and put them in the compost pile, raked the leaves from the back lawn. It felt good to work. The house suddenly seemed very empty, in a way it hadn’t in a long time.
He’d brought few people to Black Elm. When he’d invited Michelle Alameddine to see
the place his freshman year, she’d said, “This place is crazy. How much do you think it’s
worth?” He hadn’t known how to answer.
Black Elm was an old dream, its romantic towers raised by a fortune made on the soles
of vulcanized rubber boots. The first Daniel Tabor Arlington, Darlington’s great-great-great-grandfather, had employed thirty thousand people in his New Haven plant. He’d bought up art and iffy antiquities, purchased a six-thousand-square-foot vacation “cabin”
on a New Hampshire lake, given out turkeys at Thanksgiving.
The hard times had begun with a series of factory fires and ended with the discovery of
a process to successfully waterproof leather. Arlington rubber boots were sturdy and easy
to mass-manufacture but miserably uncomfortable. When Danny was ten, he’d found a
heap of them in the Black Elm attic, shoved into a corner as if they’d misbehaved. He’d
dug through until he found a matched pair and used his T-shirt to wipe the dust off them.
Years later, when he took his first hit of Hiram’s elixir and saw his first Gray, pale and leached of color as if still shrouded in the Veil, he would remember the look of those boots
covered in dust.
He’d intended to wear the boots all day, stomping around Black Elm and mucking
about in the gardens, but he only lasted an hour before he pulled them off and shoved them back into their pile. They’d given him a keen understanding of why, as soon as people had been offered another option for keeping the wet off their feet, they’d taken it.
The boot factory had closed and stood empty for years, like the Smoothie Girdle factory,
the Winchester and Remington plants, the Blake Brothers and Rooster Carriages before them. As he grew older, Darlington learned that this was always the way with New Haven.
It bled industry but stumbled on, bleary and anemic, through corrupt mayors and daft city
planners, through misguided government programs and hopeful but brief infusions of
capital.
“This town, Danny,” his grandfather liked to say, a common refrain, sometimes bitter,
sometimes fond. This town.
Black Elm had been built to look like an English manor house, one of the many
affectations adopted by Daniel Tabor Arlington when he made his fortune. But it was only
in old age that the house really became convincing, the slow creep of time and ivy accomplishing what money could not.
Danny’s parents came and went from Black Elm. They sometimes brought presents, but
more often they ignored him. He didn’t feel unwanted or unloved. His world was his grandfather, the housekeeper Bernadette, and the mysterious gloom of Black Elm. An endless stream of tutors buttressed his public school education—fencing, world languages,
boxing, mathematics, piano. “You’re learning to be a citizen in the world,” his grandfather
said. “Manners, might, and know-how. One will always do the trick.” There wasn’t much
to do at Black Elm besides practice and Danny liked being good at things, not just the praise he received, but the feeling of a new door unlocking and swinging wide. He excelled at each new subject, always with the sense that he was preparing for something,
though he didn’t know what.
His grandfather prided himself on being as much blue collar as blue blood. He smoked
Chesterfield cigarettes, the brand he’d first been given on the factory floor, where his own
father had insisted he spend his summers, and he ate at the counter at Clark’s
Luncheonette, where he was known as the Old Man. He had a taste for both Marty Robbins and what Danny’s mother described as “the histrionics of Puccini.” She called it
his “man-of-the-people act.”
There was little warning when Danny’s parents came to town. His grandfather would just say, “Set the table for four tomorrow, Bernadette. The Layabouts are gracing us with
their presence.” His mother was a professor of Renaissance art. He wasn’t entirely sure what his father did—micro-investing, portfolio building, foreign-market hedges. It seemed