Free The Duration by Dave Fromm Page A

there would shortly be nothing left for the rhino to smash except her. But then Florence Banish’s mother heard a click and looked up to see Guy Van Nest at the top of the stairs, his hair askew, his pajamas wrinkled, and a rifle in his hands.
    The rhino apparently heard the click as well. It lifted its head to the stairway. Its great flat snout dipped and sniffed, and then it pawed at the Italian tiles on the foyer floor. It assumed a stance recognizable by a hundred hay bales, and by Florence Banish’s mother, as trouble.
    At the top of the stairs, Guy Van Nest leveled his rifle and fired.
    Guy Van Nest was not a rifleman, and the rifle he held was, as both a weapon and a metaphor, woefully unsuitable for the task at hand, and to nobody’s surprise the shot shrugged off the rhino’s massive shoulder, barely leaving a mark. The sound of the blast, however, echoed off of the marble walls of the foyer, a booming thunderclap, both sharp and rolling. It appeared to spook the rhino, which executed a hop-like pivot on its back feet and blasted through the mansion’s front door, left partially open by a fleeing butler. The rhino widened that opening considerably, snapping one of the door panels clear off its hinges and sending the other careening into the building’s outer wall like a sail in a storm. Guy Van Nest, rifle still in hand, hustled down the stairs, barely acknowledging Florence Banish’s bleeding mother, and raced to the door. Past him, Florence Banish’s mother could see the rhino, well down the drive, moving at a fast trot toward Bramble Street. For a minute, it appeared as if the animal might gain the road, perhaps pick up some momentum on Bramble and trot himself right down to Normanton. But then, as Florence Banish’s mother watched, the rhino turned its head and charged off, across a side lawn, its tracks in the snow as straight as a rope. In seconds, it vanished into the rolling woodland.
    Two hours later, after the front door had been braced and boarded, after Guy Van Nest had dressed and shaved and gathered several of the men who worked in the stables, after Florence Banish’s mother had cleaned her lip and applied a packet of ice wrapped in cheesecloth to it, and after young Florence Banish herself had kissed her mother’s cold damp hands, three large booms sounded in the forest. A bit later, Guy Van Nest and the stablemen came marching out of the rolling woodland, their own footprints obliterating those of the rhino. Guy Van Nest had a closed face and carried something wrapped in a towel. Two of the stablemen held grim larger-bore rifles of the sort that came in useful when one of the plow-horses splintered a fetlock. A third held a hacksaw. They’d dropped those in the toolshed and come back out with shovels.
    Guy Van Nest did not mention the rhino again.
    Some in the house staff concluded that Guy was humiliated by the whole episode, from the animal’s impulsive procurement, to its apparent inadequacy as a talisman, to the disastrous finale. A young master’s grand attempt to set himself up as a man of vitality, only to fall on his face. He’d picked his big fight and lost.
    Others, including Florence Banish’s mother, suspected that there were deeper emotions at work, having to do with the vagaries of the womb and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Whatever it was, the effect on Guy was profound. Time passed, silences were procured, and the property was restored, but Guy’s absences from Fleur-de-Lys became more frequent and the parties less so. On the nights he was there, he no longer dressed for dinner and spent long evenings in his upstairs salon. He took to medicinals. The staff, which was always whispering, now whispered about money. Was it running out? Was there enough for them all?
    Eventually, the answers to those questions became clear, and the property was abandoned by 1920. Guy Van Nest retreated to a considerably smaller estate on Long Island, and was not seen in the