Ian and Danny didn’t deserve to get taken, maybe, though they wouldn’t miss their stakes. There was plenty more.
Everyone was still courteously listening to Victor’s history lecture. “Take a guess how Paul Revere actually signaled the British advance?” he asked me. And to the other men, who’d clearly been through this lecture before, he added, “Don’t give it away.”
Jason glanced at me and fake-whispered: “He texted everyone.”
“I’ll give you a clue,” Victor said. “Revere was a silversmith and engraver. No?” He smiled. “He made bells out of silver. Little ones, for himself and his fellow patriots William Dawes and Joseph Warren. The three of them rode on their horses and rang the bells to let people know about the British.”
I was shifting my weight from foot to foot and trying to keep the ice from clinking in my glass when I glanced up at Ellen, who was staring at me, eyes wide. Right. Feign interest.
“Wow!” I said, a little too enthusiastically. Paul Revere’s bell, Moses’s staff, Santa Claus’s beard. Who the hell cared? “So where are the bells now?” I asked, and with a wistful sigh Victor explained that none had survived the Revolutionary War: melted down, crumbled apart, lost in the Charles River. Suddenly, he brightened. “I recently acquired a Confederate army war drum from Texas. Come—let me show you.”
I was desperate for the game to start—I needed the feeling of cards in my hands—but I followed the group into a room that smacked me with the hard force of memory. There was the black grand piano, there the trumpet on the wall, there the saxophone. After nineteen years, the instruments had multiplied. And I noticed printed cards mounted beside the instruments, explaining their origins. The saxophone had belonged to Julian “Cannonball” Adderley and had been used in the studio for Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album; the clarinet had belonged to Skip Martin, who’d played in the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Each instrument had a story to go with it.
“This is what I want my own legacy to be, Nora,” he told me. “I want to play a small part in American history.” I realized that each person in the room must have been subjected—once, or quite likely many times—to Victor Flowers’s musical tour through history.
“You want to be a part of history,” Danny said, “then you gotta run attack ads. I’m telling you, Vic—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Victor said.
“Yeah, nothing. It works.”
“We all know it works,” Victor said. “That isn’t the point. I’m running a positive campaign.”
“Then I’m positive you’re gonna lose,” Danny said, and laughed.
I was looking at the guitar on the wall. I remembered it from all those years ago, except that now I could decipher the sloppy signature on the instrument: Elvis Presley. The card said this was one of the guitars Elvis played during his final tour in 1977.
The army drum sat on a wooden stand in a corner of the room. It was painted red with the initials C.S.A. in gold and surrounded by painted gold fronds.
“What’s the story here?” I asked.
Victor bent over the drum and tapped out a shave-and-a-haircut rhythm with his fingers. “The seller claims it belonged to the man who wrote ‘Shiloh’s Hill’ and a number of other Civil War songs. My appraiser isn’t so sure. The age checks out, though: mid–eighteen hundreds.”
“You ever sing anymore, Vic?” Jason asked.
“Nah,” said Victor. “Who has the time? And my pipes aren’t what they were. Anyway, I’d rather keep taking your money.” This got a laugh out of Ian and a grunt out of Danny. “Come on”—he clapped twice—“let’s play poker.”
We walked down a hallway to the end of the house. Victor reached into his pocket and removed a key, which he used to open the door. He must have seen my expression. “Not even the housecleaners go into the cave without me,” he explained. “Some of the wine in here, the liquor—it’s obscene.”
Entering the game room gave me a profound sense of déjà vu. Unlike with the music room and kitchen, I had never set foot in here, but I knew every inch of it. Ellen had mapped it out for me, and for the last two weeks this room had taken center stage in my mind. I could close my eyes and see the poker players at the table, hear their chatter, look over at the enormous video screen across the room that was tuned softly to whatever football or hockey or basketball game the men had settled on; I could watch the rise and glow of the silent flame in the gas fireplace along the wall opposite the windows, where the blinds would be shut for the evening.
Ellen hadn’t mentioned the exposed wooden beams overhead or the soft carpet underfoot, but she had sketched out the wet bar along the wall before the row of windows. And just as she’d said—as she’d promised—our delayed arrival at Victor’s home and subsequent tour of the house had taken long enough for the men to finish their drinks. While they went to the bar to replenish, I noted other aspects of the room: the chandelier with curved metal and black glass beads lighting up the poker table, which was made of gorgeous wood and brown velvet. The room seemed much more traditional than the rest of the house; I half expected an oil painting of hunting dogs running
