| Nixon liberates him to say anything--as Johnson liberated MerryIt is as though in his uncen-sored hatred of Nixon, Lou Levov is merely mimicking his granddaughter's vituperous loathing of LBJGet the bastard in some wayGet Nixon and all will be wellIf we can just tar and feather Nixon, America will be America again, without everything loathsome and lawless that's crept in, without all this violence and malice and madness and hatePut him in a cage, cage the crook, and we'll have our great country back the way it was!
Dawn ran in from the kitchen to see what was wrong, and soon they were all in tears, holding one another, huddled together and weeping on that big old back porch as though the bomb had been planted right under the house and the porch was all that was left of the placeAnd there was nothing the Swede could do to stop them or to stop himself
The family had never seemed so wrecked as thisDespite all that he had summoned up to lessen the aftershock of the day's horror and to prevent himself from cracking--despite the resolve with which he had rearmed himself after hurrying through the underpass and finding his car still there, undamaged, where he had left it on that grim Down Neck street; despite the resolve with which he had for a second time rearmed himself after Jerry pummeled him on the phone; despite the resolve he'd had to summon up a third time, beneath the razor ribbon of his parking lot fence, with the key to his car in his hand; despite the self-watchfulness, despite the painstaking impersonation of impregnability, despite the elaborate false front of self-certainty with which he was determined to protect those he loved from the four she had killed--he had merely to misspeak, to say "Merry's big beefsteak tomatoes" instead of "Dawn's," for them to sense that something unsurpassingly awful had happened
In chloe paddington bags addition to the Levovs there were six guests for dinner that eveningThe first to arrive were Bill and Jessie Orcutt, Dawn's architect and his wife, who'd been friendly enough neighbors a few miles down the road all these years, in Orcutt's old family house, and became acquaintances and then dinner guests when Bill Orcutt began designing the new Levov homeOrcutt's family had long been the prominent legal family in Morris County, lawyers, judges, state senatorsAs president of the local landmarks society, already established as the historical conscience of a new conservationist generation, Orcutt had been a leader in the losing battle to keep Interstate 287 from cutting through the historical center of Morris-town and a victorious opponent of the jetport that would have destroyed the Great Swamp, just west of Chatham, and with it much of the county's wildlifeHe was trying now to keep Lake Hopatcong from devastation by pollutantsOrcutt's bumper sticker read, "Morris Green, Quiet, and Clean," and he'd good-naturedly slapped one on the Swede's car the first time they met"Need all the help we can get," he said, "to keep the modern ills at bay Once he learned that his new neighbors were originally city kids to whom the rural Morris Highlands was an unknown landscape, he volunteered to take them on a county tour, one that, as it turned out, went on all one day and would have extended into the next had not the Swede lied and said he and Dawn and the baby had to be in Elizabeth, at his in-laws', Sunday morning
Dawn had said no to the tour right offSomething in Orcutt's proprietary manner had irritated her at that first meeting, something she found gratingly egotistical in his expansive courtesy, causing her to believe that to this young country squire with the charming manners she was nothing but laughable lace-curtain Irish, a girl who'd somehow tiffany replica got down the knack of aping her betters so as now to come ludicrously barging into his privileged backyardThe confidence, that's what unstrung her, that great confidenceSure she'd been Miss New Jersey, but the Swede had seen her on a few occasions with these rich Ivy League guys in their Shetland sweatersHer affronted defensiveness always came as a surpriseShe didn't seem ever to feel deficient in confidence until she met them and felt the class sting"I'm sorry," she'd say, "I know it's just my Irish resentment, but I don't like being looked down on And as much as this resentment of hers had always secretly attracted him--in the face of hostility, he thought proudly, my wife is no pushover--it perturbed and disappointed him as well; he preferred to think of Dawn as a young woman of great beauty and accomplishment who was too renowned to have to feel resentful"The only difference between them and us"--by "them" she meant Protestants--"is, on our side, a little more liquor'My new Celtic neighborAnd her Hebrew husband' I can hear him already with the other nobsI'm sorry--if you can do it that's fine with me, but I for one cannot revere his contempt for our embarrassing origins
The mainspring of Orcutt's character--and this she was sure of without having even to speak to him--was knowing all too well just how far back he and his manners reached into the genteel past, and so she stayed at home the day of the tour, perfectly content to be alone with the baby
Her husband and Orcutt, promptly at eight, headed diagonally to the northwest corner of the county and then, backtracking, followed the southward meandering spine of the old iron mines, Orcutt all the while recounting the glory days of the nineteenth century, when iron was king, millions of tons pulled from this very ground; starting from Hibernia and Boonton down to Morristown, gucci purses the towns and villages had been thick with rolling mills, nail and spike factories, foundries and forging shopsOrcutt showed him the site of the old mill in Boonton where axles, wheels, and rails were manufactured for the original Morris and Essex RailroadHe showed him the powder company plant in Kenvil that made dynamite for the mines and then, for the First World War, made TNT and more or less paved the way for the government to build the arsenal up at Picatinny, where they'd manufactured the big shells for the Second World WarIt was at the Kenvil plant that there'd been the munitions explosion in 1940--fifty-two killed, carelessness the culprit, though at first foreign agents, spies, were suspectedHe drove him partway along the western course of the old Morris Canal, where barges had carried the anthracite in from Phillipsburg to fuel the Morris foundriesWith a little smile, Orcutt added--to the Swede's surprise--that directly across the Delaware from Phillipsburg was Easton, and "Easton," he said, "was where the whorehouse was for young men from Old Rimrock
The eastern terminus of the Morris Canal had been Jersey City and NewarkThe Swede knew of the Newark end of the canal from when he was a boy and his father would remind him, if they were downtown and anywhere near Raymond Boulevard, that until as recently as the year the Swede was born a real canal ran up by High Street, near where the Jewish Y was, and down through to where there was now this wide city thoroughfare, Raymond Boulevard, leading traffic from Broad Street under Penn Station and out old Passaic Avenue onto the Skyway
In the Swede's young mind, the "Morris" in Morris Canal never connected with Morris County--a place that seemed as remote as Nebraska then--but with his father's enterprising oldest brother, MorrisIn 1918, at the age of twenty-four, already the fendi b owner of a shoe store he ran with his young wife--a cubbyhole Down Neck on Ferry Street, amid all the poor Poles and Italians and Irish, and the family's greatest achievement until the wartime contract with the WACs put Newark Maid on the map--Morris had perished virtually overnight in the influenza epidemicEven on his tour of the county that day, every time Orcutt mentioned the Morris Canal, the Swede thought first of the dead uncle he had never known, a beloved brother who was much missed by his father and for whom the child had come to believe the canal beneath Raymond Boulevard was namedEven when his father bought the Central Avenue factory (no more than a hundred yards from the very spot where the canal had turned north toward Belleville, a factory that virtually backed on the city subway built beneath the old canal route), he persisted in associating the name of the canal with the story of the struggles of their family rather than with the grander history of the state
After going around Washington's Morristown headquarters--where he politely pretended he hadn't already seen the muskets and the cannonballs and the old eyeglasses as a Newark fourth grader--he and Orcutt drove southwest a ways, out of Morristown to a church cemetery dating back to the American RevolutionSoldiers killed in the war were buried there, as well as twenty-seven soldiers, buried in a common grave, who were victims of the smallpox epidemic that swept the encampments in the countryside in the spring of 1777Out among those old, old tombstones, Orcutt was no less historically edifying than he'd been all morning on the road, so that at the dinner table that evening, when Dawn asked where MrOrcutt had taken him, the Swede laughed, "I got my money's worth all rightThe guy's a walking encyclopediaI never felt so ignorant in my life
"How boring was it?" Dawn roxanne mulberry bag as |