“What I want?” he said. “What do I want?” His hand drifted back down to his lap, and then he said, “I want to go to Massachusetts. I want you to drive us there, so I can show you the land I’m leaving you and Wiloma. I want to see the reservoir. I want to see where your parents lived.”
For a second, Henry saw the cabin in which he’d spent his first nine years. He saw the rough pine paneling and the wood-burning stove; he saw his mother bent over the kitchen table, snipping war reports from newspapers and magazines. He saw the map of the Pacific she kept on the wall and the pins dotting the islands where battles had raged, with and without his father: New Guinea, Makin, Eniwetok, Saipan. He heard his mother’s voice telling him how he’d leapt in her womb during the 1938 hurricane, which had started on the same day Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and so been ignored by almost everyone. Calamitous days, she’d told him. I carried you through calamitous days. His spirits soared with his uncle’s request and then promptly crashed.
“How can I take you?” he asked. “You know I don’t have a car.”
Brendan stared out the window and flapped his arm tensely in the air. “We could get one. Those vans in the parking lot, the ones with the wheelchair lifts — we’re allowed to borrow them.”
“Come on,” Henry said. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m serious,” Brendan said. “I could go talk to the administrator, sign one out, get the keys — it’s as easy as that. I could sign one out for the weekend, we wouldn’t even have to tell anyone where we were going ….”
“Really?” Henry thought of a smooth road, a few days of freedom, the pleasure of knowing that his uncle trusted him, even if no one else in his family did. Then he remembered that he didn’t have a license. The police had handcuffed him after the accident, once they’d pried him out of the car and decided he wasn’t hurt. They’d hauled him to jail and made him appear in court in his dirty clothes, and then they’d taken his license away. “I’d do it,” he said glumly. “I’d love to. But I can’t. They suspended my license.”
Brendan spun around so Henry could see his face. “Fine. Worry about a piece of paper. Maybe once I get to Wiloma’s, I can talk Waldo into taking me. He’d be interested in seeing that land, I bet — I bet he can talk Wiloma into letting him do something with her half.”
Henry’s stomach knotted. “Waldo knows about the land?”
“I imagine,” Brendan said coolly. “I imagine Wiloma told him. You know she can’t keep anything to herself.”
Henry could just imagine what Waldo would do. He’d pry that land away from Wiloma somehow; he’d always been able to manipulate her. And then he’d cover it with pretentious houses on three-acre lots, all of them looking exactly the same although they were supposed to be unique. Which was not at all what he had in mind himself; he had big ideas. A vacation complex complete with tennis courts and a health club and cross-country skiing trails, condominiums tucked in the trees, tax credits and depreciation allowances. The units would be small but elegant, energy efficient, cunningly designed. That was the difference, he thought, between a developer and a builder like Waldo: a developer had vision, a developer could see. And if he could see it, he could figure out how to finance it. If he could explain it to Brendan, he could get Brendan to go along.
“Forget about it,” Brendan said. He spun his chair around again, so that Henry was looking at the back of his head. “I can make my own arrangements.”
“No,” Henry said. “I’ll take you. What could happen? We’ll drive slowly, no one will stop us. Are you sure you can get us a van?”
“Wait here. I’ll be back with the keys.”
Before Henry could stop him, before he could even catch his breath, Brendan rolled down the hall toward the elevator.
6
FROM THE “LETTERS TO THE EDITOR” OF THE PARADISE VALLEY Daily Transcript:
February 12, 1922
Dear Sirs:
The report of the Metropolitan Water Commission is deeply disturbing, recommending as it does “the construction of a great reservoir in the Paradise River Valley, and of tunnels sufficient to transport said water to the Metropolitan area.”
At the town meetings of Pomeroy, Winsor, Stillwater, and Nipmuck, funds have been approved to hire legal counsel to represent our interests in Boston. These men, as well as our elected representatives, have spoken strongly at the hearings held both in Boston and here. But I note with some distress that many of their comments have addressed practical details of the plan. Selectman C. J. Wheeler presented a request that any land required for the proposed reservoir be taken by purchase, rather than by eminent domain. Representative Hallman argues that the land assessment procedures are poorly described in the proposed bill. X. J. Swanson, counsel representing the businesses of Pomeroy, expressed his concerns that delay over a final decision has been detrimental to commerce in the valley. All excellent points — but are these well-meaning men, in their efforts to safeguard our economic interests, truly expressing our desires?
Is not our deepest desire that there should be no reservoir? Does it matter how our property is assessed, how we are paid for it, or when we are told that we must leave — when we do not want to leave? Has not the grinding pressure imposed on us by the Commission worn down our resolute opposition and caused us to think only how we might best profit from this situation, when it is the situation itself that we must resist?
We must keep in mind that this group of engineers and politicians from Boston have one ambition only: to invade our valley, to destroy our towns, to trample on our rights as citizens. Compromise with such blind aggression is untenable.
Frank B. Auberon, Sr.
Pomeroy
Part II One Old Man Vanished
7
BRENDAN THOUGHT HE HEARD SIRENS, IN THE PARKING LOT, before they’d even left the grounds; at the spotlight where, sitting high in the van, he overlooked his patch of sidewalk; on West Street, as they finally rolled away from the Home. He expected police cars, motorcycles, announcements on the radio — because of course the Home had no policy of loaning out its vans, and he could not believe that Henry had believed him.
All week he’d been wondering how he might approach Henry. He’d planned a campaign of pity and guilt: The end is near, my boy. Would you deny a dying old man his last, modest wish? Something along the lines of that, which would twist Henry’s ears with shame. But in his desire to see the valley once more, in his mad passion to gaze at the water beneath which his first abbey lay, he had forgotten that Henry no longer had a car. His heart had almost stopped when Henry had reminded him. Then he’d looked out the window and seen the vans and plucked his scheme from the air like an unripened quince. It was weak, there was nothing behind it. It depended on luck and on his last-minute appeal to Henry’s greed and need to master Waldo.
He had not seen the administrator. He had not spoken to anyone. He had wheeled himself into the basement room where the janitors kept their tools and their coffeepot and the pegboard on which hung the keys to the vans, and then he had directed Fred Johannson, who sat drowsing in his chair, to the whirlpool in the other wing. It sounded funny, he’d said. Like it might be overflowing. Fred had lumbered off and Brendan had leaned up against the board and knocked down the keys marked “Medical Transport Van No. 1.” A minute’s work, except that the keys had fallen to the table and Brendan’s hands had banged against them like hooves. He had thought of the way the dogs they’d kept at the abbey had scooped up bones, pressing the pads of their paws clumsily together. No fingers, no thumbs; he had scooped up the keys in a similar fashion and dropped them into his lap.