The Four Corners of the Sky Read online

  They were not well-to-do, that is, until 1899. That’s when Joseph Peregrine returned from the Spanish-American War, via the Philippines. He returned a hero. A Spanish rifleman in Cuba had shot out his right eye and he had the patch and the medal to prove it. Joseph was a flashy man; he renamed the town “Emerald” and wore an emerald ring as large as a marble and was called “Boss” and opened a bank and ran it like he was J. P. Morgan. When he lavishly refurbished the dilapidated Pilgrim’s Rest, gilding its cracked molding with gold leaf and replacing its pine with mahogany and marble, rumors started to spread about where he’d gotten all his money. The rumors turned to buried treasure when his wife began displaying at their annual New Year’s party rubies the size of quail’s eggs on her locally famous bosom. The prevalent theory was that Boss, on his way home from war, had gone prospecting in the Blue Ridge Mountains, that he had squinted over flume lines, sluicing rubies and emeralds out of the dirty water. The town speculated that he had stashed away hundreds of these precious stones somewhere on his property; that whenever he needed money, he sold one of them; that he had so many gems he could never run out; that his neighbors the Nickersons knew all of this for a fact, Mrs. Peregrine having told them that the Boss refused to reveal even to her where he’d hidden the jewels.

  When Boss Peregrine died suddenly in front of his own bank—with the one eye, he hadn’t noticed a farmer, enraged about a foreclosure, approaching to stab him in the back of the neck—any secret about his treasure died with him. Despite his written wish, Boss’s widow didn’t bury him with his emerald ring, but wore it herself, along with the ruby necklace, to his funeral. At the service, the St. Mark’s minister asked the congregation to meditate on the word “Peregrine,” a word carved in the newel post in the marble entryway to Pilgrim’s Rest. Above the name was a peregrine hawk, wings wide, with Boss’s personal motto in its beak: Peregrinus ego sum. The minister said the phrase came from a play by Plautus and meant, “I am a pilgrim,” although it also meant, “I am a Peregrine.” “Peregrine” was why, the minister mistakenly explained, the house had been named “Pilgrim’s Rest.” Boss Peregrine was on a journey to heaven, where, if it was God’s will, he’d soon be enjoying a pilgrim’s rest for all eternity.

  Privately, the minister thought Boss Peregrine had no chance at even a stopover in heaven and that he would have done better to buy a new organ for a Christian church than to carve puns in Latin on his grandiose staircase and give his son a silver baby tub with his name engraved on it—a Greek name, Ulysses, the name of that Yankee general who had been elected president of the United States when the people of Emerald hadn’t wanted the states to be united at all. The War had happened a long time ago, but not long enough for Rev. Maddocks, who hadn’t appreciated Boss’s telling him not only to get over the Confederacy but to shake hands with the future by joining the Republican Party. The reverend also blamed Boss for the disruption in the cemetery at the funeral, when a “family Negress” jumped weeping into the open grave, with every appearance of intimate grief, for reasons no one wanted to admit they understood.

  Boss’s obituary called him “the quintessential American,” which was true enough: there was no edge of the earth he wouldn’t push his way into—even as far away as Cuba and the Philippines. For him the frontier was always filled with desirable things that somebody else was going to grab first if he didn’t get a move on. But wherever Boss’s wealth had come from, it hadn’t made him happy. Only his mistress had given him any joy—despite which fact it had never occurred to him that he loved her. Nor had his wealth protected him from getting stabbed to death in the street.

  So Boss was laid to rest with other dissatisfied Peregrines under a heavy gravestone in the Emerald cemetery where the mistress famously flung herself at the coffin and then into the grave and then moved penniless to “Darktown,” where she married a Native American tobacco farmer named Destin.

  From his grave, Boss, if he could watch anything, watched his son lose the family bank and his grandson—Sam and Jack’s father—lose his two-year-old son in a pool accident and then years later drown himself, so mysteriously that people in Emerald were still talking about it thirty years later.

  The Peregrine graves in St. Mark’s, ponderous gray granite blocks, begged their occupants to Rest In Peace, but, as Sam lamented, her family had never been able to get any grasp on peace at all. Desire kept them stretching for every new thing they’d ever been told they should want. And when it all turned to smoke and wisped through their fingers, desire kept them longing, as Sam’s brother Jack longed for emeralds and rubies buried on Peregrine land.

  “And why?” Sam wondered aloud to Clark as they got out of his car. What had Jack really wanted?

  Clark pulled the barn doors shut behind the Volvo. “Maybe he really wanted emeralds and rubies.”

  Sam said, no, Jack didn’t want money. He wanted what was out of reach, because it was out of reach. Like he’d wanted Ruthie Nickerson, George’s sister, who appeared to have been one of the few people in his life who hadn’t loved him back.

  “Love’s a slow dance,” said Clark. “Jack didn’t have the patience.”

  Sam caught his arm, stopped him. “If you’re going to say Jill wasn’t the real thing because she left me, you’d be wrong. Just because love doesn’t last, doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything about Jill. Why do people always think you’re talking about them?” Clark’s pager beeped. As he waited for his service to connect him to the hospital, he pointed into the dark. “There’s a deck chair in our driveway.”

  Sam looked too. “I think that’s Georgette’s chair.”

  “It’s been broken for years anyhow.” Clark tipped the chair over. “It’ll go into that stuffed garage of broken dreams she’s got.”

  “Don’t be so cruel. Georgette’s just too busy to have a tag sale.”

  “Sam, is there anybody you wouldn’t make excuses for?”

  “Hey, you should hear me defending you.”

  Together, they carried the teak deck chair up onto the Nickerson patio.

  Afterwards, they climbed their porch steps together and righted the overturned green rockers and sat in them. In a while, Sam said, “So, anyhow, this Miami detective thought we were a couple.”

  Clark rubbed her knee. “We’re not?”

  Chapter 22

  Bright Eyes

  Samantha Peregrine and Clark Goode were certainly not a couple in any ordinary sense, although when Annie spoke to friends about her “aunt and uncle,” most of them assumed she meant a married couple. But the two hadn’t expected even to be friends, much less to share a home and raise a child.

  Both were bachelors, battle-weary after a number of defeats in the wars of love. Both believed the other had suffered more damage in those battles. According to Sam, Clark had never gotten over the early death of Tuyet, whom he’d met and married while a teenager in Vietnam, and that Ileanna, the Chicago radiologist whom he’d hurriedly wed during his bereavement over Tuyet, had sideswiped him. Since his divorce from Ileanna, and despite the earnest efforts of a number of women in Emerald, no one had made a serious claim to become the third Mrs. Goode. It was Sam’s contention that Clark had “given up on love.”

  Meanwhile, according to Clark, Sam had never recovered from the loss of her partner, Jill, whom she’d met on a white-water-rafting vacation in Arizona, and who’d run off with someone else after living with Sam for seven years. Sam insisted she was still willing to try again, although she claimed vaguely to friends that she’d been about as lucky in love as the Barefoot Contessa. Few in Emerald had any idea what she meant by this analogy, or that the role in the movie had been played by their fellow Tar Heel, Ava Gardner.

  In her good-bye note, Jill said their biggest problem had been Sam’s mother, Grandee, whom Sam wouldn’t institutionalize, and whom the town wouldn’t arrest (even after the widowed Mrs. Peregrine had smashed out the glass of a whole block of front windows o
n River Street, including Nickerson Jewelers). It was only after Grandee had attacked Sam with a pair of hemming shears (Sam still had the scar on her forearm) that the latter was persuaded to put her mother in a nursing home.

  By then, according to Jill’s note, “the damage was done.” Jill left their new condo and Now Voyager, the travel agency on the floor beneath it that they’d started together. She flew off to Belize to start a cave-canoeing business with somebody else. She took their Djuna Barnes first editions and left Sam the tropical fish. Sam had to buy her out of the condo and the business; while shocked by the price Jill demanded, she told her lawyer, “Just do it.”

  That winter was a tough one. Sam’s mother was evicted from her convalescent home for hitting a nurse with a concrete elf and Sam had to move her back into Pilgrim’s Rest to care for her. Grandee died of a stroke a year later, a few weeks after biting a piece out of Sam’s shoulder.

  Some people in Emerald knew that, between them, Jill and Mrs. Peregrine had broken Sam’s heart, but few felt free to offer their sympathy since (a) they had never admitted that Sam and Jill were anything more than business partners who happened to live together above their travel agency and (b) had never publicly discussed the fact that Sam’s mother was insane.

  Sam sat alone in her condo night after night thinking that happiness would always hover outside, like a hummingbird, never resting.

  Then one day her old friend, Clark Goode, returned to Emerald. He came back to hire someone to run the family’s business, Goode Landscapes, in which he had no real interest. He was at loose ends since resigning from the Chicago hospital where he and his ex-wife Ileanna had done their residencies. It seemed to Sam that Clark, withdrawn, listless, had resigned from life itself. She knew the feeling.

  Running into him one night at a grocery store, and seeing that he had nothing in his cart but frozen pizzas and a bag of doughnuts, on the spur of the moment she invited him to join her for dinner. Clark looked into Sam’s cart, at the packages of shrimp and monkfish, mussels, sausage, and chicken. “I’m making paella,” she told him. “It’s nuts, cooking for one. Go pick up some bread and stuff for a salad. Not iceberg. Come on over, why not?”

  They made the paella together and sat in Sam’s condo eating it, watching the old classic comedy The Wrong Box.

  “I’m laughing! I’m laughing out loud.” Clark told her, amazed.

  “Me too. I can’t believe it,” Sam said.

  A month went by. Clark didn’t leave Emerald. The old friends became better friends. Sam told him that their evenings together were the best part of her life these days.

  “Me too,” he said.

  When her woodstove set fire to her condo and Now Voyager, Clark was the first one there. With a slow look around the blackened living room, he blinked his blue eyes at the smoke. “Still carrying a torch for Jill, huh, Sam?”

  She fell into laughter, in a way she hadn’t felt all winter.

  Clark sat down on a sooty chair. “Maybe you ought not be alone so much.”

  “Maybe not,” she agreed. “I’m moving back to Pilgrim’s Rest. I’ll rent you one of the wings.”

  A week later, she took him to the local Chinese restaurant, The House of Joy, for a “serious discussion.” Clark was a little worried that she was going to propose a romance.

  “You wish!” she told him with such obvious sincerity that the subject was settled. “We’re here to talk about what you’re going to do next. What’s your passion? What can’t you live without? Mine’s politics and tennis and movies and gardens. And that’s just to start. What’s yours? Because you’ve helped me a lot, Clark, and I’d like to help you.”

  If Sam had many passions, Clark found it difficult at first to come up with any single compelling one. He mentioned his love of reading and baseball. But finally he confessed to a large dream that was yet unformed.

  “That’s what I want to hear about,” Sam told him. “Talk.”

  And so, evening after evening, they began to imagine the details of an up-to-date pediatric clinic here in Emerald that Clark could run.

  A few months after Sam had moved back to Pilgrim’s Rest, she brought Clark some news that—as she predicted—took him entirely by surprise. Local buyers had long been approaching her about Peregrine land and she’d just sold them the 118 acres that surrounded the ten-acre site of the house; the land had gone for twenty-six thousand dollars an acre. With the three million, sixty-eight thousand dollar profit, she wanted Clark to help her set up a foundation to build the John Ingersoll Peregrine Pediatric Clinic at Emerald Hospital. She hoped he would stay in Emerald to run that clinic.

  Clark was motionless for so long that Sam asked if he were all right. He stood up and nodded. “I’m just fine.”

  She asked if he wanted time to think her proposal over. He shook his head. “The answer’s yes,” he said. It was the fastest decision he’d ever made, except in Vietnam or in an operating room, and it was a decision he never regretted.

  Over the following year, Clark sold his family’s business and his family house. A year after that, the clinic opened in Emerald Hospital.

  At Pilgrim’s Rest, the two “singles” took up watching classic movies after supper almost every night. Clark had never been the film buff that Sam was, although he’d been named Clark by a Southern mother infatuated with Clark Gable. But under Sam’s influence, he became a fan. The famous lines of movies gave them a language that made them feel closer. If Sam wanted a drink, she’d growl in Garbo’s voice, “‘Give me a whiskey and don’t be stingy, baby.’” If Clark was battling a Christmas tree into its stand, he’d snarl like Bogie, “‘Nobody gets the best of Fred C. Dobbs.’” When Sam played on the piano the song Jill had loved most, “Wind Beneath My Wings,” Clark shouted, “Don’t play it again, Sam!” and Sam yelled back, “‘Are you talkin’ to me?’” They were particularly fond of movies in which incompatible misfits, who’d been given to each other by the accidents of life, became friends, to the good of both.

  Clark helped Sam restore Now Voyager and, without even having to change its name, reopen it as the town’s first video rental place. Now Voyager was a much greater success in its new incarnation. People so much liked staying home to watch movies that the Paradise, Emerald’s only downtown movie theater, went out of business. Next, Sam started a mail-order service for serious rare film collectors. Eventually customers throughout the country were contacting her for help in locating film footage—even the most obscure independent movie, newsreel, preview, director’s cut, and studio screen-test. Her promise was, “If they made it, and if anybody, from a projectionist to a grandchild, saved at least one print, I can find it for you.” For local customers, she would transfer old Super-8 movies or slides of their children, their weddings, their reunions and graduations and anniversaries, onto first video, then, in later years, DVDs. “Past Perfect,” she called this popular service.

  Above the store, her restored condo became a small theatre called Sam’s Place, where friends and neighbors came to “Play It, Sam,” the free double and triple features she showed on rainy weekends. “Bite Night” featured meal movies like Big Night, Babette’s Feast, and Eat Drink Man Woman, and at intermission served a fusion buffet. On “Phys Films” night she screened films like Magnificent Obsession and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and had Dr. Clark Goode speak (to a chorus of “Louder!”) on “Doctors in American Movies.” “Phys Films” started the town rumor that Sam and Clark were a couple, secretly in love. (Though why their love should be kept a secret stumped the theorizers.)

  Then one day in July the seven-year-old Annie showed up in their yard, abandoned by her father. Within days of the child’s arrival, they were sitting together on the couch, watching Shirley Temple in Bright Eyes sing about wanting to be an airplane pilot on the Good Ship Lollipop. Within a week, the imperious puppy Teddy, moving from lap to lap, joined them. The couple became a family.

  It was Clark who figured out the recurring dream that was awakeni
ng Annie nightly in those early months. He brought home some paints and suggested she draw her dream on the barn wall behind the airplane parked there. It was something he asked his child patients to do, draw their dreams. She painted a picture of a girl in a little red airplane that chased after another red airplane on a straight blue line of horizon. Between the sky and the ocean, she painted a brown ship on which a woman in a yellow cape stood, her arms in air.

  After Annie finished her picture and carefully cleaned the colors from the brushes, she reached up and put her hand in Clark’s. Clark told Sam that when he felt the life in Annie’s small hot hand race up his veins to his heart, he knew it would stay there the rest of his life.

  The next morning, Annie asked Sam if Clark was her in-law. Sam explained that he was not an in-law, but he was an in-love. She said that sometimes in the end an in-love could be more counted on than a “real” relative. “You can always count on Clark,” Sam told the child.

  Annie agreed with a quiet solemn nod. “He’s not going anywhere. He promised.” She was predisposed to believe that if Jack Peregrine were any example of a “real” relative, she could do without them.

  A year later, Sam and Clark officially adopted Annie at the Emerald courthouse. The judge, a married woman with children, questioned Annie carefully about whether she wanted to live at Pilgrim’s Rest with Sam and Clark. Annie said she did. “You can always count on them.”

  As they left the courthouse after the hearing, Annie heard a woman say she’d just been awarded damages because a department store’s elevator cable had snapped and plunged her down two floors, breaking her leg. Annie found this notion of legal retribution for suffering so comforting that the following day, forging an excuse from Clark about a doctor’s appointment, she left school and found her way back to the courthouse. Judge Susan Patterson answered her office door in Bermuda shorts and with her peppery hair held up by a big paper clamp. When Annie said she’d come to ask a question, Judge Patterson told her to take a seat and ask away. Annie said she wanted to find out how she could sue her father for leaving her.