Read Online The Almanac Branch by Bradford Morrow - Free Book Online

I could tease him without fear of immediate retribution.
    Djuna said, “I guess it would be a little hard to wear a tie with the shirt on backwards.”
    â€œFaw wanted me to tell you they’re here.” Then he left.
    I eavesdropped dinner, with Desmond at my side. The voices we could not connect with names. I heard Mother speak only to offer more wine, or to call Djuna out from the kitchen; her exclusion from the conversation was of her own choosing, but was not, so far as I could make out from my blind on the landing at the head of the stairs, contested by her guests, whose attentions were directed toward my father.
    Where sphinxes hide their riddles in silence, we mortals bury ours in banter. No need to recount the laughter and the jokes. Desmond, bored, tiptoed from our listening perch to my room, and climbed out into his treehouse to do whatever it is he liked to do out there. I overheard, after he left, two remarkable things, though—one, that in honor of their first trip as men together, Faw had decided to make Berg a vice-president of this Gulf Stream Trust thing, “to get his feet wet,” and Berg, over Mother’s mild protest, got to sample his first sip of champagne, having been toasted by Pannett, or Neden, or one of them. The second matter was much more perplexing, because Berg’s premature blossoming as the newest flower in the Geiger festoon I saw for the parental bribe that it was. Faw was buying some good behavior, was what I figured—after all, what good would Berg be to some French woman in some church on an island in the Caribbean?
    â€œWhat woman, what island are you talking about?” Neden asked. They all seemed drunk except for my father. He may or may not have explained to them what he was referring to, but the matter was so bizarre that I misunderstood along with the others. Whoever this woman was and whatever was her role in the Gulf Stream deal, were matters either so very tangential to what my father’s colleagues were doing in their roles as employees of the Sprawl that none of them wanted to commit a faux pas by expressing some opinion that would show them to be ignorant of the inner workings of Geiger, or else it was more complex than heads pleasantly adrift in champagne and wine would want to bother to comprehend. Everyone, it seemed, wanted instead to crowd in with his own bizarrerie.
    The hour had gotten late. Dinner had been cleared, Desmond had come in from outside because it had gotten too cold and went off to bed. Mother with Beth Silliman and Mrs. del Russe retired to the kitchen, where Djuna’d built her evening fire. The Sillimans were going to sleep in the guest room downstairs, and the others were staying at the Peconic Lodge over on the island. This was a weekend for these city people, in other words; it was going to be a late night.
    Faw and the men—Berg still among them—isolated themselves in the library, and I listened in through a heat register, pressing my cheek to the warmth of the grate, and straining to hear what was being said. They were discussing Gulf Stream in entirely different tones than what I’d discerned at dinner.
    â€œBut what are the parameters on setting up a not-for-profit on foreign soil, Chas? I didn’t think you could do that,” Pannett, I believe it was Pannett, quietly said. The smoke of their cigarettes staled the heat that rose through the register. A decanter clinked against a glass, I could smell cognac. It made my tongue dry, and the back of my throat mildly sore.
    â€œNo, you can’t,” Faw answered.
    â€œWell, how does it work?”
    â€œWe operate out of Cape Hatteras, there is a storefront church we have there—actual church, the pastor we’ve got there is something like a Unitarian I think, so far not much in the way of membership about five families. But the church is nondenominational—”
    â€œYou mean its denomination is money, right?”