BY JOEL F. JOHNSON
This is a novel excerpt. Copyright is held by the author.
MRS. WOODWORTH regretted her Gin Rickey. It slowed her brain to a crawl, and she did not enjoy crawling, though the pace felt appropriate for a meeting with a pair of senior trust officers from The First National Bank of Boston. Her advisors, bifocaled men with widow’s peaks and padded shoulders, had insisted on taking her to lunch before the portfolio review. They dined on Lucky Strikes and martinis with a complement of roast beef and mashed potatoes, soiling the heavy linen napkins with gravy patted from their bluish lips. She chose a lighter fare of breaded scrod and creamed spinach, but one does not escape a table at Locke-Ober without a feeling of avoirdupois. Mr. Forrester gallantly picked up the tab, though she understood he would bill it to her account. The younger of the Vice Presidents, a Mr. Griffith, hailed a taxi, and she slipped between the two men for the ride back to the bank. They could have easily walked the few blocks, and she might have enjoyed the air.
She gave her wool-cashmere coat with its mink collar, her trim felt hat, and kid-leather gloves to the receptionist and asked for the power room, where she straightened her double strands of pearls in the mirror. The conference room featured an oak table and oak chairs of green leather padding with brass nail-head trim. A girl offered coffee, which Mrs. Woodworth gratefully accepted. Mr. Griffith distributed the stapled pages, and lighting another Lucky, Mr. Forrester began his review. She felt as if he were hauling her corpse from a bog. Page followed page of disappointing results, a droning recitation of opportunities lost, most of which Mr. Forrester attributed to the policies of Harry Truman. Befuddled by his gin, he stumbled on page seven (or was it eight?) over a particularly opaque table of numbers. He asked Mr. Griffith to fetch Mr. Stoughton for an explanation.
Her impatience rising, Mrs. Woodworth reminded herself that, if she lacked the energy to charm these men, she should at least treat them with respect. They served a necessary role, and Mr. Griffith had shared a mildly amusing story at lunch, but her head ached, and she was frustrated with the trust’s performance. She hadn’t enough vim left to search out redeeming qualities in mid-to-late-career financial men. Young Mr. Stoughton stepped into the conference room with the polite demeanor of a deacon bearing the collection plate. With his soft waistline and deferential manner, this Senior Associate did not cut a figure any more impressive than that of the two Vice Presidents to whom he reported, though he did carry a fuller head of hair. Mr. Forrester made the introduction, and she smiled without rising from her chair. The junior officer joined them at the table, and prompted by Mr. Forrester, he explained what she already knew, namely that the table provided the investment date, the investment amount, the current value, and the total return.
“But Mrs. Woodworth wants to know the compound annual return since the date of the investment. Where’s that?” Mr. Forrester asked irritably.
“My apologies. I should’ve included that.” Ollie turned to Mrs. Woodworth. “Eyeballing it, I’d say the Amsco return is around three percent, and PLK is clearly higher, closer to seven percent. The negative returns we don’t measure.”
The meeting dragged to its listless conclusion. Mr. Forrester walked Mrs. Woodworth out to reception, promising her better results if Ike won the White House. He helped her into her coat. She stepped into the elevator, and once the door closed, she told the operator to take her down to the fifth then back up to the ninth. Returning to the reception desk, she told a little fib, and the girl directed her to Mr. Stoughton’s office. He rose from his desk, his pink face round with alarm. She saw what she’d missed before, evidence on his tie of the clam chowder he’d eaten for lunch. She took off her gloves but kept on her coat and hat, a signal that she wanted but a moment of his time. She perched her purse on her lap and rested her hands above the brass snap, the soft gloves limp in her strong fingers. “I won’t keep you, but you did something remarkable in our meeting, and I’d like to know your secret.” The associate lifted his eyebrows but said nothing. “You estimated a compound return in your head. How?”
Ollie smiled. “I assumed an average investment period of three years. As a rule of thumb, a three percent return is around one point ten, five percent is around one point fifteen, and seven percent is in the neighborhood of one point twenty or twenty-five. I guessed based on those multiples.”
Her second question proved more difficult to answer. “Should I be satisfied with those returns?”
They discussed risk and reward, time horizons, and investment goals. She volunteered her marital status (widowed), number of children (one), and even her age. “I’m fifty-three,” she said matter-of-factly. Mr. Forrester had used her allotted hour to justify his decisions. Ollie offered her choices. He suggested that she move a bit of her bond money into equities: B.F. Goodrich and Motorola. He lacked the authority to make this change, but she decided to watch these stocks. She left his office with his card in her purse. Six months later, she set aside The Wall Street Journal and called Oliver Stoughton, Senior Associate, with more questions.
Several years before, Ollie had crossed the country by train, traveling from his old post at Fort Lewis to his new one at the South Boston Army Base. He’d served as a junior supply officer in two stations out west and one in the South, but never overseas. His new commanding officer studied him from behind a metal desk. The officer distractedly rubbed the bowl of his pipe across his forehead and down his cheeks, collecting the oils from his face. He assured Ollie that the war in Europe was grinding to its furious conclusion. Boston would be Ollie’s last post, and it was time for him to look beyond the Army. He encouraged Ollie to resume his college work, which had been interrupted by the war. By now proficient in Army processes, a senior clerk who understood when rounding was forbidden and single-spacing required, Ollie could complete a day’s work in several hours. Following his officer’s advice, Ollie hopped a streetcar twice a week for afternoon courses at Boston University.
He found that his uniform set him apart from the younger college boys. He had never crossed an ocean or ducked from gunfire, but he had served for two years in the endless corridors of Army bureaucracy, typing forms with carbon copies, negotiating with suppliers, stamping reports, eating Army food, and writing in the bloated military style. The college boys dressed, sounded, and acted like boys, their vocabulary juvenile, their callow attitudes not yet ground down by bureaucratic life.
As for the girls, they mystified Ollie. He had never touched a woman’s breast. The product of an all-boy prep school, he’d attended a few college mixers and USO dances, but he felt out-of-place there, no good at small talk. He had double dated several times, but he’d never been out on a date alone with a girl. Not once in his life. When his first date did happen, if it ever were to happen, he could not imagine admitting, “This is the first time I’ve ever sat alone in a restaurant with a woman my age. You’re the first girl I’ve ever walked to the door.” He didn’t look at the girls at BU with their pleated skirts and intimidating breasts (lifted and shaped beneath their sweaters by a series of cups, hooks, and straps he could only imagine) and think that he should make up for lost time. He cowered instead.
The combination of deskwork and military potatoes had swollen his waistline, further eroding his self-confidence with women. Why would one of these girls, so fresh, so lovely and lively, ever want to date a chubby man already in his twenties? He felt dense around women, lumpish and dull, a grey character who knew too much about filing systems and nothing about poetry. He sought out accounting courses where girls were scarce.
A friend persuaded him to attend a mixer at Wellesley College, and the same friend abandoned him when they entered the hall. Ollie liked big bands, the clarinet in particular, so when the band swung into Begin the Beguine and kids crowded the dance floor, he moved closer to the music, finding refuge in the noise. A girl’s face popped up in front of his own, and she said something he couldn’t hear, her dark eyes mischievous and bold. A cheerful girl with a sturdy frame, her roundish cheeks lightly freckled, she had black hair and brown eyes. She stood with her back so straight her pert posture seemed to challenge him. He took her gloved hand and introduced himself. He was aware of a chaperone monitoring their encounter. Chaperones did not trust military men.
“Arnold, did you say?” the girl shouted. “Like Arnold Beckman?”
“Who?”
“Arnold Beckman, the chemist. He invented the pH meter!” It sounded like she was saying something about a dentist.
“I can’t hear you!” he shouted back. “Can we move away from the band?” Even as he led her past the punch bowl, he was aware of doing the wrong thing, retreating from the music when he should’ve invited her to dance. In a quieter part of the room, he said, “Did you say your dad was a dentist?”
“I did not,” she answered. “Why? Do you dance only with dentists’ daughters?”
He blushed. “I’m not much of a dancer.”
The band stuck up Moonlight Serenade. “You’re in luck then, soldier. Anyone can dance to this.” Abby led him back to the dance floor, turning and lifting her gloved hand so he could take it in his own. Her lifted face and challenging eyes were somehow both mocking and sympathetic, as if she were gently teasing him. He slipped his arm around her waist and felt the smooth, almost slippery fabric on her back. Higher up, his fingers met the ridge of some undergarment, possibly a slip or even a brassiere. He was careful to keep his posture straight, but she pulled close, resting her right hand on his shoulder. He felt the gentle pressure of her gloved fingers on his scapula, and though he couldn’t feel it, he knew her cheek brushed against his jacket. He had no idea what to do with his feet. “Follow me,” she whispered, and he tried to move as she moved, stumbling after her, feeling acutely self-conscious yet exhilarated to have a girl in his arms. Moonlight Serenade would become their song, the one Abby would play for him in the reception room of Beebe Hall, where girls were allowed to entertain boys between the hours of four and six.
A few weeks later, Ollie sat with Abby in the library as she studied for a chemistry exam. He interrupted her occasionally, reading aloud from The Boston Globe about the Battle of the Bulge. “Can you imagine?” he asked. “They must be so cold.”
“None of that for you, eh soldier?” He didn’t like to be teased about his lack of combat experience, but Abby teased him about everything. She was damned cute, this girl, and he enjoyed every moment she allowed him to spend with her, but he sometimes wished they could have a more serious conversation. She projected a relentlessly perky demeanor, more often witty than candid. For once, he was tempted to sideslip her joke and tell her what he honestly thought. He’d confess how guilty he felt that his service had never taken him into harm’s way. He assumed she must’ve intuited that, but he wondered if they should speak of it directly.
“I have an aversion to gunfire,” he said instead.
“Convenient. I think I’m developing an aversion to redox reactions.”
“I thought college girls were supposed to study Jane Eyre, not chemistry.”
“Not this senorita.”
“I’m worried you may be too smart for me.”
“I share the same concern.”
“Can’t you introduce me to some cute friend who’s majoring in flower arrangements?”
“She can find her own boyfriend. I’m keeping you for myself.”
It thrilled him to hear her talk this way. She’d adopted him as her own, though it seemed to him that they had somehow skipped a step. He’d never reached across a table in candlelight to take her hand and confess his love for her. They’d never embraced beneath a melting moon. Their first kiss came when she turned to him and said, “You may kiss me now, lieutenant.” He had done so gratefully, but he felt a little bewildered, as if she were guiding him through a staged process she’d mapped out in her head, a series of light conversations, shared jokes, and orchestrated kisses that would lead inexorably to marriage. He couldn’t find in Abby’s gaze anything like the dark, insistent passion he saw in Ingrid Bergman’s films. One night after a movie, when Abby closed her eyes for her obligatory kiss, his hand moved from the belt of her skirt up her blouse to the base of her breast. She pulled it down, saying “At ease, soldier.”
Both understood that marriage was their goal. Every honest girl dated with marriage in mind, and any man in search of an honest girl was expected to fall in line. At Wellesley, graduating seniors raced hoops down Tupelo Lane wearing their caps and gowns. Tradition had it that the first to cross the finish line would be the first to get married. Though he proposed only a few months after their first dance, his proposal came with no element of surprise. She watched him drop to his knee and produce the ring as if he were a performer and she the acting coach, half-expecting him to blow his lines. She listened on the verge of laughter. He rushed through his offer, eager to get it over with, and she answered in her teasing way, “Oh, I suppose I will, if you insist.” They embraced and kissed, and she, for the first time (did he dream it?) slipped her tongue into his mouth.
Abby decided that her future husband needed some culture, so she took him to the Museum of Fine Arts to see a painting by John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. Ollie liked the picture, but he wasn’t sure he recognized the name of the artist. She took him to tea at the Copley then a concert at Symphony Hall. He drank his tea with two sugars, ate his scone, and finished hers. “Do you like Shostakovich?” she asked.
“Not as much as shots of vodka.”
“Word play. How droll.”
They found their seats in Symphony Hall, and he read Beethoven’s name above the stage. He liked Beethoven, or at least the few pieces by Beethoven he thought he knew. He had no opinion of Shostakovich or any other composer with a Russian-sounding name, except possibly Tchaikovsky. He associated Tchaikovsky with cannons and a ballet she’d threatened to make him sit through at Christmas. When the lights dimmed, Ollie clapped as others clapped, tried to listen when they listened, and watched the violinists as they followed the conductor’s lead. He found it no more or less interesting than a well-rehearsed lecture. He heard no progression in the music, discerned no themes either building or returning. Instead, the music unspooled for him as a somber, mildly tedious series of rises and falls, largely interchangeable. He preferred the sounds of Tommy Dorsey.
She had better luck improving his appreciation of nature. The war ended in May of 1945, and Ollie would remember that spring for the weekends he spent strolling with her up and down the long rolling lawns of the Wellesley campus. Abby took pride in introducing him to the goldfinches that flitted within the broad umbrellas of the beech trees. “See? They’ve put on their yellow jackets.” On the edge of Lake Waban, they fed the mallards, and she pointed to the swans farther out, and half-hidden in the shade, a great blue heron. He teased her for her fascination with the sparrows that built their nests above the hanging lamps in the loggia of the courtyard.
“There’re just sparrows,” he said. “Trash birds.”
“Not trash,” she answered, smiling. “Even sparrows are important.” She shared with him her dream of one day owning a two-bedroom house in Newton with a flower bed and a bird feeder that would attract cardinals and chickadees. Other young couples would settle nearby, and while the husbands labored in the financial district, the young moms would push their strollers to the park. It pleased him to think that Abby would organize the remainder of his life. He’d happily go along and let her choose their house, their friends, and schools for the children. With Abby as his wife, it all seemed so predictable and pleasant. Ollie applied for a training position at The First National. The dour old bank reminded him of the military, and he knew he could advance there.
They couldn’t afford a house in Newton, so they rented an apartment in Belmont. Abby learned to bake chicken and make a dessert of canned grapefruit and Jello, which Ollie adored. He set aside a fixed percentage of his salary, saving for a down payment. A half decade slipped past, in which they bought a cramped bungalow, and Abby practiced birth control, because she didn’t want a baby until they could afford one. Ollie moved up at the bank, in part due to the sponsorship of Mrs. Woodworth, who insisted on including him in her regular portfolio reviews. These meetings became conversations between Mrs. Woodworth and Ollie with Mr. Forrester looking on, stubbing out his cigarettes and grumbling about the Democrats, who hadn’t the good sense to keep out of Eisenhower’s way.
Abby was alarmed one night when Ollie announced over his plate of pork chops and apple sauce that Mrs. Woodworth had invited them to dinner at her house on the north shore of Boston.
“The Mrs. Woodworth? As in The Woodworth School and Woodworth Boulevard in Cambridge? The lady you taught to calculate compound interest?”
“The same.”
“And she’s inviting us to dinner? Who else? Mr. Forrester?”
“Apparently, just us. She says she wants us to see the house and meet her son.”
“Did you tell her I was pregnant?”
“Why would I tell her that?”
“Because I’m five months pregnant, and I look six. Because I’d have nothing to wear even if I weren’t pregnant. I’m going to show up at her door in maternity clothes, looking like a houseboat.” Abby was committed to supporting her husband’s career, but she did not like to be surprised or embarrassed.
It was early evening when they turned off the shore drive onto a narrow lane lined with rhododendrons. They passed a field of blowing grass with the ocean beyond, where the silver crescent moon hung like a hook for flying fish. They didn’t know they were traveling out a promontory called Last Hand, a name which referred both to the peninsula and the house that crowned its southern tip, and they couldn’t know that they would live out the better part of their lives here.
A half mile wide and three times as long, the finger of granite points from the coastline out to sea, a subtle spit of New England land that displays none of the garish splendour of Big Sur. It’s edged in bluffs too short to be called cliffs and too tall to be called rocks. Waves sometimes crash there, but more often, the mild old Atlantic is content to gurgle and lap at the promontory’s feet.
The car passed through open iron gates suspended from a pair of stone pillars, and Ollie pulled up the brake on a circular drive of crushed stone. The late-Victorian house rose before them, a large but pleasing structure of a size appropriate to the landscape. It looked out on Whitby Cove, its three stories clad in cedar shingles that, seventy-five years before, had been dipped in buttermilk to achieve a weathered look. A combination of dormers and doors, bay windows and porches gave each side a unique, outward-facing style. The architect, an acolyte of H. H. Richardson, had considered a back door wasted space so he designed this house without one.
Ollie rapped the brass knocker, and the massive green door swung open, soundless on its hinges. The man who greeted them looked older than Ollie and a few inches taller. He tilted slightly forward, like a tennis player expectant of the serve, and his quick eyes, which bore a glacial tint, passed over Abby in a heartbeat. She felt a surge of regret that she was pregnant. Irrespective of her marital status, she was still young enough to feel offended that his brisk carnal appraisal had concluded in disappointment.
“Whip Woodworth,” he said, shaking Ollie’s hand in his racquet-firmed grip, holding it a moment longer than necessary in an effective, if trained, expression of sincerity. “Delighted to meet you at last.” Turning to Abby, he took her hand in both of his own, which were warm and powerful, his eyes answering the challenge in hers with the infectious twinkle of an unreformed scamp.
***
The House at Last Hand is Joel F. Johnson’s second novel. His first, Never (Arbitrary Press, 2023), is a coming-of-age story in the segregated South. It won an Independent Press Award and was a finalist for an Indie Book Award. Kirkus called Never “an observant and immersive work about a society in flux.” Kirkus also gave a starred review to Where Inches Seem Miles, a poetry collection published by Antrim House in 2013. Joel’s poems have been published in Rattle, Blackbird, and other journals. He’s the father of three, a professional business appraiser, and the survivor of a rattlesnake bite.
