slices of toast. From Jerusalem, tiles inlaid with the faces of the Old Testament Prophets, to be used in Lapham’s kitchen counters and on the backsplashes. From Oppressa, a small farming village outside Damascus, and known widely for its dancing calligraphers, came several precious tapestries with portions of the Koran woven in lavender. (Dave told me Lapham wanted all the major faiths represented in his home, and “a few minor ones.”) From the Hopi came a fourteen-foot-high totem pole depicting various forms of foul weather. From the Pinga-poogoos, a tiny aboriginal sect that broke off from the main tribe in the 1960s, a stuffed kangaroo called Pek, the god of fertility and pugilism.
There was more: a solid piece of oak, oval in shape, fifty-six feet long, eleven feet at its widest, and honed from a single tree in the Black Forest, to be used as the dining room table (seats eighty comfortably). A bidet carved from a single piece of murky pink marble found only in a quarry in Oslo, by the hand of Carmen of Nordstrom. For the flooring in the upstairs hallway, a honey-stained maple discovered by Mrs. Lapham on a flying trip to Tblisi, a wood so strong and impermeable that Stalin had selected it for his casket and sepulcher. A spectacular front gate from the Tuxedo Park mansion of P. Lorilard, the drug manufacturer, which caught Lapham’s eye because of the six-foot-high L centered in an iron parenthesis at the top, with molded bars of soap and toothpaste spilling from cornucopias on both sides.
Crockery from Delft; coffee mugs from Quito; theater seats rescued during the demolition of the old Palace on Broadway; and stadium seats from the Polo Grounds, to be set in tiers as grandstands for the grass tennis courts; three scatter rugs made from the hair of a dingo; a pair of combs from the tusks of a dugong; and a set of one-of-a-kind shaving brushes from the whiskers of a dikdik.
More still: maids’ uniforms created in Nagasaki by seamstresses who were maimed but not incapacitated by the 1945 bombing, and which, according to Dave, gave Lapham the inspiration to order up his own underground bomb shelter onthe property, for whose lining six tons of lead arrived in extra-wide loads from Des Plaines, Illinois. And green canopies for the beds from Uzbekistan in the guest rooms. And violet globes from Marseille for the reading lamps in the library, for which sixteen thousand volumes were purchased in bulk from used bookstores in Oxford (England and Mississippi) and Cambridge (England and Massachusetts). And, as of yesterday, painted panels of asparagus done by an artist in Winnipeg known for his renderings of vegetables. These, said Dave, will be hung on every wall of the house.
I don’t know if he was pulling my leg, but Dave also told me that next week an artist from Albany will be arriving to paint the domed ceiling of Lapham’s forty-seven-foot-high living room. Lapham said he wanted to provide a room that both creationists and those he called “evolutionaries” could feel comfortable in. So for his ceiling painting, he commissioned a depiction of Adam reaching out and extending the touch of life to a pollywog. I told Dave I could hardly wait to see the finished product, still thinking he was kidding. But he said, “Me too.”
All such things, great and small, were delivered to the construction site by vans, station wagons, Jeeps, pickups, flatbeds, dump trucks, boats and helicopters, and deposited in their giant wooden crates on the grounds. I would sit and stare at them as, I imagine, the natives of Surinam, Jamaica, or of our own shores stared as warships, with bloated, braggingsails and teeming with strange men, entered the sky above the horizon and inched toward them, making not a sound and appearing out of nowhere, forever to ruin their lives. I stared as I am staring now, able to note my imminent destruction and unable to do a thing about it. That is, until today.
Suddenly I am aware of a difference in my
There was more: a solid piece of oak, oval in shape, fifty-six feet long, eleven feet at its widest, and honed from a single tree in the Black Forest, to be used as the dining room table (seats eighty comfortably). A bidet carved from a single piece of murky pink marble found only in a quarry in Oslo, by the hand of Carmen of Nordstrom. For the flooring in the upstairs hallway, a honey-stained maple discovered by Mrs. Lapham on a flying trip to Tblisi, a wood so strong and impermeable that Stalin had selected it for his casket and sepulcher. A spectacular front gate from the Tuxedo Park mansion of P. Lorilard, the drug manufacturer, which caught Lapham’s eye because of the six-foot-high L centered in an iron parenthesis at the top, with molded bars of soap and toothpaste spilling from cornucopias on both sides.
Crockery from Delft; coffee mugs from Quito; theater seats rescued during the demolition of the old Palace on Broadway; and stadium seats from the Polo Grounds, to be set in tiers as grandstands for the grass tennis courts; three scatter rugs made from the hair of a dingo; a pair of combs from the tusks of a dugong; and a set of one-of-a-kind shaving brushes from the whiskers of a dikdik.
More still: maids’ uniforms created in Nagasaki by seamstresses who were maimed but not incapacitated by the 1945 bombing, and which, according to Dave, gave Lapham the inspiration to order up his own underground bomb shelter onthe property, for whose lining six tons of lead arrived in extra-wide loads from Des Plaines, Illinois. And green canopies for the beds from Uzbekistan in the guest rooms. And violet globes from Marseille for the reading lamps in the library, for which sixteen thousand volumes were purchased in bulk from used bookstores in Oxford (England and Mississippi) and Cambridge (England and Massachusetts). And, as of yesterday, painted panels of asparagus done by an artist in Winnipeg known for his renderings of vegetables. These, said Dave, will be hung on every wall of the house.
I don’t know if he was pulling my leg, but Dave also told me that next week an artist from Albany will be arriving to paint the domed ceiling of Lapham’s forty-seven-foot-high living room. Lapham said he wanted to provide a room that both creationists and those he called “evolutionaries” could feel comfortable in. So for his ceiling painting, he commissioned a depiction of Adam reaching out and extending the touch of life to a pollywog. I told Dave I could hardly wait to see the finished product, still thinking he was kidding. But he said, “Me too.”
All such things, great and small, were delivered to the construction site by vans, station wagons, Jeeps, pickups, flatbeds, dump trucks, boats and helicopters, and deposited in their giant wooden crates on the grounds. I would sit and stare at them as, I imagine, the natives of Surinam, Jamaica, or of our own shores stared as warships, with bloated, braggingsails and teeming with strange men, entered the sky above the horizon and inched toward them, making not a sound and appearing out of nowhere, forever to ruin their lives. I stared as I am staring now, able to note my imminent destruction and unable to do a thing about it. That is, until today.
Suddenly I am aware of a difference in my
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