The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [72]
She fell into laughter, in a way she hadn’t felt all winter.
Clark sat down on a sooty chair. “Maybe you ought not be alone so much.”
“Maybe not,” she agreed. “I’m moving back to Pilgrim’s Rest. I’ll rent you one of the wings.”
A week later, she took him to the local Chinese restaurant, The House of Joy, for a “serious discussion.” Clark was a little worried that she was going to propose a romance.
“You wish!” she told him with such obvious sincerity that the subject was settled. “We’re here to talk about what you’re going to do next. What’s your passion? What can’t you live without? Mine’s politics and tennis and movies and gardens. And that’s just to start. What’s yours? Because you’ve helped me a lot, Clark, and I’d like to help you.”
If Sam had many passions, Clark found it difficult at first to come up with any single compelling one. He mentioned his love of reading and baseball. But finally he confessed to a large dream that was yet unformed.
“That’s what I want to hear about,” Sam told him. “Talk.”
And so, evening after evening, they began to imagine the details of an up-to-date pediatric clinic here in Emerald that Clark could run.
A few months after Sam had moved back to Pilgrim’s Rest, she brought Clark some news that—as she predicted—took him entirely by surprise. Local buyers had long been approaching her about Peregrine land and she’d just sold them the 118 acres that surrounded the ten-acre site of the house; the land had gone for twenty-six thousand dollars an acre. With the three million, sixty-eight thousand dollar profit, she wanted Clark to help her set up a foundation to build the John Ingersoll Peregrine Pediatric Clinic at Emerald Hospital. She hoped he would stay in Emerald to run that clinic.
Clark was motionless for so long that Sam asked if he were all right. He stood up and nodded. “I’m just fine.”
She asked if he wanted time to think her proposal over. He shook his head. “The answer’s yes,” he said. It was the fastest decision he’d ever made, except in Vietnam or in an operating room, and it was a decision he never regretted.
Over the following year, Clark sold his family’s business and his family house. A year after that, the clinic opened in Emerald Hospital.
At Pilgrim’s Rest, the two “singles” took up watching classic movies after supper almost every night. Clark had never been the film buff that Sam was, although he’d been named Clark by a Southern mother infatuated with Clark Gable. But under Sam’s influence, he became a fan. The famous lines of movies gave them a language that made them feel closer. If Sam wanted a drink, she’d growl in Garbo’s voice, “‘Give me a whiskey and don’t be stingy, baby.’” If Clark was battling a Christmas tree into its stand, he’d snarl like Bogie, “‘Nobody gets the best of Fred C. Dobbs.’” When Sam played on the piano the song Jill had loved most, “Wind Beneath My Wings,” Clark shouted, “Don’t play it again, Sam!” and Sam yelled back, “‘Are you talkin’ to me?’” They were particularly fond of movies in which incompatible misfits, who’d been given to each other by the accidents of life, became friends, to the good of both.
Clark helped Sam restore Now Voyager and, without even having to change its name, reopen it as the town’s first video rental place. Now Voyager was a much greater success in its new incarnation. People so much liked staying home to watch movies that the Paradise, Emerald’s only downtown movie theater, went out of business. Next, Sam started a mail-order service for serious rare film collectors. Eventually customers throughout the country were contacting her for help in locating film footage—even the most obscure independent movie, newsreel, preview, director’s cut, and studio screen-test. Her promise was, “If they made it, and if anybody, from a projectionist to a grandchild, saved at least one print, I can find it for you.” For local customers,