Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt Page A

his own behavior toward the women in his life has Clive facing backward to where his mother left off. Would she approve? Doubtful. Your father would never was how she reprimanded Clive when he was growing up. He sees his mother from a distance and then spends the night by her side. His mother in imposing diamonds at the Hotel Gritti, New Year’s Eve, the passing of the year in which his father had died, Clive sat with his mother while she delivered her pronouncements on Daddy’s genius, his kindness, his elegance—such assertions had hissed past his ears before, chiding; but on this one night she spoke of his father’s gift for life and for loving others. “Your father was a man who let things go alive.”
    Then with the alacrity of another new year, she tucked the dead man into her clutch, quoting him only from time to time when it served instructive. Scolding Sally’s table manners, “Your grandfather used to say only boiled and roasted joints allowed on the table!” Clive thinks his mother liked to poke Sally in the elbow with a fork. In this way Clive thinks he is more like his mother: He’s a killer.
    The other day he had told Isabel he would not be needing her services for a while. Poor choice of words, probably, but he was not given to lying. He had told her from the start, just as he had once told Dinah, he must have full sway.
    *
    “I told you. Clive’s on to the lily pond,” Isabel said.
    “I’m sorry,” Ned said.
    “Whatever for?”
    Advancing across the sky, clouds promised a storm of Olympian proportion. The power might go out. Now something appropriately dramatic would happen.
    Ned wanted to know, “Should we get buckets?”
    “Does the roof leak?”
    (The weather that time with the dying mouse when Ben stood behind a grill big enough to roast a boar and Phoebe whisked the dressing, the weather then had been threatening but nothing came of it until the next morning when they drove back to New York in a downpour. Rain on a Sunday—all very appropriate.)
    She asked, “Should I feel sorry for you?”
    He made some helpless gesture—as if a sale had not gone through or he was broke or lost, unable to answer. “Yes, no, I don’t know.” He tried to explain to her—as much as to himself—that Phoebe was making her summer rounds, visiting her father and her stepmother, her stepfather and her mother, and Ben’s mother and father. Part of Phoebe’s vacation was being spent on different family compounds, another part was offbeat Europe with well-traveled friends. How did he feel about this, Isabel wanted to know. “Do you want to figure more prominently in her life?”
    Just when they were on to an important topic, the phone rang and she knew it was Clive. Before Ned even spoke, she knew from his expression of complicit exasperation that Clive had asked Ned if he might speak to her. “No,” Ned said, delightedly. Ned looked at Isabel and lied about her whereabouts, and all the time he was talking, Isabel didn’t signal for the phone, but watched Ned and wondered why he was so sure this was what she wanted him to do—when she didn’t know what she wanted Ned to do—or Clive to do, for that matter.
    “Thanks a lot,” she said.
    “I really didn’t think you’d want to speak to him. I’m sorry,” Ned said, and he sounded quite genuinely sorry; it made her sorry, sorrier, and sadder.
    “It’s all right,” she said. “I didn’t want to speak to him.” But she wasn’t sure if what she said was true. She was also thinking of Phoebe.
    “Now that we’re in Maine,” Ned began, “it might be fun . . . ,” but he had no need of finishing when he saw Isabel’s expression—God knows he wanted to be hopeful himself. “We should read The Odyssey together. The epic belongs to beautiful women—Odysseus visits the underworld and is witness to a parade of them, a great loveliness of ghosts with stories of ravishment, fleet sons, and sorrow.”
    *
    The barn is preternaturally white