to change with every visit and it never seemed to be going well. What Danny did know was that his parents lived off his grandfather’s money and that the need for more of it was
the thing that lured them back to New Haven. “The only thing,” his grandfather would say,
and Danny did not quite have the heart to argue.
The conversations around the big dinner table were always about selling Black Elm and
became more urgent as the neighborhood around the old house began to come back to life.
A sculptor from New York had bought up a run-down old home for a dollar, demolished it,
and built a vast open-space studio for her work. She’d convinced her friends to follow, and
Westville had suddenly started to feel fashionable.
“This is the time to sell,” his father would say. “When the land is finally worth something.”
“You know what this town is like,” his mother said. This town. “It won’t last.”
“We don’t need this much space. It’s going to waste; the upkeep alone costs a fortune.
Come to New York. We could see you more often. We could get you into a doorman building or you could move someplace warm. Danny could go to Dalton or board at Exeter.”
His grandfather would say, “Private schools turn out pussies. I’m not making that mistake again.”
Danny’s father had gone to Exeter.
Sometimes Danny thought his grandfather liked toying with the Layabouts. He would
examine the scotch in his glass, lean back, prop his feet by the fire if it was winter, contemplate the green cloud formations of the elm trees that loomed over the back garden
in the summer. He would seem to think on it. He would debate the better places to live, the
upside to Westport, the downside to Manhattan. He’d expound on the new condominiums
going up by the old brewery, and Danny’s parents would follow wherever his fancies led,
eagerly, hopefully, trying to build a new rapport with the old fellow.
The first night of their visits always ended with I’ll think on it, his father’s cheeks rosy with liquor, his mother gamely clutching her cocoon of plush cashmere around her
shoulders. But by the close of day two the Layabouts would start to get restless, irritable.
They’d push a little harder and his grandfather would start to push back. By the third night, they were arguing, the fire in the grate sparking and smoking when no one remembered to add another log.
For a long time Danny wondered why his grandfather kept playing this game. It wasn’t
until he was much older, when his grandfather was gone, and Danny was alone in the dark
towers of Black Elm, that he realized his grandfather had been lonely, that his routine of
the diner and collecting rents and reading Kipling might not be enough to fill the dark at
the end of the day, that he might miss his foolish son. It was only then, lying on his side in the empty house, surrounded by a nest of books, that Darlington understood how much Black Elm demanded and how little it gave back.
The Layabouts’ visits always ended the same way: his parents departing in a flurry of
indignation and the scent of his mother’s perfume—Caron Poivre, Darlington had learned
on a fateful night in Paris the summer after sophomore year, when he’d finally worked up
the courage to ask Angelique Brun for a date and arrived at her door to her looking glorious in black satin, her pulse points daubed with the expensive stink of his miserable
youth. He’d claimed a migraine and cut the evening short.
Danny’s parents had insisted they would take Danny away, that they’d enroll him in private school, that they’d bring him back to New York with them. At first Danny had been thrilled and panicked by these threats. But soon he’d come to understand they were
empty blows aimed at his grandfather. His parents couldn’t afford expensive schools without Arlington money, and they didn’t want a child interfering with their freedom.
Once the Layabouts had gone, Danny and his grandfather would go to dinner at Clark’s
and his grandfather would sit and talk with Tony about his kids and look at family photos
and they’d extoll the value of “good, honest work” and then his grandfather would grab Danny’s wrist.