Chapter 39
October 18
The Hole and the Hill
To-morrow sees undone, what happens not today;
Still forward press, nor ever tire!
The possible, with steadfast trust,
Resolve should by the forelock grasp;
Then she will ne’er let go her clasp,
And labours on, because she must.
Goethe, Faust, translated by Anna Swanwick
AN EARNEST YOUNG COUPLE, Theodore (“Don’t call me Ted”) and Carolina (“With an a”), friends of friends of Lou’s, arrived in the morning with a couple of small gasoline generators to provide electricity for the island temporarily, and as soon as they had those up and running they began surveying the island to produce an “energy-independence proposal.” By cocktail time they had it written and printed and distributed to all interested parties, which operation tied up my printer and kept me from distributing the flyers for Memoirs While You Wait. Theodore and Carolina proposed that we make a huge investment in a network, a “power grid,” that would combine wind, solar, and tidal generators to provide us something for almost nothing, which sounded to me like the sort of deal that my grandfather taught me was usually too good to be true. Since they were friends of friends of Lou’s, I didn’t want to tell them that it sounded too good to be true — particularly since their estimates for the maintenance costs of the system seemed to have completely overlooked the fact that most things break, and that here on Small’s Island most things break twice as often — or to tell them that I couldn’t begin to imagine how we could ever come up with the huge initial investment, so I said that I would take it under advisement. They gave Lou a copy of the plans, too, and although he thanked them for their work he didn’t have much else to say. I couldn’t help noticing that Lou had started exhibiting signs of worry — wringing his hands, biting his nails, pulling his hair — and frankly I was worried about him, not only as a potential purchaser of my albatross, but as a fellow creature.
The rest of my fellow creatures on the island got right back to work as soon as we had power again. Albertine called a couple of lawyers who specialized in tax grievances, because the town had raised our taxes again while we weren’t looking, and she began looking for a new insurer, because our insurance costs had gone up as the value of the hotel had gone down, a correlation that struck Albertine as ass-backwards. Suki, Louise, and Miranda were launching Small’s Affairs, a catering and party-planning service that looked very good on paper, thanks to the promotional efforts that Nancy and Elaine had made. I was beginning to think that I might have been wrong about Elaine; maybe she actually was in public relations. She certainly seemed to have connections. She managed to get a feature on Small’s Affairs on “Gilligan’s Wake Up with People Magazine,” a morning television show. The footage showed the trio arriving at a bayside party in a 1938 Chris-Craft runabout, each of them holding a platter of hors d’oeuvres. Tony T played the part of chauffeur in the piece and clearly enjoyed doing it. In his spare time, he had actually managed to find and repair the gas leak in the launch. He would never manage to stop the hull from leaking, but he’d taken a shine to the old tub, and he was doing a fair business with short excursions on the bay, which he sandwiched in between his hourly runs to the island in the (sigh) triple-cockpit barrel-back mahogany runabout. He had begun to talk about a water-taxi business, linking the towns along the bay, using a dozen or so vintage runabouts that would require a great deal of maintenance and keep him, happily, very busy. Cutie was working out the manufacturing arrangements for reproductions of Albertine’s miniature of Small’s Hotel, with battery-powered annoyances and miniature inmates to be sold separately. Alice had four rooms remodeled and had begun working on a cottage. Clark was driving her a little nuts by replacing the shingles on the roof of the cottage while she worked inside, despite my having pointed out to him that the cottage roof didn’t leak very much at all. Loretta made sure that all our supplies arrived just in time, and she had begun looking into the possibility of a group health-care plan. Artie was on the phone more than ever. He always gave the impression that something big was in the works, but that he wasn’t at liberty to talk about it yet. You would have thought that the cellular telephone had been invented for him, personally, at his request. Manuel Pedrera spent most of each day sitting in his room, writing The Confessions of Manuel Pedrera, his life story.
[to be continued]
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