by R.P. Burnham
A Car, a Cottage, and the Persistence of Memory
Lowell Edgecomb, glancing out the showroom window at the traffic on U.S. Route 1, experienced a moment of estrangement. He was not in Chicago. Laurie Heinsohn, the woman with whom he had been living for the past five years, was over 1500 miles away physically and on the other side of the universe spiritually. He no longer worked with his uncle building houses. He wasn’t going to get married. He wasn’t going to settle down, be a father, raise boys and work eight to four every day. Instead he was in Waska, Maine buying his mother a new car with money from stocks that until last year he thought were mere printed paper. The estrangement, how-ever, went beyond the fact that he was living again in the town in which he grew up. The salesman, Rett Murray, was a very strange man, quite unlike any salesman he had ever dealt with before. He had the most unsalesmanlike ability to make one feel uneasy in his presence. Lowell, at least, felt uneasy and was simultaneously trying to talk to the man and figure out what the source of the uneasiness was.
It started in the normal world. Lowell had gone in to the showroom and told the receptionist that he wanted to buy a car just as a million other people would do. She had asked his name and gone into the back room to fetch a salesman. A few minutes went by during which time he leafed through some brochures and examined one of the floor models of the kind he wanted to buy. Presently out came Rett Murray to be of service, such as it was. Even as he walked across the showroom toward him, Lowell could sense an under-current of hostility in the way he walked and looked at him. After they identified each other (as opposed to greeting one another), Murray said, “So you want to buy a car?”
“Yes. Yes, I do. I know exactly what kind and what color I want.”
“How come you’re so sure you want a certain car?” His eyes narrowed suspiciously.
The question was so unexpected that Lowell stared in speechless amazement at the salesman.
He was a tall, scrawny fellow with a large Adam’s apple bobbing up and down when he talked. He had little ratlike, mistrustful eyes of uncertain color. His cheap suit didn’t fit him very well—it was too big in the shoulders so that the padding hung like snow on the edge of a roof. His shoes were scruffy. His thin brown hair looked dirty. Lowell was so mesmerized by the bobbing Adam’s apple that it took him awhile to realize the man never looked him in the eye for more than a split second every now and then. His first reaction, before his uneasiness started, was to suppress a smile when the thought popped into his head: I hope this guy lives on more than commissions. He was the most unpromising-looking salesman Lowell could ever remember meeting. He himself had worked in electronics stores in his past and was familiar with the usual expectations of a salesman. All he could conclude was that this guy must be a relative of the boss.
“So why are you so sure?” Murray repeated.
“Why am I so sure? What do you mean?”
“We got a lot of cars here.”
That didn’t answer the question. Dissonance.
Murray looked behind him at the noise of another salesman dropping a thick folder.
“Well, you see, I did some research on the Internet using my brother’s computer.” He felt his face redden. Why was he telling this man this absurd fact? Then he recovered himself and in a businesslike manner enumerated the specifications he wanted, and Murray went over to the computer on his desk to see if a car matching these specifications was in stock.
As he searched the computer Murray worked his mouth, pursing his lips and running his tongue over them in a way that Lowell suspected was meant to disgust him. It did, and for a moment he considered going elsewhere to buy the car. But Hopkins Motors was the largest Ford dealership in the county. He would have to go all the way to Portland to find a similar range and selection.
“I suppose you’d like a test drive,” Murray suddenly said, looking up from the computer screen.
“Does that mean you’ve got the model and color in stock?”
He nodded and stood. “I’ll get the keys.”
He was gone for a few minutes. When he returned the aura of hostility was still present. They walked together into the lot, searching for the maroon Ford station wagon Lowell had specified.
“How will you finance it?” Murray asked just as they found the car.
“I don’t need financing. I’ll get you a check if the car is satisfactory.”
Murray whistled in a particularly insolent way. “Where do you work?”
Lowell frowned angrily. “I don’t work. But what business is that of yours?”
“That must be nice,” he said with sarcasm about as subtle as garlic on the breath. He went over to the passenger side, not bothering to unlock the door for Lowell. Only when he was seated inside did he reach over and allow Lowell into the car.
“Where’s your car?” Murray asked as Lowell, giving him a black look, slid into the driver’s seat.
He told him the eight-year-old Japanese car, rusty and with many a dent that was parked in front of the showroom door, was his car.
“Won’t be worth much in trade-in, you know.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m not trading it in. The car is for my mother.”
Murray didn’t say anything, but Lowell, concentrating on backing out, imagined he rolled his eyes.
He drove out of the dealership onto Route 1, going about a mile before he turned into a country road. Ordinarily he would be vocalizing his thoughts about how the car was responding, but since the salesman was sullenly maintaining his silence, he said nothing. The car, though, was okay. He was sure it would be perfect for his mother. He pulled into a farmyard, backed out, and returned to the dealer’s parking lot, perfect noncommunication being maintained the entire way. When they got out of the car, Lowell, thinking that if his mother was going to get the car he promised her he would have to say something, began talking in a businesslike manner about the particulars of paying for the car, signing the contract and so forth. As if they hadn’t driven together for fifteen bizarre minutes without saying a word, Murray answered his questions equally routinely. But quite suddenly he changed the subject:
“You don’t recognize me, do you?” His eyes flashed.
Lowell glanced at him, noting that almost instantly Murray dropped his gaze and stared at the ground. “I was thinking you looked a bit familiar, but I’ve been living out of state for the past fifteen years.”
Murray nodded. “I was in your brother’s class at C.A.”
“I see. But about the car. I’d like to have it tomorrow.”
They went back to business, walking now to Murray’s desk inside the showroom where Lowell signed some papers and said he’d be back tomorrow at about ten o’clock. Then he left without saying good-bye. Somehow that seemed appropriate.
He went directly to the bank after leaving Hopkins Motors and spent half an hour arranging for a certified check to be ready tomorrow morning. Then he drove out to Camp Melton where Fred McClellen, a builder and general contractor, was completing a new house. It was a beautiful day, the Thursday before the Memorial Day weekend, and glimpses of the Waska River flowing serenely under tower-ing pines were truly lovely. He had known these views since a boy when he’d ride his bicycle down to the beach, but they looked fresh and new to him today. Everyone in Chicago whom he told that he was from Maine would always exclaim, “Oh, Maine is a beautiful state!” Well, it was.
He pulled into the long driveway of the new house—a huge tudor-style trophy house sitting like a massive and incongruous brontosaurus on the banks of the river—and parked behind the last of the half dozen pickup trucks and a couple of late-model cars that showed the house was still in the hands of the proletariat. He walked up to the house looking for someone to direct him to Fred. A man wearing a carpenter’s apron and carrying a piece of lumber came out of the garage to do a cut on a portable table saw. He told him the boss was in the backyard. “There’s some trouble with the bulk-head door. You’ll find him there.”
He wa
lked around to the back to find two workers and Fred trying to close the bulkhead door without much success. “Problem with the door, Fred?” he said by way of greeting.
Fred was kneeling down looking at the hinge. “Here’s the trouble. The stupid thing has been warped. Buck, see if a good whack won’t bring it into alignment. See where the metal is dented? Hit it there.” He rose and came over to shake Lowell’s hand. Kneeling, he had looked small, but on his feet he was a tall, wiry man who stood stiffly and was rubbing his back. His face, neck and arms were bright red from sunburn. He was forty or so but looked older.
“Close to finishing?”
Fred nodded. “Inside is all ready for the painters. We’re just fixing odds and ends now. Things that shouldn’t need fixing if they were built right.”
Lowell eyed the bulkhead. “I bet that thing was dropped sometime, either at the ware-house or when it was winched into place. I’ve seen that happen.”
Fred didn’t answer directly. He was watching his boys carefully. “Not there, Buck. A little to the left.”
Lowell, however, was certainly not offended. He was glad to see Fred inattentive because his concentration was on the work at hand. One wanted a contractor with that characteristic. But another thing pleased Lowell just as much. The previous times he had talked to Fred the man had been close to cravenly sycophantic, and Lowell didn’t like it. He himself when he talked to customers of his uncle’s company took great care to maintain his dignity. If a job could only be gotten through ass-kissing, it wasn’t worth it. He had talked to Fred four times about the cottage he wanted to build on his mother’s lakefront property twenty miles from Waska, and this was the first time the man hadn’t been sycophantic. He was going to be all right after all.
“Did you use our technique?” Fred asked, watching the workmen bang at the underside of the bulkhead.
Lowell grinned. “It’s one way. I’ve returned a few in my day too.”
The men tried the door, and this time it closed tightly.
“Friendly persuasion worked this time,” Fred said. “Finish up, you guys, and then clear out the stuff in the garage.”
He started walking towards the front of the house, and Lowell joined him. “So you are on schedule, right? I figure to get the permit tonight.”
Fred nodded and reached for a cigarette. “Yep. Should be able to start next Tuesday right after the Memorial Day weekend.”
“Remember, I plan to be there.”
The contractor frowned but kept his thoughts to himself.
Lowell had contracted him to pour the foundation and do the framing. Everything else, with the exception of installing the circuit breakers and some of the plumbing, he planned to do himself. “I’ve already been assured there will be no problem with the permit—as long as we’re back one hundred feet from the shore, that is. Still, I have to make my case to the planning board tonight. Unless you hear otherwise, everything will be okay. I’ll call you Sunday or Monday night to confirm you’ll be there. Does that sound right?”
“Sounds right to me, Lowell.”
“The electricity won’t be in for a week or so, but Nate Wentworth told me he’s completely free after next week. But you can pour the foundation without it, right?”
“Oh, yeah. No problem.” Fred puffed at his cigarette.
They shook hands on that, and Lowell left.
His mother would be home soon, but he decided to take a drive along the coast to think. Plans in the making for several months were about to be realized. Once the foundation was poured a line would be crossed and he would be committed to Waska—not perhaps forever but for a long, long time. He wanted to think about this commitment while it was still possible to back out. He had done a lot of backing out already in his thirty-two years. There weren’t too many steps left behind him before he would fall over some precipice, yet even those few available steps, if he were to take them, could still mean freedom.
Even his name was backwards, or at least quasi-palindromic. His parents not having married, his name was comprised of their two last names, and only an accidental decision had made him Lowell Edgecomb instead of Edgecomb Lowell. In a time when hippies favored silly names like “Moon Unit” or “God,” at the last possible moment his mother had changed the order of the names they had decided on. She didn’t think Edgecomb made a good first name.
This business about his name happened in northern California where he was born in a hippy commune that even then was past its day. The sixties had peaked and the war was already lost, even if the government and military didn’t realize it. Now it was a cow pasture. He knew that because several years ago he had gone on an absurd quest to find his father and had visited it. Having last seen it when he was five years old, he had only vague memories of a sprawling farmhouse where five couples and numerous children tried to eke out a living by farming and making crafts to sell in San Francisco. Fire had claimed even that tenuous connection to his beginnings. A crumbling foundation of fieldstones reinforced with mortar and a few scattered pieces of blackened wood were all that remained.
Nor did he find his father, the man who to him was the feeling of a huge beard of wiry hair rubbing against his cheek like steel wool and who would sometimes dance with him to Jefferson Airplane’s “Feed Your Head” at one moment and then be sullen and withdrawn the next. His mother later told him his father’s mind was ruined by too many acid trips. The closest Lowell ever got to him was seeing some of his friends in San Francisco, but they told him the same thing his uncle in Chicago said—that they hadn’t seen him for over fifteen years and that he was probably dead. He’d traced him to the Arizona desert before the trail went cold.
His father had walked out on them after a bad acid trip so that there was some ambiguity about his motives. He had plenty of time to clear his head and return, however, so that when he didn’t eventually his mother assumed he’d deserted them. Lowell was five at the time. Soon after that the commune broke up. His mother and he went next to San Francisco where for two months they crashed in hippy pads and sometimes spent the night on the streets before his mother took him back to her hometown of Waska, Maine. Her hippy days were over even though she spent the rest of her life reliving them.
Here he grew up, here went through all his changes, here he met life, but because the process to consciousness of self was not altogether a happy one, he had not felt until recently anything approaching affection for what he should have regarded as his home-town. He did not blame his mother for this inheritance—she was who she was, and besides, she had a good heart—but they lived a slovenly, chaotic life. With a genial, easy-going person-ality, she found she was best suited to being a waitress, a job depending on tips so that income was erratic and made further erratic by her propensity to lose jobs with alarming regularity. They were often on welfare and food stamps, and once or twice there was talk among the social workers of removing the children from her care—children because a few years after they returned home she began living with a man who gave Lowell a brother. Bill Paine was his name; this time his mother Pat gave the father’s last name at the hospital, though she doubled that up by giving the kid his father’s first name as well. Bill Paine Sr. lived with them for about four years off and on before drifting away like her first man. He was a drunkard and, like Perry Lowell, probably a manic-depressive. Lowell had few happy memories of him. The only person who sometimes acted fatherly to him and his brother was their uncle, Cliff Dalton. He was married to Nadine, his mother’s sister. He’d take the boys fishing and to ball games with their cousins, and once or twice he came to school when some activity required a father’s presence. He was nice but it was not enough. Lowell always had the consciousness of being a fatherless boy; too early was he familiar with the sorrows of being human.
Waska being a small town, the particulars of their home and their life became pretty much general knowledge. Lowell got used to a certain look of disdain and disapproval in the faces of his friends’ parents and knew fir
sthand the soul-freezing feeling of being treated as an inferior long before he actually understood the snobbery and smugly self-satisfied respectability that engendered the disapproval. More than anything, it was this generalized societal disapproval that led him to hate the town that made him feel alienated and inferior. He remembered even as a young boy longing to be free of it. But one thing everyone in town was wrong about was the feelings his mother had for him and Bill. They thought she was selfishly indifferent to all but her own comforts; they didn’t understand that she was always and forever a hippy and cared nothing for respect-ability and social norms. The truth was that she was a loving mother in her own way. It was a rare day when she didn’t hug them frequently and kiss them good night. She even taught, by example, some valuable lessons in life. She was amazingly impervious to external events, never losing her temper when times were tough, never yielding to self-pity when impoverished and never becoming elated when a time of prosperity came. She was not so much passive as indif---ferent to hardship. In short, as an instinctive stoic, she accepted good and ill with equanimity.
In college once when a group of students were discussing Larkin’s famous line, “Your mom and dad, they fuck you up, you know,” he was asked about his parents. What came to mind surprised him. He recalled the first time the electricity was turned off because of nonpay-ment soon after Bill Paine had deserted them. Pat had become unused to working and got herself fired for being late. Money from her sister and mother was buying food for them, but bills were shoved into a kitchen drawer unopened and forgotten, with the result that one night the apartment was in darkness. Lowell, ten or so at the time, was young enough to be very fright-ened, not so much of the darkness as of the different and strange situation they found themselves in. He was just about to start whimpering when his mother had saved the day by making a game out of it. “Boys!” she said with an excited laugh, “tonight we get to camp out!” They cooked a supper of soup on the gas stove and with crackers and a can of fruit cocktail had a laughing meal. So what had he learned from her example? Not to worry, to muddle through as if life were a British Empire on which the sun never set? Or maybe, to be your own resource, to live inside, be indifferent to materialistic creature comforts, and let the world be damned?
Something like that he had eventually learned, if not as well as she had. But in high school he was only beginning to learn to rise above fate, and the shame he felt when he thought of what his friends’ parents would think was sometimes almost unbearable. The electricity never again was turned off, but there were times when his aunt Nadine and his grandmother still had to help with money and groceries. Instead of making him feel grateful, this help also made Lowell feel ashamed. It made his grand-mother feel ashamed too, and though there was no evidence to show that his mother was bothered by these interferences in the workings of fate, she became the means that made Lowell proud of his mother. The matriarchal Mrs. Edgecomb, widow of the formidable Judge Edgecomb whose strict Calvinist discipline had driven Pat into hippiedom in the first place, challenged her daughter to straighten out her life for her sons’ sake. What she did was offer the money for a down payment on a house with the stipulation that her daughter work at a steady job to make the monthly mortgage payments, and for four years Pat did work in a factory and never missed a payment. She only stopped the factory work after her mother died and left money for his and Bill’s college education along with money to pay off the mortgage as soon as the family house was sold. That money was split between Pat and Nadine, but since Nadine and Cliff already had a vacation home, the Edgecomb lakefront property was left to Pat. The cottage had burned down years ago, and since the judge died the place was hardly used at all, but such as it was it belonged to Pat. Immediately she went back to waitressing, the job she found most congenial, but her years of steady work, and therefore his grandmother’s challenge, bore other strange and wonderful fruit.
The first fruit came when, taking his cue from his grandmother’s will, he channeled the hurt and feelings of inferiority from Mrs. Grundy’s looks of disapproval into studying. Against all odds, he rose above the chaos of his home life and became a good student in high school, particularly in mathematics and sciences. He developed an interest in computers, becoming so good that he actually wrote programs for the computer system at Courtney Academy. He got a weekend job at the local Radio Shack and became a whiz at electronic gadgetry, even building himself a workable computer before they became widespread appliances in the home. His example inspired his younger brother to study and apply himself so that all the Mrs. Grundys of Waska who had shaken their heads at the boys’ prospects were mortified to be proven wrong. It was a small consolation, though Lowell deep inside still felt as if he deserved their looks of disapproval. This was a feeling that took him a long time to shake. Even now it could occasionally still come back to him in the dark soul of the night when he would wake from a dream and find himself a despised and fatherless boy.
But as Mrs. Grundy’s disdain faded and as his teacher’s praise and his boss’s trust in him at the Radio Shack grew more common, he did finally manage to distance himself from his inherited sense of inferiority. To the outside world, in fact, he became a self-confident young man, competent at everything he did and confident that he could do anything. His teachers told him his grades and his intellect would get him into any college he applied to, and when they enumerated several examples one of them was the University of Chicago. Chicago was the city of his father and where his uncle, whose only contact was a Christmas gift mailed to him each December, still lived. The older he got the more he felt the absence of a father in his life. It was like a hollowness growing inside him, not pain but the absence of a sense of completeness. He applied, was accepted, and at age eighteen found himself a student at the University of Chicago.
But he was his mother’s son and grew alienated in a different way from the society he found himself in. His classmates were almost universally materialistic go-getters recognizing no higher value than self-actualization, which for them meant the fast track up the corporate ladder or the professions, expensive cars and trophy houses. Seeming to him more like capitalist manikins than human beings, they literally disgusted him. Fatherless and product of chaos himself, he knew that whatever he was searching for in life it wasn’t that. As he had done earlier in response to a different sense of alienation, he channeled his disgust into total commitment to studies. For two years he learned everything that was possible to learn about computers and computer programming; then by his junior year boredom grew to accompany the alienation. He stopped studying, hung out in coffee houses, experimented a little with drugs, found a girlfriend in one of the waitresses at his favorite coffee house, lived with her off campus, and flunked out. He got a job in an electronics store and worked there for a few years. It was during this time that he went to the West Coast looking unsuccessfully for his father. A few more years passed during which he lived directionlessly, though he was not so much bitter as indifferent, passive.
One day his roommate from freshmen year looked him up and asked if he could help set up one of the first Internet companies. The man was a business major and needed help with the computers and programming for his site. He told Lowell that he was exactly the man he was looking for, despite the fact it had been four years since he had used a computer. “It’s like riding a bike, isn’t it, Lowell?” he asked jocularly. “Besides, everyone on campus knew you were the best.”
Even with the flattering compliments Lowell had his doubts. He had turned his back on all that. It was too mixed up with the capitalist manikins that had turned his stomach. In the end his former roommate convinced Lowell to help, even though—or more likely because—he couldn’t pay him. Lowell helped him set up the business, writing programs, networking the com-puters and, after teaching himself the new HTML language by reading a book on it, setting up the web page. He got expenses and room and board for his four months of work and in addition six thousand shares of the company,
which Lowell kept in a cardboard box in his apart-ment and regarded as worthless paper. He did a few more freelance programming jobs, getting paid for them and making enough to move into a small apartment near the University of Chicago, and then, as if life were a sickness and he had had a relapse, he started drifting again, directionless and passive.
During his years in Chicago he had grown quite close to his Uncle Bob, his father’s brother, and his Aunt Sarah. They invited him to the house frequently, especially on holidays, where he spent many hours listening to his uncle reminisce about his father. He learned that his father had also never fit in when he was in high school. His uncle told him he was not surprised when his father ran away to San Francisco to become a hippy. Uncle Bob, the steady one in the family, continued the family business and married, though he and Sarah had no children. Lowell could tell this was the saddest disappointment in his uncle’s life, but he hid it behind a pleasant and genial persona. He often introduced himself to people by saying he was Robert Lowell, the builder, not the poet. One weekend when he was paying a visit to his relatives, his uncle asked him if he could help with the new computers his construction company had got. After Lowell had set up the computers and taught his uncle and the two foremen he employed how to use them, Bob asked him if he’d like to come into the company. Lowell understood exactly what he meant: being childless and over fifty now, he was looking for someone to pass the business on to when he retired. Lowell thought about the offer for a week or two and then agreed with the stipulation that he start at the bottom as a carpenter’s helper. This being the best way to learn the business, his uncle readily agreed. For five years he worked at every aspect of the business until he was knowledgeable enough to be entrusted with the responsibility for projects himself. By this time he was being paid well, though much of the money simply accumulated in his bank account. Like his mother he was essentially indifferent to things material. He still drove the used car he’d bought to get him to work sites when he first began. When it broke down he bought the Japanese compact he was still driving till this day.
He had various relationships with women during these years, many one-nighters and some lasting a few months but nothing truly serious until Laurie Heinsohn came into his life. He met her at a party. They started talking in a corner of a room full of people, then moved into the kitchen where it was more quiet and talked for two hours. She had dark hair and striking blue eyes that registered her feelings exquisitely when she told him about an accident she had seen on the way to the party. A little boy had been badly hurt when struck by a car and was sobbing in fear of dying more than from the pain. She was so disturbed that she had considered going back home after the ambulance took the boy away. Lowell was not particularly fond of parties—he didn’t like them in fact and wouldn’t go to them except that he disliked loneliness more—so when Laurie suggested they go to a quiet coffee house a few blocks away, he readily agreed, and they left.
They stayed until past midnight, not listening to the folk singers but talking. She told him about her girlhood on a dairy farm in southern Wisconsin, of getting up before dawn to get to work, of how she had left that life for the city and sometimes felt so homesick and alienated that she considered going back home. Her father was only in his fifties but had been stricken with Parkinson’s disease so that her two brothers ran the operation now. Veronica, the cow that when she was a calf had won a 4H prize for Laurie, had recently died, and Laurie’s blue eyes glistened when she spoke of her. In high school she had gone with a boy who was now a Lutheran pastor, and if things had been a little different she would be a minister’s wife right now. But she told him that story with less regret than she showed for her cow Veronica. More guardedly, Lowell told her about his birth in a hippy commune in California and about his roots in small-town Maine. By the end of the night they had fallen in love.
They had almost four good years together, during which time they went to Wisconsin twice to meet her parents and once to Maine to meet his mother and brother. Occasionally she hinted about marriage, but last year after her thirtieth birthday came she passed beyond hints to explicit remarks about her biological clock. At first he brushed off these remarks with attempts at humor; she was not amused and began asking him if he loved her. “You know I do,” he’d say and argue that he needed more time. He did make an effort. He would think about marriage, trying to talk himself into it, but the thought didn’t go too far before he would always confront an insistent no in his mind, a no that was irrational, a vague feeling and though only a feeling impossible to surmount. Intellectually he couldn’t understand it or accept it. It wasn’t her. She was a sweet girl, a wonderful woman, good-natured and with a good sense of humor, respon-sive to others, tolerant about frailties in other people and by no means under any kind of impression that she was perfect. She was also pretty, a good lover, and fun to be with. And yet something inside him said no when he got to the final boundary of commitment. Because she loved him, because she was understanding, because she was tolerant and patient, she did not push him unduly—she only made sure now and then that he understood her position. So they didn’t argue; it was much quieter than that; but slowly the issue of marriage became the only reality in their lives.
It was at this time that he experienced the first and probably only windfall in his life, a piece of luck that he accepted with an indifference and equanimity worthy of his mother. His friend’s Internet company became a success, and the dividends from the formerly worthless paper of his shares paid $20,000 the first time and over $30,000 the second time so that he now had an enormous amount of money in his bank account. The financial security that his class-mates devoted every waking thought to achieving came to him accidentally. It did not, however, change anything between him and Laurie. A day came when the atmosphere of their little efficiency apartment became so tense that going home after work no longer held any joy. It was as if they had become enemies, not lovers. Nothing she could say, and more importantly nothing he could think, could change what happened to him every time he tried to visualize marriage with her: a cold feeling seized his insides like a drink of liquid nitrogen. This stage of suppressed hostility and tension lasted for another few months until one day he came home to find a note and all her things removed from the apartment.
When she moved out right before Christmas last year, it came as a surprise, even a shock. He had thought with time that one or the other of them would move towards the other’s position, the hostility would end, the air would be cleared, and they would go on renewed and happy. He never envisioned separation and finality, even though he still could not see himself a married man. With Laurie gone, his connection to Chicago weakened even further. His original interest in the city—that it was his father’s town—had long ceased to mean much to him. He stayed through the winter, but it was the worst three months of his life. Sooner than he would have expected, he heard she had found someone else, news which he received with a pang of jealousy mixed with regret. But he couldn’t blame her, so the emotions devolved into self-loathing. Lonely, he himself wasn’t ready for another relationship. Perhaps, he thought, he would never be ready for another women in his life. If Laurie wasn’t right for him, it was hard to see what woman would be. His days became dreary. He started feeling more rootless than he had when he left Maine all those years ago. Then the world was before him; now he felt world-weary and finished. He was confused, sometimes even scared. Wanting those feelings to end, he spent hours every night trying to assess his situation. Slowly the idea grew in his mind that he belonged in Maine. With all the money he had in the bank, it occurred to him that he could build a cottage on his mother’s lakefront lot. Pretty soon the idea of a cottage was all he could think about—as if it were a woman he had fallen in love with. He felt at the same time a sense of how ludicrous it was to have the idea seize and dominate his mind. He wondered if the idea of the cottage was not a false idol. In the early spring, however, he gave his uncle notice, trying not to see the dee
p hurt this caused him, and as soon as he completed the house he was building for his uncle’s company, packed his clothes, books, and the household things that fit into his car and drove to Maine.
As he drove along the beach (only rarely actually seeing it so overdeveloped with cottages was this section of the Maine coast), he recalled his past not so much sequentially but as a connected whole. Regrets dominated, above all Laurie, but also his uncle. The former was lost to him, but he could make amends to his uncle—he could go back to Chicago and his uncle’s business. He owed a great deal to the kindness of his nearest relative aside from his mother and brother. His other regrets—his father, his childhood, his flunking out of college—had assumed the finality of facts beyond the reach of change. But his mother was both past and present. He had rather neglected her during his years in Chicago, having only come home for visits four times in all those years. She was overweight and not in the best of health. Her life, as far as he could see, was still chaotic. She needed looking after if she were to glide into a comfortable old age. Besides the car, he planned to also buy her health insurance. And then there were his brother and Becky, his sister-in-law. They had two boys now, four years old and one year old. They had met and gone steady all through college and married after graduation. They were the future and possibly an inspiration. At least he thought they might be. His brother hadn’t inherited the restless sense of incompleteness that had been his lot. Maybe in observing and sharing the life of a normal family he could see his way clear. More than anything else, it was his brother that had brought him back home and would keep him home: he wasn’t going to back out, not this time.
He turned from the beach and drove inland towards Waska, entering town from U.S. Route 1 and passing for the second time today Hopkins Motors. Once downtown, he made the turns that led to his mother’s modest ranch house. In the driveway he saw her car, a twenty-year-old Lincoln that she had driven since her mother’s death.
Inside, at first he didn’t see her as he surveyed the small house from the door. The coffee table was piled high with soap-opera magazines, fast-food wrappers (some of them on the floor) and a box of half-eaten chocolates. Ringo, her big male tiger cat, was sunning himself on the windowsill. The walls were decorated with some of her macramé made at the commune many years ago and with a couple of posters of uplifting subjects. One showed Mt. Everest with the ersatz philosophical legend below that read: STRIVE FOR THE SKIES/AIM FOR THE HEIGHTS; the other showed hippies with flowers in their hair with the simpler legend, FLOWER POWER. The rug below his feet was worn where one walked from the front door to the kitchen. On the bookcase, laden mostly with CD’s and tapes of 1960’s rock groups, he could see from the door where his mother had written with her finger DUST ME as a reminder to do some housework when the spirit moved her. He assumed she was in the kitchen or backyard and was about to call to her when a noise made him look down to his right to see her on her hands and knees on the floor in front of the TV.
Her face wore a perplexed, frustrated expression that melted into a smile when she saw him. “It’s like the old days, Lowell,” she said and followed it with a hearty laugh. She stood up by rolling and then stiffly pushing herself off the coffee table. His mother had a round face buttressed by a double chin. When she laughed her small hazel eyes disappeared into folds of fat that made her look like a laughing Buddha in a Chinese scroll painting. She was short and stout, but with a torso of normal proportions and a protruding belly and thick hips her chubbiness was of a decidedly pear shape. Watching her now, Lowell was put in mind of a bowling pin righting itself.
Standing a bit unsteadily, she scratched her ample belly and adjusted her bra strap. “Either that or the machine’s gone haywire. But I think the juice was killed today.”
“What are you talking about, Mom?”
“My soaps weren’t recorded this afternoon. I figure the juice went off. When that light flashes, isn’t that what it means?”
“Usually. Here, give me the remote.” He buttoned to the record menu, but it was blank. “Yeah, I think the electricity went off, maybe for just a few seconds. That’s enough to wipe the settings off, even if not long enough for us to camp out.”
She smiled sweetly, seeing that he had recognized her reference to the old days, but then as quickly as it came the smile disappeared. “Dr. Goodwin was just about to run away with Nurse Gaudet when the episode ended yesterday. It’s all I could think about all day at work.” She sat down on the couch and sighed. Taking a long gulp of coke and reaching for a chocolate, she said, “It’s probably the reason I dropped Mr. Chattham’s blue plate special. Now I’ll have to wait.”
“Aw, I doubt you’ll miss much. Don’t things go pretty slowly on those soaps? I mean,” he added when she gave him a sharp look, “don’t they drag these things out? I bet they just made the airport today and won’t take off until tomorrow.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. They’re driving to his vacation home in the upper peninsula of Michigan. They plan to live off the land. He’s going to give up doctoring.” Again she sighed, this time philosophically. “Well, c’est la vie as the frogs say. Until you came home I never saw these soaps anyways.”
She was referring to the fact that though she had had the VCR for years she didn’t know how to program it. When Lowell was told she wished she didn’t have to miss her soaps, he pro-grammed the VCR for her.
Lowell quickly reprogrammed the VCR, then handed the remote to her. “It’ll be all right tomorrow,” he assured her.
She turned on the TV, and reaching for another chocolate, she said, “You’re a love for doing these things for your mother, Lowell, just so I can watch soap operas. Ain’t I a ridiculous old woman? The oldest hippy in Waska, Maine, indeed.”
Lowell, on his way to the kitchen to get a beer, didn’t respond. Returning to the living room, he said, “”By the way, Mom. Your car will be ready tomorrow morning.”
But now she was engrossed in watching a talk show and didn’t hear him. The topic was about women who dress too sexily. A heavyset black woman with thin bandanas crisscrossing her ample chest like ammunition belts was explaining why she displayed herself this way. “That woman gives new meaning to the term displaying your wares,” she said. “Anything less on and she’d be showing her birthday suit.” She laughed, her eyes disappearing into rolls of fat like a Chinese Buddha.
Her lack of interest in or excitement about the new car didn’t surprise him. When he’d first asked her for permission to build a cottage on the lakefront property and live there, she’d readily assented. “Except for a picnic or two, we’ve hardly used it,” was all she said. Nor did she follow him closely when he explained that he planned to get a lawyer and put the cottage in Bill’s name as well because he didn’t want to appear to be trying to steal it. Legal niceties and property had little reality for her. Later when he had to work on her car and change the spark plugs and timing belt to get it running, he had the further thought that a pleasant thank-you gift for letting him live at the lake would be to buy her a new car. When he told her of his plan, she’d replied with her usual equanimity, “Oh, that would be nice. I’ve never had a new car.”
So he waited a minute or two, then repeated. “Did you hear me, Mom? I said the car would be ready tomorrow.”
She stared at him vacantly for a moment before coming to attention. “Oh, ain’t I a ridicu-lous old woman. The oldest hippy in Waska, Maine, I swear. I almost forgot you were out today getting me the nicest gift anyone has ever got me.”
Lowell smiled. “It’ll be ready tomorrow, as I said. I have to make a stop at the bank and then get it registered for you.”
“Could you get the maroon color?”
He nodded. “Just like you wanted.”
“And it’s automatic, right? You know I can’t drive with a clutch.”
“It’s automatic. Don’t worry. It’s exactly what you wanted. I’m going to ask Bill to drive me over if he can get the time off during lunch break.”
“That reminds me. Bill called. He has some problem with his porch railing. He wants your advice on what to do.”
Lowell sat down and watched the program while he sipped his beer. A woman wearing a see-through blouse was the next guest. She claimed her choice of apparel made her feel comfortable. “Comfortable!” Pat barked. “That little filly means she enjoys making the boys uncomfortable.” Pleased with her bon mot, she laughed, once again making the Chinese Buddha appear on her face.
Lowell grinned. “You’re something else, Mom,” he said as he finished his beer. “I’m going over to Bill’s to see what the matter is. Shall I get a pizza for supper on the way home?”
“Pepperoni and green peppers,” his mother said as she indulged in another chocolate.
He made the phone calls and left. Bill was waiting on the front porch when Lowell drove up. He was wiggling the metal railing on the concrete steps and looking perplexed. “Glad you could come, big brother. Did you get the car for Mom?”
“Sure did. Bought it from a very strange guy, though. Do you know Rett Murray? He was in school with you, he told me.”
Bill frowned. “I don’t really know him but I know of him. He’s a Nazi.”
“A Nazi? What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s literally a Nazi or KKK or something like that. He was arrested in Portland for inciting a riot a couple years ago. He was handing out leaflets denying the Holocaust in front of a synagogue or something.”
“How the hell does he sell cars, then?” Lowell asked.
Bill smiled at the thought. “I don’t know, but business is probably business. He does the Nazi stuff on his own time. Maybe he only gives deals to Aryans.”
Lowell came up the steps to look at the railing. “Is this the problem Mom mentioned. Is this what needs fixing?”
“Yeah. I was trying to fix it, but actually I have no idea what to do. Do I need to get some concrete mix or what?”
Lowell jiggled the railing and studied its footing. “The concrete has come loose, probably rotted by salt you put down in the winter. But no need to get concrete. Anchor cement is what you need. It comes as a powder which you mix with water. It hardens to rocklike hardness.”
“You mean they have something just for this problem?” He made a comic face that went beyond surprise to utter astonishment. Unlike his brother, he was not very handy around the house. Lowell in fact had fixed several things for him already during the spring.
Lowell regarded him affectionately. They certainly didn’t look like brothers, not even half brothers, but they were very close. Bill had sandy hair (it was blond throughout his youth but now several shades darker), blue eyes, a nose that slightly resembled a ski jump in shape, and he was tall and slender—in all these particulars he was the exact opposite of Lowell, who was short and stocky, dark-haired and dark-eyed as well as generally darker-complexioned than his brother. His nose was prominent as well. People said the one feature they shared was their mother’s square jaw, though even that would take a perceptive and close observer to see the similarity.
“If you want, I’ll get some of the anchor cement at the hardware store tomorrow and fix it.”
Bill nodded, but before he could speak they heard a squeal of delight from behind the screen door. “Uncle Lowell!” His four-year-old nephew Johnny had spotted him. He opened the screen door and came out onto the porch with a big grin on his face.
“Hi, Tiger. What have you been doing?”
“We was watching TV. You want to see?”
Lowell shook his head with exaggerated regret. “I’ve got to go pretty soon. I’m picking up a pizza for my Mom and me. Do you like pizza?”
Johnny solemnly shook his head up and down. “Oh, I do,” he said very seriously.
Behind him Becky, carrying her baby, stepped outside. She was very pretty with a long, narrow face and straight blond hair worn short just below her ears. Usually she wore contact lenses, but today she had her glasses on. “Has Bill offered you something to drink? Would you like a beer?”
“No thanks, Becky. I really do have to get going in a few minutes.”
“We’ll have to have you and Pat over for a cookout this weekend. How does that sound?”
“That’d be nice.”
The arrangements were made, and Becky, explaining that she had to get supper started, went back inside with the kids.
As soon as they were alone again, Bill asked, “Are you sure you can take a whole after-noon of the kids?”
“They don’t bother me. In fact, to see you and the family was one of the main things that brought me back home. I especially wanted to see the boys grow up.”
A strange look passed over Bill’s face. For a moment Lowell thought he’d said something wrong. He gave Bill an inquiring look.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” he said in answer to the unspoken question. “It’s just that I’m still adjusting to being number four around the house, that’s all. Even my own brother puts me in that position. But it’s all fine, really. Becky is a thousand percent mother.”
Lowell tapped him on the shoulder. “You’re number one as brother, believe me. But all’s fine with you and Becky, isn’t it? I hope so, because I envy you. I kept thinking about you and Becky with Laurie. The appeal was there—for a family, I mean. But something held me back. Maybe, you see, I’ll never have boys of my own. If so, you can expect to have an indulgent uncle around.”
“I wouldn’t worry, Lowell. Something told you Laurie wasn’t quite the one. But when you find the right one, you’ll know it’s the real thing. It gets to where it’s not a choice you have to think about—the choice is already made. That’s how it was for me with Becky. You’ll find a woman like her. Don’t worry.”
Bill walked to the bottom of the steps, and Lowell followed him. “I hope so.” He spoke doubtfully.
“No, really, Lowell, you’ll know when it’s right. For what it’s worth, I predicted Laurie wasn’t the one.”
“You did? When?”
“After your vacation when you and Laurie came home a few years ago. Becky said something about hearing wedding bells in the family again, and I said I wasn’t so sure.”
This was very interesting. “How did you know?”
Bill shrugged. “I didn’t really. Like you, I just had a feeling. Somehow she didn’t seem quite right for you. Maybe because she grew up in a complete family, maybe she didn’t understand how your life was. Something like that.”
“Well, I guess she didn’t. It does bother me, though, that all I had was a feeling. I could never really put it into words. That was disturbing, you know.”
Bill nodded. He walked over to Lowell’s car and examined it. “It’s a wonder you didn’t buy yourself a new car too,” he said, looking at the rust and the many dents.
Lowell followed him over to the car and started to get in the driver’s seat before stopping and leaning across the top. “I’d better go get that pizza. It’s probably just about ready.”
Bill leaned on the roof and started rubbing an area where the sun had faded the paint. “Hey, a bunch of us guys from work and some of my old pals around town are planning to have a softball game on Memorial Day. Would you like to play?”
“Yeah, that’d be fun. I left my glove in Chicago, though. Can I borrow one from you?”
“Better than that—I still have your old glove, the one you had in high school. I’ll give it a saddle soap treatment and it’ll be good as new. By the way, what did you mean when you said Murray acted strangely? What did he do?”
“He seemed to resent everything about me. It may have started because I didn’t recognize him. Then again, he didn’t like it that I was paying cash. You know, as if I was rich and he wasn’t.”
“Maybe he thought you were a drug dealer. Don’t they pay for expensive German cars with a suitcase of money?”
“Maybe they do, but this was a Ford I was buying, and it wasn’t hot money in a suitcase. Besides, he was hostile from the moment he ca
me out of the office, before we’d exchanged a word. I’m telling you, it’s really weird when a salesman shows hostility and resentment. Usually they’re all phony smiles and friendly remarks. If I hadn’t already decided on Mom’s car, I would have walked out.”
Bill stood up and rubbed his back before folding his arms across his chest. “Maybe he thought your nose looked Jewish.”
“What? Me? Look Jewish? That’s bizarre. I’ve never heard that before.”
“Well, you don’t. I’m just thinking of the Nazi mania. He’s never seen your father. He probably knows you were born in a hippy commune.” He frowned thoughtfully for a moment, then added, “Could be your name too. You know there’s a well-known lawyer in town named Lowell Rosenberg who’s Jewish. Some Jews like those Waspy names like Elliot and, well, Lowell. Murray certainly knows that.”
“Well, after tomorrow I won’t be troubled by him anymore—or be any trouble to him.” He got into the car and started the engine.
“Tell Mom about the cookout.”
“I will.”
“And don’t forget the softball game.”
“I won’t,” Lowell said. Already he was looking forward to the weekend.