MACK ADMIRED the fire I’d built, when she got home, braced for trouble, right about eight-thirty. “Where’d you get the wood?” she said, finding me in my chair, reading shredded magazines by the light of the new seventy-five-watt bulb I had installed in the end-table lamp. She didn’t even mention the martini I was sipping.
“Went next door,” I said. “I asked the Coreys for some. Told them flat out I screwed up, forgot to order any. Jim Corey was very nice, said he understood. Told me to help myself to some. Had a beer with him.”
“They are a nice young couple,” Mack said, hanging up her coat. “They moved in last August, I think it was, while we were still down at the beach. They must think we’re not very neighborly.”
“My impression was,” I said, “one of several, really, but my impression was they haven’t thought about us much, or had the time to, you know?”
“I suppose not,” Mack said absently, pouring white wine in the kitchen. “They’ve got two kids, have they?”
“Two extremely young kids,” I said. “One’s still in a high chair. Having some SpaghettiOs, throwing them around the kitchen, banging his spoon on his tray, having a grand time. Looked like strained carrots that he’d gotten in his hair, that blueberry stuff all down the front of him.”
“Cobbler,” Mack said, coming in, sitting down before the fire. “Nothing like it either, that stuff, that and the rice pudding. How old is the older one? Three or maybe four?”
“The one in the high chair is the older one,” I said.
“Oh my God,” Mack said.
“The younger one was in his crib, raising seven kinds of hell. Bottle wasn’t the right temperature. Or maybe his pants were all full of shit. He was unhappy, anyway. Mummy’s trying to cook dinner, Daddy’s feeding older brother, this intruder comes in to beg firewood, and here’s this young man and all his desires, totally ignored. He was really quite pissed off.”
“Someday,” Mack said, “and I realize I’ve been saying this for almost twenty years now, I should really write to Doctor Fitzmaurice and tell him that on further consideration I am not entirely sorry that we had to stop with one.”
“A very nice gesture that would be, my love,” I said, “were it not for the sad fact that Doctor Fitzmaurice has acquired staff privileges at a more celestial place.”
“Oh yeah,” Mack said, “I forgot.”
“Alzheimer’s disease,” I said knowingly. “Don’t give it a second thought, you can’t remember things. There’s nothing they can do about it, anyway.”
“Oh shut up,” she said. “How was your day, anyway?”
“Until I got home?” I said. “Or since then? You have got your goddamned choice.”
“Which is likely to be worse?” she said.
“Not much to choose between them,” I said. “One was dull and kind of sad, and I don’t know what to do about it. The other one was sad and kind of upsetting. I don’t know what to do about that either.”
“Shall we start with mine, then,” she said, “for a little change of pace?”
“Okay,” I said, “I’m all ears. What misery did Diane invent for the company today?”
“Ah,” Mack said, “Diane is moping. Just like she’s been doing ever since I told her I was booting her ass out. Diane doesn’t know it, but she’s much less trouble that way. Which I’m not about to tell her because she’d stop doing it.
“The big news is something different. Are you ready for this?”
“I will brace myself,” I said.
“I have it in mind,” she said, “to buy a piece of land.”
“That’s an interesting concept,” I said. “I thought you were selling land.”
“I am,” she said, “to other people, lots of other people. People who aren’t any smarter than the two of us are, Jerry. Ordinary people who are building things, okay?”
“So far, so good,” I said. “With the proviso, of course, that these people who have no more brains than we have do have something that we lack. Which is: lots more money.”
“Not that much more,” she said, “when you think about it. And if you really give it some thought, not as much in fact. It’s just what they have is liquid. They can get their hands on it. What we have is tied up, and we can’t use it for anything.”
“I’m not sure I follow this,” I said. Nor was I sure I wanted to, as far as that was concerned.
She leaned forward in her chair and clasped her hands before her. “Ace and Roy have got an option on the Commodore Islands. They are selling participations, shares of development rights, and I think we should buy a couple. Actually, what I really think is that we should buy five, but I can’t see how we can afford to pass up two.”
“Slow down here,” I said. “The Commodore Islands. I do not know from them. Just what are these islands, and where are they located?”
“They’re not really islands,” she said, sitting back again. “What they are is high ground which is twelve feet above mean high water, so they look like islands when the tide is high. When it’s low, they look like what they are, which is high ground that sticks up out of tidal marshes. There are seven of them, down near Marion, and five of them are buildable. The other two are smaller.”
“This does not sound promising,” I said. “What happens to these islands in a hurricane, for instance? Or another blizzard like we had in Seventy-eight? Does this ‘mean high water’ that they’re twelve feet above include high water that is really mean? Or are they maybe ten or twelve feet under that kind of high water, so that what gets built on them will float, even if it wasn’t meant to?”
“Those kinds of storms,” she said, frowning, “are hundred-year storms, Jerry. Storms like that are very unusual. Almost any kind of coastal property fronting on a beach is going to be vulnerable to severe weather like that storm.”
“This I know,” I said. “I can recall very clearly finding pieces of the beachfront houses on our lawn down at Green Harbor, after that last one. The high-water mark was right at our front steps, which is a good four hundred yards and a big seawall from the usual location.”
“Well, what I am saying,” she said, “is that you don’t plan for those things when you’re laying out new projects. That is an assumed risk that the people who are involved in it just take into account.”
“And buy a great deal of insurance,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “not actually. No more than a nominal amount.”
“Sure,” I said, “because insurance companies won’t write insurance on that kind of property. They have got more sense than that, and more sense also than the people who think that since we had a big storm back in Nineteen seventy-eight, we are all set now until Two Thousand seventy-eight. Am I tracking this so far?”
She grinned at me. She fluttered her hand in the air. “Mezza mezz’,” she said. “The whole theory is: you’re building there to sell, all right? This is an investment that we would be making. We would be participants in these new condo complexes. We would not live in them. We would own so many units, as charter investors. When the buildings start to go up, Southarbor starts to advertise. By the time they’re all constructed, they have all been sold. We have got our profits out. Everybody’s happy.”
“All of this assuming, of course, that the weather behaves,” I said. “We finance the buildings we’re not dumb enough to live in, because while we like the water we are not strong swimmers. What we hope for is the suckers buy those buildings from us before the next storm comes in, because that storm will remove those buildings from the land they’re on.”
“That’s about it,” she said, “yup. Buying for investment.”
“I know guys who go to racetracks who say that about the ponies,” I said. “Ace and Roy, I think, have bought some stuff they shouldn’t. I would bet they bought it and then they tried to finance it, and the banks burst out laughing in their very startled faces.”
“Money’s still tight, Jerry,” she said, “for recreational, second-home construction. Still very tight, and fairly high rates too.”
“I’m sure it is,” I said. “I’m also sure it can be had, if when the bank views the land they can see some probability that what’s built on it will still be there when the mortgages have got five years to run. I bet that they can’t even get government flood insurance on those parcels that you mention.”
Mack began to look unhappy. “Jerry,” she said, “Jerry, will you listen to me, lover? Beachfront land is very scarce. All of it’s eroding. What’s not built on’s very poor, second-rate and crummy. These islands are in Marion, close to it, at least. It’s a really lovely town. The view is out on Buzzards Bay, the Elizabeths and Martha’s Vineyard. If you look west on a clear day you can see clear to Block Island.”
“If you look south on a bad day,” I said, “you can see a tidal wave.”
She leaned forward again, pleading. “This’ll go on advertising, and like hotcakes too, I’m sure. Close to boating, fine sailing. Good fishing and good swimming. No pollution. No Cape traffic, no fights with the bridges to cross that damned canal. Offer this one in New York, you’ll sell it out by nightfall.”
“Sell it on the wrong day,” I say, “and it’s gone by daybreak.”
“Jerry,” she said pleadingly, “those rich jerks can take the chance. “Won’t you think about this? Please?”
“You wheedle well, Mack,” I said. “I have always admired that.”
“I know it,” she said, smirking and smoothing her skirt on her thighs. “Dad always said the same thing.” She became serious again. “But really, Jerry, all right? The participations are twenty grand apiece.”
“Good God,” I said, “that much? I was thinking: maybe five. Ten at the outside. But twenty big ones each? And you want to buy two of them? Forty thousand dollars? Jesus Christ, Mack, we can’t do that. We don’t have that kind of money. And didn’t you say something about wanting five of them? A hundred thousand dollars? I’m glad I’m sitting down.”
“Jerry,” she said, “it’s our chance. Ace and Roy have researched this thing. They know it will go. They’ve got all the permits for the access road, all the percolation tests, all the permits, all the zoning, everything they need. Do they say it’s not a gamble? No, of course they don’t. If we get another blizzard before they have gotten in and gotten out again, what they put into the project will float down to Stonington. But if they can get about four years more out of the interval before the next big blow, everyone who puts in twenty will pull somewhere in the neighborhood of one-eighty back again. Five of those investment units would be nine hundred thousand dollars, Jerry, all of it straight capital-gains taxes, seventy percent of eight hundred thousand dollars’ profit free and clear to sock away.” She looked as though she’d been wired for stereo. Her eyes sparkled and she could barely sit still in the chair.
“We don’t have the money,” I said.
“Yes, we do,” she said. “We are sitting in it, and we have some more in Marshfield. If we sell this place, as we could easily, we could live in the beach house until the deal is finished. Then we’d have enough so that we could live anywhere we liked. Get ourselves a condo on Beacon Hill, if you like. Build ourselves a summer place that really would be something.” She stood up suddenly and quivered for a moment. “This could make us, Jerry,” she said, “make us rich and happy.” She looked down on me and rumpled my gray hair. “We could both use that, my love, being rich and happy. I want you to think about it while I broil some lamb chops.”
I did not think about it. It was a crackpot scheme. It was certainly dishonest. It was probably illegal. It would leave me in my old age, recluse in a beach house, busted out and disgraced as a paltry swindler who had tried to cheat some strangers and had been punished by God. I thought about my daughter instead, as though that would cheer me up. I had a third martini.