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priced, well-enough built, and perfect examples of my basic belief about housing and the corollary, that what people really like is a simple canvas to fiddle around with. Gottfried Nuelle couldn’t stand anyone to fiddle with his houses, but Gordon relied upon his buyers to transform the uniformity of his developments. Gordon had some ideas about Phase Four, and he wanted to talk to me about them.
    Gordon’s other developments were smaller and less philosophical, and he also built commercial properties. If one of his cronies wanted to open another restaurant or put in a miniature golf course with six waterfalls and a merry-go-round, Gordon would do that. He had sold one farm ten years ago, way out in the country but at the busy intersection of Highway 12 and Hardy Well Road, to Bert Milstein and then built a Colonial-style shopping village that specialized in shops that sold one thing: door handles or table linens or fudge. The security guards wore knee pants and the waitresses wore long skirts and frilly décolletage, and the center had succeeded against all odds, partly by hosting nonretail events, like chamber music groups and pig roasts, and partly by hosting craft fairs and swap meets. It had become a very successful fake village and Gordon loved it—it was not at all the sort of place he would ever shop, or even go, but exactly the sort of place where he could sell high what he had bought low. He couldn’t believe how the small shops and upscale décor put people in the mood to pay through the nose, but he had a little antiques shop there, which Betty ran with a friend, and he stocked it with whatever he had found here and there. One year they made a huge amount of money on gilt-framed mirrors that he got out of a hotel in Buffalo. Another year they had fifteen golden oak washstands and a rack full of silk kimonos from prewar Japan.
    At any rate, I got in the car and drove over to Gordon’s in a happy mood. Phase Four would be simple and fun. Gordon would build them, and Bobby and I would sell them. One of the ways that Gordon kidded himself that he wasn’t supporting Bobby was that he only discussed his projects with me, and Bobby did all his sales of Gordon’s properties through me as the broker.
    Of Gordon, my mother always said, “Well, I never thought he was a handsome man, though obviously some people do.” Some people did; he looked like a movie star of a certain era, Tyrone Power, say, whose looks not only change but become outmoded. In his early sixties, he was florid and jowly, and his dark pomaded hair had failed, suspiciously, to thin or recede. He had big shoulders and big hands but he was actually not a large man; I was an inch or two taller and outweighed him by maybe fifteen or twenty pounds. What he had was ease of movement. When he opened the door for me, put his arm around me, propelled me across the foyer into his office (shouting the whole time for Betty to come out and say hi and bring me a beer), it was his dance. His touch and his presence felt like they were infusing grace into me. In his office, which was pure 1970—orange shag carpet, a long low window looking out on their back acreage, which featured a man-made pond with a swimming raft and a rope swing hanging from the limb of a big oak—he had the plans for townhouses spread out on his desk. At first, say just for two or three minutes, I forgot that Felicity had put us in a new and strange relationship. He was just Gordon and I was just Joe and we were about to do what we had done so many times—build and sell and drink and eat and talk and shout and curse or celebrate as the deals rolled by. Then Betty came in with the beer.
    Betty was about sixty then. I suppose when I first met her she was in her mid-thirties, and of course she had changed. Sally had adored Betty. What she always said was, “My mother was a legendary beauty, you know. None of us girls will
ever
be as beautiful as my mother. Daddy says that’s evidence right