Jane Smiley - Good Faith

GOOD FAITH

JANE SMILEY

ALFRED A. KNOPF NEW YORK

2003

Acknowledgments

Several lawyers advised me on this project, but they preferred not to be mentioned by name. I thank them anyway.

Contents

CHAPTER

T HIS WOULD BE 82. I was out at the Viceroy with Bobby Baldwin. Bobby Baldwin was my one employee, which made us not quite friends, but we went out to the Viceroy almost every night. My marriage was finished and his hadnt started, so we spent a lot of time together that most everyone else we knew was spending with their families. I didnt mind. My business card had the Viceroys number in the corner, under may also be reached at. Buyers called me there. It was a good sign if they wanted to see a house again in what you might call the middle of the night. That meant they couldnt wait till morning. And if they wanted to see it again in the middle of the nightwell, I did my best to show it to them. That was the difference between Bobby and me. He always said, Their motivation needs to be tested, thats what I think. Let em wait a little bit.

Bobby was not my brother, but he might as well have been. Sally, his sister, had been my girlfriend in high school for about a year and a half. She was the first person I ever knew who had a phone of her own. She used to call me up and tell me what to do. Now, Joey, she would say, tomorrow wear those tan pants youve got, and the blue socks with the clocks on them, and your white shirt, and that green sweater I gave you, and I am going to wear my blue circle skirt with the matching cashmere sweater, and Ill meet you on the steps. Well look great. Have you done your algebra problems? When you get to number four, the variable is seven, and x equals half of y. If you remember that, then you wont have a problem with it. Did you wash your face yet? Dont forget to use that stuff I bought you. Rub it in clockwise, just a little tiny dab, about the size of the tip of your pencil eraser. Okay?

I had been short, and now I was tall. I had been skinny and quiet and religious, and now I was good-looking and muscular. It was Sally Baldwin who brought me along, told me what to wear and do and think and say. She was never wrong; she never lost her patience. She created me, and when she was done we broke up in a formal sense, but she kept calling me. She was smart and went off to Smith College, and I was sure she would get everything organized there once and for all. I went to Penn State. In April of my freshman year, Sally was killed in a car accident outside of Boston. I had talked to her two days before. Now, Joey, she had said, its okay to see a woman who is almost thirty, but you dont say that you are dating her, you say that you are seeing her. Seeing is much more sophisticated than dating, and it doesnt lead to marriage.

I went home for the funeral. It was as if the Baldwins had been eviscerated. All they had left were Felicity, Norton, Leslie, and Bobby. That didnt seem like much without Sally to move them along. Betty, their mom, couldnt act of her own free will. The funeral director, Pat Mahoney, had to seat her here and stand her there and remove her from this spot and place her in that spot. Gordon seemed better, almost vigilant in a way, though my mother said he would never recover and maybe he never did. Bobby was ten then, nine years younger than I was. Gordon came up to me afterward and asked me how I was doing. He was concerned, the way you always get at funerals, and I couldnt help telling him that I wasnt doing at all wellI hated college and was terribly homesick anyway, and now there was this stunning thing that was the end of Sallyand the next thing I knew he was offering me a job and I was taking it, and I went back to pick up my stuff at Penn State two days after the funeral, and I started working for Gordon the following Monday, which I certainly would not have been invited to do if Sally were alive and my girlfriend or fiance because Gordon didnt like to be bankrolling everyone in the whole family, especially not sons-in-law.

My dad used to wonder what the Baldwins real name was. They werent like any Baldwins he had ever known. Gordon was loud and affectionate. Hey, honey, he always said, no matter who he was talking to. He ate out every night. He had three or four restaurants he took everyone to, owned by his poker buddies, I think. He played poker twice a week, high stakes. These games had been going for generations. For a living, he bought and sold things. For a while, it was antiques; for a while, jewelry; for a while, cars; for a while, expensive fixtures out of houses and restaurants and hotels that were being torn down. Once in a while he would hear about some hotel in the city that was going under, and he would come home with a truckload of dishes or silver that carried a hotel monogram. One year, his barn was full of pink silk chairs and settees from the lobby of a hotel in Montreal. Another year he got a thousand commodes. That was the year he persuaded everyone who bought a house from us that you got to have one more bathroom than the number of bedrooms. Its the wave of the future. Always land and houses and dairy-cattle breeding stock. One thing leads to another; that is, houses lead to commodes, and then commodes lead to houses, which lead to land, which leads to dairy cattle, which lead to cheese, which leads to pizza pies, which lead to manicotti and veal Parmesan, which lead to wine, which leads to love, which leads to babies, houses, and commodes. That was Gordon Baldwin in a nutshell.

My father, who didnt like anything to lead to anything else, because of sin, couldnt decide whether the Baldwins had originally been Obolenskis or Balduccis or Baldagyis. He took solace in the fact that we were Stratfords, always had been Stratfords; there was no misspelling of the Stratford name since the Middle Ages. The Baldwins had come to town after the war. That was all anyone knew; and for all that Gordon had gotten rich and locally famous, and he, Bobby, and everyone else in the family talked and talked, where the Baldwins had come from was something they never talked about.

Anyway, I could hardly keep my eyes open, though it was only midnight, early for a Baldwin, and Bobby was wide awake. He was drinking and playing craps for pennies with a builder we knew. The bar was about half full. It was a Wednesday. I said, See you at ten.

Bobby said, See that, a five and a three. Thats eight.

Bobby, I said. Ten! I have to show a house at ten-fifteen and I want to be sure youre there before I go.

Ten, said Bobby.

Ten in the morning.

In the morning.

Morning is when the sun is in the sky and you dont have to turn on your headlights.

Got you. Roll em. He looked at me and smiled. He looked just like Betty. I shook my head. As I passed next to the table right behind where we had been sitting, I saw a guy look up, look at me. I went out into the parking lot.

The parking lot of the Viceroy backed up on the river, the Nut. My condo was in a development in a smaller town upriver, Nut Hollow. Instead of getting right into my car, I walked down to the river and had a look at the moon, which was shining round and bright. The river was black and glassy around the circle of the moon for just a single long moment; then the wind came up and ruffled the image. I saw there was a woman squatting at the base of a tree, about ten yards from the river. When she turned at my footsteps, I realized it was Fern Minette, Bobbys fiance. She stood up with a big smile, wiping her hands on her jeans. Fern was about twenty-seven or so. She and Bobby had been engaged for four and a half years. I said, Well, its Fern! What are you doing, Fernie?