“Yet isn’t that against the very tenets of Bonaventure? Isn’t the goal to cast the old customs into the waters and instead raise new fish at the ends of our poles? Your own daughter dreams of a day when there are no carpenters or farmers, when anyone regardless of sex or birth can perform any task or chore with equanimity.”
Grosvenor chuckled. “I am Aristotle undermined by a sophist.” He peered at Lyman through the lenses at the end of his nose. “Let me ask you pointedly: are you a carpenter, as you described in your letters to me?”
“What I am,” said Lyman, drawing his spine straight, “is a subscriber to the Bonaventure project. I own a full share. I believe in Bonaventure—and if there are doubts about that, then as testament to my sincerity please refund my hundred dollars and I’ll be on my way.”
“You’re serious?”
“If such a demonstration quiets those suspicions of yours or anyone else’s, then yes.”
Grosvenor fixed Lyman with frozen stillness. “Suspicion is a terrible emotion, I grant you. But often, it is not unwarranted. For example, I suspect a great many things about you, Mr. Lyman.”
“Such as?”
“Such as your reticence to unhand your luggage that first day we met, as well as your payment of the subscription in full. You see, many of the others haven’t paid the balances they owe—and yet you paid the whole fee on your very first day.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” said Lyman, “that the others aren’t even fully paid shareholders?”
“I mean to tell you that I think you hold a great deal of money in your possession, which you have secreted somewhere at the stone house.”
Suddenly two things became crystallized in Lyman’s imagination. The first was that the digging exercise was, from the outset, a mere pretense for Grosvenor to arrange this moment. The second was that now Lyman knew who had rifled through his belongings during the picnic.
“Please don’t worry yourself unreasonably,” said Grosvenor. “I have no cares where the money originated. What I’m suggesting is that perhaps you and I are better,” he searched for the words, “better furnished than the rest. And as such you are uniquely positioned to invest in Bonaventure to a greater degree.”
“That’s an interesting assessment,” said Lyman. “Yet tell me something. I also recall when I subscribed that a regular dividend is due to all fully paid members. I remember it mentioned in our letters as well.”
“Ah, well,” said Grosvenor, “that’s just a trifle—”
“How many of these dividends have you actually paid over Bonaventure’s existence? I mean, I’d be willing to pay more if a large dividend could be guaranteed. But I’d expect more than a trifle.”
The two men faced each other, and in the adamant set of Lyman’s jaw, Grosvenor understood him; and in the anxious glance and quivering lip of Grosvenor, Lyman knew him. Neither was a carpenter nor the manager of a successful utopian venture. Both men were the perpetrators of very different fibs; each recognized his counterpart as a member of his own species, a brother of the same fraternal order.
Lyman pulled on the hem of his coat to straighten it. “David,” he said, “I think we must come to an understanding.”
“Yes, Tom,” said the other man. “I agree that would be best.”
•••
Just as one cannot hope to pen a menagerie of zebras and giraffes on the shoulder of a road without expectation of passers-by to halt and stare at them, so too did Bonaventure attract its share of gawkers and gogglers. More often than not Lyman, sequestered in the woods with his stone house, remained ignorant of them; but every so often when he was working some chore at the Consulate or helping in the fields, he would glance up to see a party of well-dressed excursionists, usually attended by Grosvenor, watching him as they would a monkey peeling a banana. Newspapers spilled a great deal of ink on transcendentalism, most of it unkind, and for Saltonstall readers, a colony of adherents in their midst was too much a distraction to resist. Bonaventure was a circus that stayed put. While charging sightseers a nickel for a walk around the farm wasn’t the most lucrative of side-businesses—nor was the penny for a cup of lemonade afterward—the overhead was small, so no one argued against the profit.
Besides, as Grosvenor would often point out, such was Bonaventure’s mission.
Yet there are only so many times one can scratch his buttock or armpit, then turn to find a half-dozen witnesses to the event, or look up with an apple halfway to one’s mouth to behold an audience leering outside the fence rail, before it agitates the nerves. Quicker than any magician’s student, Lyman soon learned to vanish from the scene upon the approach of outsiders.
Not far from the Consulate lay a hillock shaded by clusters of white birches. From that vantage it was possible to observe the comings and goings of the strangers, and it was there that Lyman would escape to wait out any disturbance. He soon discovered he was by no means the first Columbus to plant his flag on that particular West Indies, for he was often joined by the young daughter of the Albys, who likewise shared his distaste at being subjected to voyeurism.
“My name is Judith Alby,” she said upon their first encounter. “It’s pleasant to meet you. Are you the replacement for Mr. Bradway?”
“I don’t think so,” said Lyman as he took his seat. “Who is Mr. Bradway?”
“He was an Englishman who stayed at the farm for a while but he left abruptly. A lot of people come and go here.”
She sat cross-legged at the base of a birch. Lyman guessed her age to be around twelve years.
“People arrive here with all kinds of ideas,” she continued, “though rarely do those ideas involve hard labor. The farm is like a
