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

that’s quite an appropriate place I think to carry on this work, since from what I’ve been able to learn, he was a religious man as well as a man given to discovery. And to the point, these repairs will or will not eventually come to pass, you with me?”
    When he asked, no one said a word, and when he went on to say it didn’t really matter that they understood, I detected a tone of satisfaction in his voice; it was as if he had led them point by point through something with the hope that they wouldn’t get it. He asked del Russe, who had been quiet, a question, which I didn’t quite hear, and all of a sudden del Russe seemed to speak the same foreign language. He assured my father and the others that while over the years the trust would no doubt amass a surplus, quite a large surplus, and would therefore have to show activity, they, Geiger, had set up a religious objects company whose factory in Canton had a guaranteed client in the Gulf Stream Trust—the “Make Mary” ornament, for instance, a figurine of Mother Mary with a smiling face, could be produced in hundreds of thousands of units for not much money and sold at inflated prices to the church, which would then “distribute them.”
    â€œIn other words, bury them in the sand,” said Faw.
    â€œWell, that would be one way to distribute them, to be sure. You could also give them away to believers if you had the time and inclination, though that might not be as efficient.”
    â€œAll right, then,” my father finished.
    Whether no one spoke then because they all suddenly understood and had nothing to say, or they failed to speak because they wouldn’t know what to ask, I couldn’t surmise, but a silence ensued. Faw went on, and as he did, the hush downstairs developed further, and what I heard became fragmented, and engulfed, as it were, in the drift of my sleepiness, which was encouraged by the heat pouring upward from the register, and the lateness of the hour, so that what I am able to remember has become a palimpsest. I record it, because in retrospect, all of what has now come to pass was mentioned—if only in some kind of embryonic way—that night, and it has been the link in my memory that led me to St. Barts, so many years later, quite a different island than it must have been back then during the night of the Shelter Island dinner. What linked, what added up to something that made a one and one makes two kind of sense? In some way, all of it; in some way, none. That church mirage of Faw’s and the peculiar films that Pannett and Neden went on to discuss, however, I can now see as smoke and fire.
    One of the men said, regarding the films, “You have the equipment here to show it?” and the women’s voices in the other room rose and fell down in the kitchen, mingling with the voices of their companions in the library.
    â€œâ€”but those birds, they would have been tasty, though I admit it’s sort of horrible the way you have to do them, snip their beaks off and stick them up their … oh. But they were going rancid or something—” Djuna talking, and I could tell they thought she was quite a pip.
    â€œI think I’d rather not,” Faw told the man.
    Djuna, again, saying, “Blanch- ailles . It’s very fast but it’s pretty hard to do, too, so Grace should get some of the credit, she’s such a dear, so how you do it is you get the flour, clean linen, the wire drying basket, and you start with the lard to melt into hot liquid in the biggest copper frying pan you can find.”
    â€œIs that false cypress or viburnum in the yard out front?”
    â€œSo, on this plantation where they grow asparagus—”
    â€œAnd Neden and I were thinking about making this new one, it’s called Oriental Affairs , in which these Chinese women—”
    â€œWell, they don’t even have to be Chinese, they can be Vietnamese, Korean,