“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said. He kept trying to explain himself. “You may be right. You may even be honest, though I doubt it. But I’ve spent enough time listening to you already. Out, out,” she said, gesturing and laughing by this time, the laugh of a pretty woman who gets her way. And he walked out.
She suspected him of turning the all-out landgrab into an excuse to raise prices, and so she set up a complicated system of rival agents to keep the prices down. Some of the land was being bought back from the city, which had started paying people to abandon their homes, and she got a good rate for the buyback, too. The city took it in the purse both ways.
Another one of her jobs was to persuade the holdouts to sell, and I drove along with her on some of these missions. “As protection,” she said, though I was more frightened than she was. I told her about my gun and she looked at me, shocked.
“Marny, what do you think this is?” she said. “Kabul? Get rid of it. I don’t want to hear about it again.”
I thought she didn’t have a clue. Wearing her Barneys coat and bright stilettos, she clicked up broken porch steps in the melting snow and banged on warped doors when the bells failed to ring. “Darling,” she called people, and “honey,” but somehow nobody minded. They invited her in.
Inside she would slowly unwrap herself, talking all the time, asking for coffee. Women, she once explained to me, respect a woman who can wear such shoes, and men have their own reasons for liking them. It didn’t matter in the end if most of the holdouts refused to sell — she wanted to spread good relations.
I got to know my neighborhood this way, which had once been prosperous. There was still a kind of washed-up middle class. I remember an elderly retired elementary school teacher, Mrs. Troy, who had lived in her house for fifty years. Maybe two-thirds of her block had burned down — she was surrounded by fields. Shopping took all day. She refused to understand the Internet and couldn’t drive safely anymore, though her license was valid. There weren’t many buses. Her grandson, who used to come around with a few bags of groceries on a Sunday, was serving fifteen months at the Ryan Correctional Facility. She told us all this herself, with a certain pride: he was doing very well there.
No, she wouldn’t think of selling. But she wanted us to stay and talk and brought out Archway oatmeal cookies on a china plate.
Most of the buildings looked in much worse shape. The best way of telling if someone lived in them was by the satellite dishes. Cable companies refused to lay cable because locals spliced into the mainline themselves instead of paying their monthly fee. People also stole cable for its street value. So we looked for dishes.
They weren’t hard to find. We saw one as big as a bathtub nailed into the side of a grand old Victorian corner house, with gables and turrets. It was so large it had to be attached by a six-by-six square of plywood. Somehow the dish and turrets went well together — the house a kid would design. There were cars parked on the grass in the front yard. The steps to the porch had caved in, so I climbed up first and gave Beatrice a hand.
“Who lives like this?” I said. The windows were all boarded up.
A young, muscular, well-dressed black man let us in. Two other young men sat behind him on a couch, watching TV. The room looked like a frat house after a party: potato chip bags, pizza boxes, bottles, cartons and napkins lay on the floor. The TV did double duty as a source of light.
No, ma’am, they didn’t want to sell. Yes, they got the lawyers’ letters. There was nothing they didn’t understand or wanted to talk about. If white people want to move in, they can move in. See how they like it.
I noticed that the guys on the couch weren’t watching TV but playing some video game. This explains why they hardly looked up. The images they controlled operated knives and guns.
Afterwards, on the way out, I said to Beatrice, “You didn’t do the striptease act for them.”
This is one of my father’s phrases, and I thought she might take offense. Which she did, but I was surprised by what offended her.
“What do you mean, them?” she said.
It was a wet April afternoon a few days after a snow. Nobody else was out walking, and I had a strong feeling there was a reason for that. Empty streets make you think that everyone else is in the know. But we made it to the car all right.
Later, on the drive home, we had the other argument, too.
“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I thought you broke up with him and now you run around taking his orders.”
“That was ten years ago, Marny.”
“I thought you said he wasn’t smart enough.”
“I was wrong, and anyway, it doesn’t matter. You realize after a while that there are certain people who make things possible; he’s one of them, that’s all. There are more important things going on here than my self-esteem.”
“Or maybe you think you’re really calling the shots, with those short skirts and high heels.”
“Why are we fighting, Marny? Are you trying to pick a fight?”
“I don’t know what it is,” I said. “When I’m scared for some reason I try to piss people off. Maybe I don’t like being told that I’m a racist.”
BUT THIS WASN’T THE WHOLE story. I found living in the house with her very painful. Seeing her come down for breakfast, with wet hair, and watching her at night go up to bed carrying the day-old New York Times and a mug of Celestial Seasonings tea. (When I went into her bedroom I saw many of these mugs, cold and half full, with the tea bag left in, coloring the water.) We spent afternoons as I have described, driving around Detroit together, sharing car space, and sometimes parking and getting out in what seemed to me medium-risk situations. She had become a tough, competent and admirable woman but part of what pained me is the fact that she also seemed diminished somehow — not quite the girl I knew in college. I didn’t like the way she took his money, though I was living off Robert’s money, too.
ROBERT HIMSELF PUZZLED ME. I figured I knew him well enough at Yale, yet every time I saw him he struck me as more difficult to get at.
The morning after my arrival, after breakfast, he said to me, “Come for a walk with me, Marny.”
I realized for the first time what our new relations were when it occurred to me that I shouldn’t refuse him. So I put on my coat and second-best leather shoes, which I had sprayed the night before with waterproof sealant. (I didn’t own any northern-winter boots.) Together we edged our way along the icy sidewalks. He wanted to point out houses in the neighborhood, the real beauties.
The place we were staying in was only rented, from a retired midlevel General Motors executive. A good guy, Robert said, who believed in the city and had lived in it his whole working career. But even he had had enough and took early retirement to justify a move to the country. Besides, his girls were already out of college; one was married.
Robert wanted to buy the house from him. He thought if the Detroit plan worked out this kind of high-end real estate would shoot up in price.
“You can’t help making money,” I said. “Can you?”
“I hope not.” This was an example of his humor — not so much funny as hard to read.
Later he delivered one of his prepared speeches. The reason I brought you in on this, he said, is not just because it was your idea in the first place. “I wanted a historian on hand, in case this thing takes off. I want you to write about it.”
There were plenty of journalists around, interviewing him and Clay and covering the story for newspapers and magazines. Smart guys, some of them, but they weren’t his guys; also, it wasn’t their job to take the long view. Then he spoke about my academic specialty, American colonial history — he’d been reading up on that, too. It’s an obvious point, he said, but what people forget about the early settlers is that they were shipped over by private companies; it was a business venture. A typical Robert James pronouncement, vaguely general and matter-of-fact. He believed that what we were doing in Detroit belonged to the same tradition.