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Authors: Roger Rosenblatt
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the force that nearly deafened you just now is the force you should oppose. The Chautauquans want the twentieth century. Did you know that at the start of the twentieth century, ordinary people used to laugh at the self-aggrandizing antics of the big spenders? Cornelius Vanderbilt’s re-creation of Versailles in Newport, and Potter Palmer, the Chicago store owner, loading down his wife with so many diamonds that she could barely stand upright. People once thought all that was funny. Today they envy what they laughed at.
“At the start of the twentieth century, one in every seven houses had a bathroom. A hundred years later, every seven bathrooms have a house.” Bang bang bang . “Make that twenty bathrooms and two houses.”
“You’re just anticonservative,” Hector says with a snort. “People in the Hamptons hate conservatives. But everyone will be conservative eventually, that’s what I think.”
“Don’t waste that wisdom on me. Be a true evangelical: go door to door.”
“In the same house?” He indicates ours.
“O Chautauquans,” I cry out to no one in particular. “If only I could preach to you as though the Methodists were still in charge, and I were wearing a beard like the SmithBrothers’, and you were a tent community again, and we all lived in sepia tone. I would tell you to repent. I would urge you to acknowledge that your most valuable property is not real estate. It is imagined estate, which is not and has never been for sale.”
“But why can’t you have both?” asks Hector.
“Both what?”
“God and mammal.”
“Mammon.”
“Whatever. Why can’t you have riches on earth and riches in Paradise? I say aim for the skies!”
“That’s the plan, my boy.”
José calls across the creek to ask if I would care to hear the Blowhard again. “ No más ,” I plead, raising my hand in a Roberto Duran surrender.
“You should get one of these things yourself, Señor March—if you can afford it, wheech I theenk you cannot. But if you could, you would never again be hot in the summer.”
“That would be heaven,” I tell him. I am encouraged to see that he, Jack, and Dave are all laughing.
Seven
H ave I mentioned that I communicate with Lapham? I have no direct dealings with him, but I do correspond with his executive secretary or manservant or amanuensis or creepy-crawly or whatever he is called. A certain Damenial Krento. I send my notes to Lapham by boat across the creek. Not by my real boat, one of the row-row-row variety that I keep tied to the dock inside the L , to protect it. For Krento I bought a fiberglass toy motorboat, battery-powered, cerulean blue, with black-and-silver warheads decaled on the sides, about two and a half feet in length and one foot wide. It is quite sturdy. It does not capsize. I skew it toward the current at an angle upstream (tides and currents are treacherous in the creek), and I keep it on course using a remote control. I have named the boat Sharon , a female version of Charon, the grizzly old sailor of Greek mythology who ferried the dead across the river Styx in the Underworld.
I tuck my message into Sharon ’s tiny cabin, guide the craft carefully, watch it make landfall, and wait for a reply.
I send the same note every day: “Mr. Lapham, tear down that house!” I thought that the Reaganesque echo might appeal to him.
As of 1:06, I have received no response to today’s note. When Krento is ready, he signals me with a huge red-white-and-blue yachting flag, and I switch on the remote. Because he is apparently on the short side and also somehow translucent, the flag often looks as if it were waving itself. But his reply, too, is always the same: “Dear Mr. March: Mr. Lapham is in receipt of your recent letter. He takes this opportunity to express his gratitude to you for taking the time to write to him. That is why he is writing to you. He wishes you continued success in your endeavors. Yours very sincerely, Damenial Krento, executive
“At the start of the twentieth century, one in every seven houses had a bathroom. A hundred years later, every seven bathrooms have a house.” Bang bang bang . “Make that twenty bathrooms and two houses.”
“You’re just anticonservative,” Hector says with a snort. “People in the Hamptons hate conservatives. But everyone will be conservative eventually, that’s what I think.”
“Don’t waste that wisdom on me. Be a true evangelical: go door to door.”
“In the same house?” He indicates ours.
“O Chautauquans,” I cry out to no one in particular. “If only I could preach to you as though the Methodists were still in charge, and I were wearing a beard like the SmithBrothers’, and you were a tent community again, and we all lived in sepia tone. I would tell you to repent. I would urge you to acknowledge that your most valuable property is not real estate. It is imagined estate, which is not and has never been for sale.”
“But why can’t you have both?” asks Hector.
“Both what?”
“God and mammal.”
“Mammon.”
“Whatever. Why can’t you have riches on earth and riches in Paradise? I say aim for the skies!”
“That’s the plan, my boy.”
José calls across the creek to ask if I would care to hear the Blowhard again. “ No más ,” I plead, raising my hand in a Roberto Duran surrender.
“You should get one of these things yourself, Señor March—if you can afford it, wheech I theenk you cannot. But if you could, you would never again be hot in the summer.”
“That would be heaven,” I tell him. I am encouraged to see that he, Jack, and Dave are all laughing.
Seven
H ave I mentioned that I communicate with Lapham? I have no direct dealings with him, but I do correspond with his executive secretary or manservant or amanuensis or creepy-crawly or whatever he is called. A certain Damenial Krento. I send my notes to Lapham by boat across the creek. Not by my real boat, one of the row-row-row variety that I keep tied to the dock inside the L , to protect it. For Krento I bought a fiberglass toy motorboat, battery-powered, cerulean blue, with black-and-silver warheads decaled on the sides, about two and a half feet in length and one foot wide. It is quite sturdy. It does not capsize. I skew it toward the current at an angle upstream (tides and currents are treacherous in the creek), and I keep it on course using a remote control. I have named the boat Sharon , a female version of Charon, the grizzly old sailor of Greek mythology who ferried the dead across the river Styx in the Underworld.
I tuck my message into Sharon ’s tiny cabin, guide the craft carefully, watch it make landfall, and wait for a reply.
I send the same note every day: “Mr. Lapham, tear down that house!” I thought that the Reaganesque echo might appeal to him.
As of 1:06, I have received no response to today’s note. When Krento is ready, he signals me with a huge red-white-and-blue yachting flag, and I switch on the remote. Because he is apparently on the short side and also somehow translucent, the flag often looks as if it were waving itself. But his reply, too, is always the same: “Dear Mr. March: Mr. Lapham is in receipt of your recent letter. He takes this opportunity to express his gratitude to you for taking the time to write to him. That is why he is writing to you. He wishes you continued success in your endeavors. Yours very sincerely, Damenial Krento, executive
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