About two minutes before Megan’s father-in-law pulled up in front of the house, shortly ahead of the rest of the party, I closed The Power Broker. Everyone who had seen me plowing through the 1162-page text had been kidding me, “What are you going to do when you finish it?”, and now I felt the edge of the situation. What, indeed? Never mind what I’ll read next. What will I think, and how will I feed the thoughts aroused by Robert Caro’s ultimately baroque portrait of a man who was far more singular and even more powerful than I ever imagined. One of the pebbles in my ruminative shoe is the fact that Robert Moses was 39 years old when he attained his first salary-paying job; no wonder he held on to power in his eighties! Something else: Moses was still very much alive in 1975, when The Power Broker appeared. (He would live until 1981.) Having, by then, lost just about every shred of that power, he was now insulted (I use the word in its medical sense) by an impassioned compendium of his crimes against humanity, compiled with Dickensian outrage. I am not going to say that I feel sorry for the man. But his bewilderment — there must have been much of that, because, like anyone who becomes addicted to and intoxicated by arrogance, he seems always to have been convinced that he was doing the right thing — is sad and embarrassing. So is the humiliation. It was bad enough that influential people had stopped consulting him; now they were judging him.

But, as I say, I was not left with these thoughts for long. Mike was no sooner sipping a Corona and chatting with Kevin than Fran arrived with Megan and Will. I set out to buy a few boxes of wine, an errand that I’d deliberately postponed until after the O’Neills’ arrival in case there was something else that was needed from the town (there wasn’t). When I got back, I started cooking dinner. And so on and so forth. A storm approached as we sat at the table, and later, when the dishes were all washed and the men were enjoying a nightcap on the front portch, it put on quite a good show, with several flavors of lightning, plenty of thunder, and buckets of racketing rain. The new day has dawned mild and fair. And I can’t give Robert Moses much thought until I take care of the propane problem. It seems that we’ve run out.

“Dickensian” — not a word that I use often. I don’t like Dickens. He overdoes the scenery and underdoes the psychology. I have never found his fiction to be truly adult. But guess what — I’m reading Dickens next. I’m re-reading the first real novel that I ever read, A Tale of Two Cities. It came loaded on my new smartphone, and I thought, “Why not?” I plan to put all of Jane Austen and most of Henry James on the phone, so that I never have to carry just-in-case reading material again, but, just as Fire Island was the right place for reading about Robert Moses (he wanted to pave it with a highway), so a beach house in August is the right place for revisiting a novel that filled me with an abiding dread of civil war in general and of jacquerie in particular.

Everyone’s up, and we’re glad to have a toaster oven, a coffee-maker, and (for the time being, anyway) hot water. At eight we phone the landlord.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, August 19th, 2011 at 7:28 am.