Lapham Rising Read Online Free Page A

lecture.”
    “What a treat. And you know how I love treats.”
    “Of course, if you want to stay behind and learn how to fill your own water bowl and buy dog food for yourself…”
    “Bite me,” he says.
    I’ve tried.

Three
    T en A.M .: Kathy Time. Time for Kathy Polite to take off her clothes. She spells her surname Polite but pronounces it “pole-EET,” to add that continental je ne sais quoi to her uniquely successful real estate operation. Whenever I talk with her, which is as infrequently as possible, I make a point of pretending not to know how she pronounces her name, and I replace it with that adjective of courtesy that mocks her existence.
    “That’s Pole-EET, as you perfectly well know, you old coot.” She always speaks to me coquettishly, as though she had just returned from Savannah to her favorite old uncle’s plantation, and is capable of reducing me to blushes and stumbles with the droop of an eyelid.
    “Ah’m so sorry! I was just being polite.”
    “Ah don’t know why Ah waste one word on you!” She puckers her lips like a grouper. “Ah’ll never sell you anything , you old skinflint.”
    “That is SKINE -flint,” I correct her. “And Ah would gladly purchase one of your delightful Taras, Miss Pole-EET, but the cotton crop has been so po’ this year, we’ve had to eat the slaves.”
    That I would never buy so much as a lean-to from Kathy has had no impact, I hardly need to report, on her booming real estate business. Alongside the hundreds of “gems,” “steps to the ocean,” “priced to sell,” and “just bring your toothbrush” houses for which she shills on both overladen jaws of Long Island, she also represents what grotesqueries are still for sale around Lapham’s. She did not sell that particular magnificence, of course: Lapham had his own broker (a roommate from St. Mark’s) and his own personal architect, an in-law of Albert Speer’s, whose firm has been in the family for generations, and which had erected the dank mossy manses in Newport and Saratoga, as well as several more recent, bright mausoleums in Florida and Wyoming, near the Snake River—where, it is said, the whitefish committed a Jim Jones mass suicide in response.
    But, as Lapham rises, Kathy is not far behind. Mainly she sells spec houses to Lapham wannabes, of whom there seems to be an endless parade. Thus, though without a contract, and herself but dimly aware of it, she is Lapham’s silent partnerin the destruction of the universe. She once told me that she was—and I quote—“very grateful to Mr. Lapham for setting the proper standard of architectural elegance in the area. As yet, Ah have not made his acquaintance. But on the day that Ah am so fortunate, Ah shall shake his hand warmly and tell him, ‘It is people like you, suhr, who make the Hamptons the Hamptons.’”
    Were it not for Kathy Time, I would have gutted her on the spot.
    “Hah,” she calls from her boat this morning—“Hah” being a conjunction of “Hi” and a sigh.
    “Hah,” I call back. She wants to assure herself that I am watching. She need not worry. I walk down to the platform of the dock facing the creek to decrease the distance between us, and improve my view. One does what one can.
    She surveys me with a fatalistic shrug, as if I were a decision she regretted. “Harry, you need some new clothes.”
    I would say, “And you do not,” but I don’t wish to delay her from her appointed rounds.
    On the stroke of ten, this is what she does every sweet drifty summer day. And here she is again, with her forty-year-old diver’s body, standing like a soft little piece of vertical caramel in the bow of her Grady White with the dual 250-horsepower gunmetal-gray Yamaha engines lying at rest. The powerboat is anchored midway between Nomanand Lapham’s shore. It throbs. Who would not? I see her, clear as starlight, reaching for the heavens and stretching herself like some living figurehead on the prow of a New Bedford