as he was ever likely to be. Three-hour Sunday services in a hellfire obsessed congregation of Missouri Lutherans had turned Martin against religious fervor of any sort. Lulu had sat her boys in a front pew, one on either side of her substantial bulk, in an attempt to expose them to the controlling powers of faith. Martin always felt that the pastor’s spluttering rage was directed at his own faintly insolent face. Lulu’s strategy had been counterproductive. Martin’s subsequent efforts to be a good husband and father, and to be generous and fair to those who depended on him, were entirely his own doing and had brought their obvious rewards. ------- He found Sunday worship to be a pleasant time of enforced idleness, like a long train ride during which reading and thinking were doubly enjoyable. He had day-dreamed many adventures when he was a young boy and his life offered few other satisfactions. Tom Swift, Tarzan of the Apes, and John Carter of Mars provided his models. Comfortable living and a happy marriage had tamed his fantasies, although even as a child, Martin’s daydreams had been realistic. To have imagined himself as stronger and cleverer than he actually was would have spoiled the game. Throughout the 40’s, Martin had put his imagination to use inventing stories for his children. He made up hundreds of gently moralizing tales about Elmer the Elephant, the Little Red Ant, and the Three Corgies. As his confidence grew, he could speak the formulaic opening words of a story and listen to it unfold according to the established personalities of his characters. ------- He’d tried more than once to write the stories down, but on paper his effortlessly invented tales became stiff and cluttered. Even so, he enjoyed writing. He’d once edited a newsletter for the Ferguson, Missouri Lion's Club. He wrote entertaining letters to friends and relatives which were rarely acknowledged. His only published article was accepted by Parents Magazine in 1946 but not printed until the early 50's. It was about the Indian Guides, a father and son organization that he and Bud had belonged to. The Guides was based on American Indian lore and promoted racial justice and conservation decades before these causes became popular. Fathers and sons shared duties, and physicians and PhD’s socialized easily with shopkeepers. A Native American would have been welcomed if they’d known where to find one. ------- While their children were away at college, Martin wrote them long letters in which he commented on the news of the day and the books he was reading. These were appreciated and answered. ------- Although he’d always read a great deal, Martin read fewer novels as he grew older. He’d experienced just enough of life to be bored by improbable plots and invented emotions. He watched more television than he had before his retirement. It was so easy to do. The news was better in Florida he half seriously told Eve. The local coverage was less threatening than New York's daily body counts. ------- McMurray suggested the fishing pier as an entertainment. Martin had fished in the Maine lakes when he was younger, and they’d enjoyed breakfasts of freshly caught bass and perch coated with cornmeal and fried in butter until one morning the sight of a fish gasping in the bottom of the rowboat, its iridescent scales turning gray and lifeless, had suddenly ended his pleasure in the sport. If he did catch a fish at the pier, where there were more kibitzers than fishermen, someone would be sure tell him what it was and how to cook it. He didn't feel the need to be initiated into another brotherhood of hearty men. ------- He'd earned a good salary for thirty years by doing what was required of him and sometimes swallowing his pride and judgment. He was finished with that. He had no intention of joining the comatose fishermen or the brain-dead pensioners on their park benches. Whatever he did from now on would be his own choice, and when the time came for him to be slid into his drawer in Memorial Park, he'd go as himself. ------- For the most part, he was content to read and to walk the beach and watch the thunderheads form fantastic shapes above the Gulf. The weather had been generally good, but there was always a vaguely agreeable threat behind the deep blue of the Florida sky. ------- Eventually, however, he began to share some of Eve's restlessness and to feel the stirrings of what he called his creation factor, the hunger for something new that kept humans meddling with their circumstances, often at the cost of their comfort and safety. One day they passed a new development named Serenity Gardens. Martin shook his head in amazement. Despite the name it wasn’t a cemetery, just another retirement community and a fairly decent looking one at that. ------- ------- A few weeks before they were to move into their house, Martin went for his usual late evening walk along the beach. It was a starless night. The Gulf was black except for the reflected gleam of a few whitecaps. The temperature was in the mid 80's and the humidity still very high, but the air felt almost cool compared to earlier in the day. ------- Martin found it difficult to decide whether he got more pleasure from his morning or his evening strolls. In neither case was anyone else out at these times. He wasn’t the recluse he once thought himself to be, but he disliked crowds and he valued periods of solitude. ------- Although houses were relatively cheap in Florida, land near the coast was more expensive and fully occupied. There were few places to walk other than along the beach itself. It was ironic, he felt, that space should become a costly luxury in a universe that was growing constantly larger and where light years of emptiness separated the few measurable specks of matter. ------- He was halfway to the fishing pier when he heard behind him the familiar sound of shells being crushed beneath shoes. There’d been no talk of crime at the beach, and there was no reason to suppose that this wasn't just a fellow evening stroller. ------- He stood a moment and looked out to sea as if to listen to the waves hiss and die across the sloping sand. The footsteps stopped. He walked on a few feet and bent down to pick up a shell. He did this several more times and when he thought the person behind him would be visible in the lights of a motel, he bent down again and looked back. ------- He saw a large man wearing dark pants and a long sleeved shirt, peculiar in itself on a tropical evening. It wasn’t the figure he’d half expected, the person who had leaned over his hospital bed months before and had recently searched their cottage. It was the other one, the big sandy bearded man who’d looked at him with loathing from the hospital corridor, the man who might have been a ship's officer. ------- Despite what he'd said to Kostas about Eve’s ancestor at Bunker Hill, Martin wasn’t a coward. He'd managed to avoid trouble most of his life, but the few times it had come to him, his instinct had been to fight rather than run. His present situation was unpromising, however. The man was younger and much larger than he. He would cut Martin off before he could reach the nearest motel, and Martin’s cries for help would be lost in the roar of the surf and the whine of air-conditioners. ------- He had nothing to use as a weapon. A handful of sand might surprise an attacker, but it wouldn't stop him. Martin saw only one way out. He angled unhurriedly towards the water and walked into the surf. When the waves reached his thighs, he slipped out of his trousers and began to swim. ------- He treaded water a hundred feet off shore, well into the darkness. He could see the man silhouetted against the lights of the boulevard. ------- It was a half mile back to the Abbey, but the water was warm and buoyant. Martin was an excellent swimmer and had no doubt that he could make the distance easily if his heart held out. He felt certain that his chances were better in the Gulf than with the motionless figure that stood staring out at the black water. ------- Martin began an effortless crawl. His breathing was easy. There were no complaints from his chest. He would swim regularly from now on, he decided. The captain, as he thought of him, had left the beach. There was nothing to keep the man from walking back up the road to the Abbey where Eve was reading, alone and unsuspecting, but he didn’t think he would. Somehow this was between the two of them, and the captain would find him another time. ------- Perhaps he didn't mean him harm, but Martin couldn't forget the way the man had looked at him in the hospital. Could he have sent the other intruder as well, the one who’d glanced at him and gone on to Kikapoloulos? Had he simply been checking whether Kostas was asleep? None of that was clear. ------- A hundred yards short of the motel, Martin decided to worry about Eve after all and quickly swam ashore. His legs were shaky but his breathing was normal. ------- Their air-conditioned cottage was freezing. He bolted the flimsy door behind him. ------- "What in heaven's name!" Eve had put down her book and was staring at him. ------- "I'll explain," he said. ------- "Where are your trousers?" ------- "Let me get a shower first.” ------- He took a two minute hot shower, dried off, and put on his pajamas. ------- "I went for a swim," he said. Eve just looked at him. ------- "For a reason," he added. He wrapped a robe around himself and sat for a moment in one of the crumbling wicker chairs. He got up again, put two ice cubes in a whiskey sour glass and poured himself a jigger of scotch. Then he told Eve what had happened. ------- "You're sure it was the same man? You saw him for a few seconds almost ten months ago.” ------- "I’m positive. His size, the way he moved, his hair and beard. I got a good look at him in the light from Coolie’s Cottages. What would anyone be doing on the beach at half past eleven on a hot night wearing long pants and long-sleeved shirt? Why did he stop when I did and leave the beach as soon as I swam away? And why didn’t he think I might be a suicide and holler to me or go for help? Do you think I'm being paranoid?" ------- "No,” Eve said, “I can't imagine anything more unlikely. You think you’re too cosmically unimportant." ------- "It isn’t just me. Most people seem to find one another beneath notice unless there’s a good reason. I can't think of why someone would be interested in me, and I can’t go to the police about something that makes no sense even to me. We'll just have to keep our eyes open. I'm sorry, Eve. I didn't want to worry you.” ------- "Well you have. But I don’t see what to do either, unless you think we should talk to Kostas?" ------- Martin considered this. ------- “The police thought there was something going on with him. If he’s gotten us into something dangerous, he owes us an explanation. I'll write him, Eve. I don't want to call. And I'll ask Harry to keep an eye out for the Captain.” ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 10 ------- ------- "What it’s about?" Harry asked. ------- "You know as much as I do," Martin said. ------- "Nobody’s angry at you?" ------- Martin shrugged. "I like to argue, and some people take me too seriously, but not that seriously. I really don’t know, Harry. I worked for the same company for thirty two years. I made a few enemies, but just in the office and they’re long gone. I never walked off with more than a paper clip." ------- "Do you think they're in it together, the tall man and the Captain?" ------- "They almost have to be, but in what? There’s no reason for anyone to be after me." ------- "It's a mystery. I always thought it would be neat to be in a mystery." ------- "I always did too. The kind where an ordinary guy stumbles into a mess and figures it out, but these characters are real. I don't want anyone getting hurt, including me." ------- "You're not ordinary, Martin. Ordinary people don't collect the smallest shells on the beach. I’ll bet we could solve it together." ------- "Okay, and if we have to run after anyone, you can do it. I’d have a heart attack. Where do we start?" ------- "You think it’s about Dr. Kikapopoulos?" ------- "I don’t see what else. The bad guys must think I work with him. Two agents meeting in a hospital room with heart attacks seems pretty far fetched, but maybe nothing’s ridiculous if you're in the spy business." ------- "And it’s Greek government agents that are following you?" ------- "They can follow me all they want. It's what else they might do that worries me. What do you know about Greek history?" ------- "Plato and the Olympics, Lord Byron, Troy and Heinrich Schlieman, the military coup last year." ------- "That's more than ninety-nine percent of Americans would know. How about we go to the library this afternoon? If it's okay with your mom." ------- "I’ll ask her, but she won't mind. She thinks you and Mrs. Newhouse are neat. Grandpa’s impressed by a big shot New York executive." ------- Martin grinned. "Then we won't disillusion him." ------- ------- "Kostas? Of course, we'd love to see you. Martin, Kostas is in Tampa, and he wants to take us to dinner. Why don't you come here? No? He says he’d better not come to us. How about the Kapok Tree? ------- “The Kapok Tree, Kostas. It's a big restaurant. A crazy place, but the food's good, and it’s easy to find. Yes, it’s really huge. No one will notice us. Turn right on Courtney Campbell Boulevard just after you get off the causeway and follow the signs. It's a couple of miles on your right. You can't miss it. We'll meet you in the bar. At six, Martin? At six. We eat early like the natives. We are the natives." ------- ------- Kostas had turned up shortly after 6:00, looking fit and cheerful and blending in surprisingly well with the acre of casually dressed tourists and locals seated around the gigantic tree. ------- “What do you think of your tropical paradise?" he asked. ------- "I love it,” Martin said. “It is a paradise for me. I feel at home. I was born to decompose on a tropical beach. But you’d better ask Eve." ------- "I go where he goes,” Eve said. “He's the man who wrote me poetry in my father's back yard the summer we were married. I was sorry he ever had to get a job. Of course he feels at home. It doesn't seem that way to me yet, but it will. We're adaptable. How are you doing?" ------- "Tip top, Eve. The new semester’s going well. I have good students, and some attractive young ladies from the institution across town are sitting in on my courses, which helps civilize the beasts." ------- "Busy?" ------- Kostas nodded. "I'm going back tomorrow. I came to see you and Martin. I got your letter, Martin. It's time we talked. I seem to have entangled the two of you in my own affairs, and I don't know how to extricate you. I should have forgotten about you after I was out of the hospital, but I didn't want to. It was foolish and selfish, and you’re paying the price. I’d apologize, but it’s too late." ------- "What are you saying, Kostas? We’re mixed up in something dangerous." ------- "More or less, Martin. It's my involvement with an organization that promotes democracy in Greece. Imagine! Democracy in Greece. What an idea. I know the tall man. He probably is an assassin. I very likely owe you my life, and although it was foolish that's one reason I didn't want us to lose touch." ------- "A sentimental Greek." Eve smiled at him. ------- "I just pressed the call button," Martin said. ------- "The right button at the right time. That's survival." ------- "How about the Captain?" ------- "I don't know him, but they have many agents." ------- "This is the Greek government we're talking about?" ------- "The Papadopoulos military junta. Not that despotism is un-Greek. The Ummayids, the Turks, the English, the Nazis, the communists. All totalitarians, and we've survived them. Freedom rings so insistently in Greece that it's hard for us to hear each other but we're generally not fanatical. Most of us would rather argue than kill one another." ------- "What should we do?" Eve asked. "Are Martin and I really in danger?" ------- "I wish I knew. I've been open about my opposition to the junta. I write articles, and I try to pressure congressmen. They don't have to spy on me. I try to be careful, but if they're determined to kill me, they will. Maybe they thought it would be easy in the hospital. I’ve presumed they shot poor Hanley by mistake. I told the police I didn’t know what happened, and that’s the truth. Tell me again about the sailor." ------- Martin described the man he’d seen at the hospital and recounted his adventure on the beach in as much detail as he could remember. Kostas looked increasingly disturbed. ------- "If you have no enemies, they must be mine. I'm terribly sorry, my dears. I wish I could offer you protection. All I can suggest is that you take care of yourselves, and I’ll try to attract more of their attention. I hope you won't give up your plans to go to Greece. The old stones will always be there, whatever uniform the police are wearing.” ------- ------- “I’m glad you feel at home in paradise,” Eve said. They’d stretched out coffee and dessert and taken a walk through the lighted gardens before Kostas went back to his hotel in Tampa. ------- “It’s a good place.” ------- “Yes, it is,” Eve agreed. ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 11 ------- ------- “Do you understand all this, Martin?” Harry handed him the book. ------- “I wouldn’t want to take a test on it, but I have the rough idea. Greece has been in trouble since the German occupation and the civil war in the nineteen forties. The government was fragile and corrupt. The people who want social justice don’t trust those who want to keep what they have, and vice-versa. They’ve been pretty much a client of the U.S. since 1950, and we support the conservatives. Last April, there was a military coup by a group of junior officers, supposedly to defend Greek civilization from the communists and western imperialism, but mostly to support the right wingers in the armed forces. When a counter coup failed in December around the time Kostas and I were in the hospital, Colonel Papadopoulos emerged as an unpopular dictator. We support him too.” ------- “I’ll bet we won’t when McCarthy becomes President? ------- “Eugene McCarthy’s a nice man, Harry. He’s smart and probably as honest as any other politician, but I wouldn’t count on his winning. I don’t think he has that many supporters old enough to vote. I’m not even sure who I’ll vote for. Nixon’s an opportunist. He got on the anti-communist band wagon when he became a member of the House Un-American Activities. He even called Truman a traitor. Rockefeller’s a good man, but he’s too rich, he’s divorced, and he’s a middle of the road liberal, which Americans think is wishy-washy. Ronald Reagan was dopey as an actor. I’ll probably vote for Humphrey. He’s a muddler and a machine politician, but, even if they’re crooked, the political organizations are the best thing about this country. They take care of the people, and they keep out the ‘isms. Humphrey can’t say it yet, but I doubt that he’s any more enthusiastic about Vietnam than McCarthy is. He’ll end it if he can. I see McCarthy as a dove in shining armor, and we had enough of that with the Kennedys. The thing is, Harry, we usually elect the right men for the job. Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman all had their faults but they did what they had to. Even Eisenhower was all right, although he made me sick. It’s too soon to tell about Johnson. He’s a good old boy, but he’s smart and funny, and he’s done some important things. I held my nose back in 1960 and voted for Nixon. Kennedy was elected on a wave of emotionalism, which is always a bad idea. ‘Ask not, what your country can do for you...’ Come on, Harry, we’re the country. The government’s supposed to...... Sorry son, I get carried away. Kennedy is one thing your grandfather and I agree on.” ------- “That’s okay, Martin. But, you’re not a hawk are you?” Harry sounded genuinely distressed. ------- “Lord no, Harry. Hawks and doves, left and right, that’s just people not thinking. When a bunch of people scream and holler the answer is generally somewhere in the middle. Eve says I’m a sanderling, those little birds that run up and down the beach all the time. They stake out their territory and then fight their battles outside of it. Smart birds. No, I’m opposed to any kind of extremism.” ------- “You’re an extremist in defense of moderation!” ------- “Exactly,” Martin agreed. “I say what I mean, but I don’t expect anyone to agree with me without thinking things through. Your grandfather might not understand.” ------- “There are lots of things my grandfather doesn’t understand.” ------- ------- Martin’s ulcer acted up. He spent several days growling and barking with pain. Retirement had eased his stomach for months, but the stress of dealing with the builder had gotten to him. Eve ignored his complaints in the kindest way. ------- Miraculously, during the first week of September, the final stucco coat was applied, the sprinkler system was installed, and the lawn was sodded. When the grass immediately began to turn brown, Martin asked Edna and Elsie why the lawn sprinklers weren’t operating. ------- “Their bill was two thousand dollars the first month,” Edna explained. “The sprinklers haven’t run since. But the water isn’t metered, so just use your own hose.” ------- Martin laughed and thanked her. A million times over, men had sold one another Paradise. ------- ------- They moved on September twenty-fifth. After four nights of sleeping on the floor, their beds and most of their other furniture arrived all at once in a great honking and confusion. ------- The house was neat and perfect, and they loved it. The view from the Florida room was unobstructed for half a mile. The golf course was well trimmed and artistically dotted with live oaks, Norway pines, and a dozen varieties of palm. Hundreds of birds sang, chirped, and twittered in the early mornings. By day it was easy to ignore the golfers. At night it was satisfyingly dark. ------- Edna and Elsie were dolls, ready for drinks and conversation at any time. The next door neighbors, the Trims, a retired army colonel and his wife and mother, were more dignified. Like many of their new acquaintances, they trailed as much of their past glory as people let them. Martin was generous about this, and amused. ------- Trim played golf daily, or so Martin assumed. He asked Trim about his game one Sunday afternoon when they met on the sidewalk. ------- “I never play on Sunday,” Trim said gruffly. ------- “Of course not,” Martin agreed. Religion had kept its place in New Jersey. Here it often intruded. On a Sunday evening at the Abbey Motel a few weeks before they moved, the usual crowd of guests was drinking Daiquiris and watching the sun set over the gulf. Eve had asked a man who was known as a fanatical angler how his fishing had gone. ------- There was stunned silence for a moment, and then he said solemnly, “I never fish on Sunday.” After another pause, he continued, “I never hunt on Sunday, either.” ------- “And I never knit on Sunday,” his wife added. ------- Martin and Eve could think of no really adequate reply. The couple drifted off, and the sun went down. ------- “It’s a good thing we moved from the middle-west when we did,” Martin said. ------- Eve smiled. “You liked it all right when we lived there. You’d have enjoyed being a chicken farmer.” ------- “I know,” Martin agreed. “That’s why I’m glad we left.” ------- ------- There were reports of frost in New Jersey by the third week in October. Martin stood in his back yard watering the lawn, and felt a deep gratitude as sweat rolled down his arms in the ninety degree heat. He had no need of anything cooler than a scotch and soda. ------- There were many different kinds of insect in his yard, but Martin was content to share it with them. There were frogs and toads to eat them as well. When a few dragonflies the size of small birds approached him, he squirted them with the hose. Soon forty or fifty of the amazing creatures swooped and hovered around him. Charlatan, beachcomber, dragonfly charmer. ------- ------- Towards the end of October they waited for their first hurricane. They’d moved the porch furniture and plants inside and bought a supply of candles and bottled water. There didn’t seem to be any other preparations to make. ------- The Trims left for Ocala. Martin found Edna and Elsie planting trees in their back yard. Edna told Martin that they weren’t doing anything to get ready for the hurricane. ------- “Edna, that just isn’t true,” Elsie objected. “I baked a meatloaf.” ------- Martin went home and told Eve that all was well, they could count on Elsie’s meat loaf. ------- At the Publix Market, they found the aisles filled with elderly couples emptying the shelves into their shopping carts. There was no bread. ------- Martin bought one of the two remaining loaves at a 7-11. An old man grabbed the other and exulted, “The last bread in twenty miles. I’ve been looking for an hour and a half. Those damned television newscasters have everyone so riled up they’re hysterical.” ------- After several days of stern warnings, he storm arrived on Friday afternoon with torrential rain and shrieking ninety mile an hour winds. It was an interesting experience but not one Martin wanted to repeat. They spent the evening showing slides to Edna and Elsie and drinking gin and bitter lemon. When the electricity failed, they went to bed. ------- The main force of the storm passed directly over Ocala and chased the exhausted Trims on to Orlando. ------- ------- Eve and Martin had dinner at the Smiths the following Sunday. Jack and Helen had been busy entertaining Jack’s sister and brother-in-law. The couple had retired and sold their house in Connecticut, along with most of their furniture. They’d been planning the move to Florida for years and had spent their last ten vacations in St. Pete, but after four days of dispirited house hunting, they couldn’t wait to get back to Connecticut. ------- Martin felt smug. He’d had his own brief moment of doubt before they’d moved south, but he hadn’t looked back since. Life in Florida was shallow and artificial. Martin’s beloved palms had the quality of stage props, and the lawns and flowers were trimmed to an unnatural perfection. But it was pleasant to sit on a porch late on a beautiful afternoon and drink cocktails while conversation droned on about grass and flowers, houses and drainage. The few opinions that might be expressed on world issues were predictable. Martin was used to this. Except among Eve’s friends from the University, it had been little different in the north. They had each other and their books and thoughts and a few good friends like Jack and Helen and the Lowells, a retired English professor and his energetic wife. At its worst, life among the palms was just a bit more honestly false than life in New York. There was a reluctance to give up old titles and honors, but that was true everywhere. They were all in the same frail boat. ------- For the most part, their community was content to pursue happiness through food and drink, films and plays, cards and shuffleboard, and always golf. Even golf was played with less seriousness than in the north. Sitting in his Florida room, reading or writing, Martin had become an authority on the seventh hole. Each new foursome brought its own drama of hopes and uneasy relationships. He could usually predict a player’s performance from the way he or she addressed the ball. Hookers hooked, slicers sliced, and no one appeared to be overly frustrated. One woman managed to place successive shots in the back yards of six of the houses that lined the fairway before she cheerfully picked up her ball and carried it to the hole. ------- There were many books in the local library that offered suggestions as to what people might do with their retirement. Martin had seen none that described what they actually did. ------- ------- -------Chapter 12 ------- ------- ------- ------- Christmas was in some ways a disappointment. Both Martin and Eve had secretly looked forward to their trip north more than they admitted to one another. It went well enough on the surface. It was wonderful to see the children and grandchildren. Everyone was in good spirits, and unlike so many earlier family Christmases, no one was sick. -------But there was no real going back. That their welcome was warm and enthusiastic was all the more upsetting. They had to admit finally that they could never be more than visitors in their children’s lives. This was what you raised children for, but that made it no easier. ------- They spent Christmas Eve with Bud and his family and drove to Mary’s late in the evening. Mary’s children were older and would appreciate having their grandparents with them on Christmas morning. It was pleasant being the guests of their children, something to be proud of, but sad as well. ------- The trip itself was ghastly. The weather was cold and dank and far too much like the previous November for Martin’s comfort. Eve fussed over him uncharacteristically and asked Bud and Mary not to let the children tire him. It was a strain. ------- Even the car-train was not the luxurious journey they’d expected. Their sleeper was old and dirty, and the food and service were poor. It wasn’t like the old days. Martin claimed to miss the clickity clack of train travel before welded rails. The stops and starts, the long delays, and the hours of limping along at ten miles an hour were even worse than during the war when the food was still remarkably good. ------- Was he becoming a curmudgeon, or was the world falling apart? Both probably. The next time they’d take their chances on a Cuban detour and go by air. And they’d never go north again in the winter. Martin saw a sign in Auburndale, Florida advertising “Christ’s Auto Supply” which cheered him considerably. ------- The first thing they did when they were safely back in Florida was buy a new sofa bed and prepare their guest room for visitors. It would clearly be better if the world came to them. ------- ------- The next few weeks drifted past lazily. Martin read about the blizzards and sub-zero weather in the North and gloated over their consistently beautiful weather. They socialized with their undemanding neighbors, took small trips, and explored the surprisingly numerous attractions of the Tampa Bay area. Busch Gardens, Disney World, Tarpon Springs, and Weekiwatchi Springs all had a glossy charm. Living in vacationland was a peculiar experience. It was sometimes difficult to believe that they did actually live here and weren’t simply on an extended visit. Or that the grass and trees and beach were natural and not serviced by utility tunnels that ran beneath the streets. And yet it was no sillier than thinking that because you were the owner of a hundred year old Victorian house on an elm lined street in a quaint New England village you were rooted in the real world. ------- Martin gathered scraps of wood from the construction sites in their neighborhood and built shelves for his books and his collection of sharp-spined cacti. He’d read a magazine article which described a hundred ways to build shelves, and he built his in the hundred and first, ugly but strong. He decided that oil painting was too smelly and that he’d take up needlepoint instead. It was mildly creative and very relaxing. ------- He read a good deal. He picked up a biography of Pontius Pilate at the Library. It sounded like a doubtful enterprise considering the small amount of possible source material, but he’d always felt sympathy for Pilate. What was the man to do? Martin had once disgraced himself in Lutheran catechism class by defending both Pilate and Judas Iscariot as obviously helpless pawns in God’s plan. As this was merely the worst of similar remarks, he’d finally been thrown out of class for good. Revered Peters called on his mother, and Martin was forced to apologize to the teacher and to take an extra year of catechism. It had made no difference. He’d grown up without a fear of Hell and with no illusions about resting safely in the arms of a merciful savior. It was just as well. -------

------- Part II -- The Afterlife

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------- Chenoweth-

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