The Affliction

by Beth Gutcheon

  “I’m sure they wouldn’t mind that. Of course she’ll probably call from the Virgin Islands in a day or two, or from Reno, in which case I can go home.”

  “What’s the address of that place where you’re staying?”

  “Why?”

  “I need to program my GPS.”

  “You’re coming?”

  “Of course I’m coming. This is an answered prayer; my book group meets tonight.”

  “You never finished Silas Marner.”

  “I didn’t even finish the CliffsNotes. Look I’m clearly much too busy to belong to a book group; this just proves it. I’ll see you for dinner.”

  Maggie thought best while in motion. The afternoon would have felt like early summer, had it not been for a sharp breeze off the river, and she had a warm jacket with her and Fauré’s symphony in her iPhone. When she’d finished her coffee and paid her check, she put in her earbuds and began to walk. She wanted to think about Ray Meagher, but first she wanted to know exactly where she was. What was this town, who lived here, how did the town think about the school, what kind of neighbor was the school to the town?

  Main Street gently sloped downhill. Just past the line of buildings on the west side of the street there was a sharp drop. Far below, beside the river, perched a small train station where the commuter line went through on its way to Poughkeepsie. You could reach the station either by a flight of very steep steps, or by following Main to a gentle switchback that led eventually to the level of the water.

  Across from Le Bistro there was a restored movie theater, the Royale, that now served as a concert venue for live performers, as well as showing films selected by the Rye-on-Hudson Cineaste Society. Advertisements for coming events were posted on the facade and on sandwich boards in front of the theater. Next door was a vegetarian café and deli, and next to that was the Wooly Bear yarn shop. Its logo was a caterpillar in shades of yellow, green, and scarlet. Maggie went in.

  The shop was warm and bright, with one entire wall given over to cubbyholes filled with yarns of every hue in many weights and fibers. The opposite wall held small skeins and spools of thread on pegs for embroidery and quilting. There were racks of pattern books and magazines, and in the back a mini classroom was set up with a small maple table and folding chairs, now accommodating a group of eight-year-olds wielding fat knitting needles and balls of oversize wool. A girl of about sixteen wearing a Rye Manor sweatshirt was helping a little boy to cast on stitches.

  “Can I help you?” a pretty woman with a buzz cut and cat’s-eye glasses asked Maggie. She was sitting beside a cash register in front, her hands knitting furiously as if by Braille, with slender needles and fine forest-green yarn she never looked at.

  “I’m just sightseeing,” said Maggie. “Pretty shop.”

  “Thank you. Are you a knitter?”

  “More of a purler. I learned once, but that’s all I remember. I don’t suppose you have a darning egg?”

  The woman laughed. “You can try up the hill at the Trash and Treasure, and good luck to you.”

  “Nobody darns anymore, do they?”

  “My mother used to, but by the time I asked her for her eggs, she’d given all her sewing stuff to the Goodwill. Macular degeneration.”

  The girl in the back of the shop called, “Mom? Can you come show us the cable cast-on? I can’t remember it, and Jude’s first rows are always too loose.”

  The woman looked doubtful. “That’s a hard one for little fingers.”

  “I think he can do it.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Maggie said, “Your daughter goes to the Manor?”

  “My alma mater,” said the woman with a smile.

  “Really,” said Maggie. “You must have liked it, to send your daughter.”

  “It was a whole new world to me,” said the shopkeeper. “I got to study Latin. I got to ride horses.”

  “There wasn’t any tension between the day students and the boarders?”

  “Well sure, there were some snobs back in the day. But I don’t think Ellie feels it. Nowadays the boarders are allowed off campus more, and they aren’t so cliquish. They like being friends with the day students because they like coming to our houses, getting out of the dorms. Oh hello, Alison.”

  As if to illustrate, the door to the shop opened, and a girl of Ellie’s age came partway into the store and stopped. She looked at Maggie and apparently recognized her as the stranger from yesterday morning, when she got caught with the burner cell phone. Alison held up her lime-green cell phone toward Ellie, who nodded and made texting motions with her thumbs. Alison backed out and closed the door.

  “One of Ellie’s BFFs,” said the shopkeeper.

  Interesting, thought Maggie.

  Continuing her walk, she stopped in at the Frigate, a mostly secondhand bookshop with a few bestsellers in the window. A bell tinkled as she opened the door and stepped in. The long narrow space was like a mirror image of the wool shop, except that here the walls were lined with books rather than yarns, and the proprietor was in the back. In front as you came in there was a table full of volumes labeled staff picks.

  The choice of books in the shop surprised and interested Maggie. While the strongest part of the collection was vintage travel books and cookbooks, there was a carefully curated section of belles lettres, fiction, and poetry. Maggie liked that the owner, or clerk, whichever he was, didn’t try to chat with her as she examined the shelves. No one, in her view, wanted to chat while reading, even if all they were reading was book titles. In under a minute she had found a copy of a Molly Keane novel she’d been looking for, and took it to the desk in back, wallet in hand.

  The clerk opened the book to the endpaper where the price was noted in pencil in the corner. Maggie saw that a previous owner’s name, Barbara Wellby, was inscribed along with a note: From Patrick, Christmas 1982. A lifetime of walking between students’ desks during exams and study halls had left her skilled at reading upside down.

  “Wonderful book,” said the bookman. “Do you know it?”

  “I do,” said Maggie. “I foolishly lent my copy and never saw it again. I’ve been looking for a replacement. Did you know Barbara Wellby?”

  “Very well. She taught up at the Manor until they forced her to retire. She had gotten awfully deaf. Educated at Oxford. She used to buy from me, and then, later, she would come in with a few books to sell, especially toward the end of the month.”

  “She stayed in town when she retired?”

  “She wasn’t the type for golf in Florida. She rented a little apartment over the Gourmet Shop. I worried about the stairs, but she said they were good for her. Must have been; she lived to ninety-three.”

  “Well, thank you. I’m glad to have found this copy. If I’m here long enough I’ll come in to do a more thorough inventory of your shelves.”

  “I’ll be here,” said the man. He chuckled, as if the idea he might be anywhere else was very droll. The little bell tinkled again as she opened the door to let herself out.

  On the street, she felt the wind begin to freshen and was sorry she didn’t have a scarf. When she had put her head in at the Gourmet Shop and looked at the window of Manor Hardware, she had pretty much done the whole of the commercial district, seeing no need at the moment to visit the drugstore or the banks, all three anodyne excrescences from huge chains familiar all over their part of the country. Instead she turned east, and slightly uphill, toward the church steeple just visible beyond what she took to be the town park.

  The park was partly lawn, partly patches of bare earth. There was a sandbox and forlorn swing set, and a few benches. One young woman, a babysitter Maggie guessed, sat on a bench punching at the screen in her hand while her little charge sat in the sandbox looking blank. Now and then the tot hit the sand with a yellow plastic shovel. Beyond was a fenced dog run, empty at the moment, sporting a sign requesting that residents pick up after their pets and hose down the run after use. The evidence was that the re
sidents didn’t care or couldn’t read. Maggie walked on to the church, which was Episcopalian, built of rusticated brownstone and sporting a squat square bell tower. It looked as if the stained glass in two of the windows might be of interest if seen from inside, but the door was locked. A small sign gave the name and telephone number of the sexton, who could be applied to for admittance. The message board announcing the coming Sunday’s services led with the sermon title: come labor on.

  Beyond the church there was woodland. She walked on, thinking about Barbara Wellby, an honored teacher in pinched old age who had sold her library off in pieces while she waited for her next month’s insufficient infusion of cash. She compared that with the fairly grand salaries she had been able to pay her faculty at Winthrop, and thought about the trustees at the Manor school she had met. She wondered how much they cared about what happened to the school’s most important assets. She thought about the ancient chicken-and-egg question: Did society undervalue teachers because they were underpaid? Or did it underpay them because what they did seemed less valuable to a civil society than running a hedge fund?

  She was just about to turn back when she came to another tract of open land, somewhat sheltered by a stand of poplars from the wind from the river and the view of the road. An arched metal entrance gate said riverview cemetery. Maggie loved cemeteries. The Protestant Cemetery in Rome was one of her favorite places on earth along with Père Lachaise in Paris, Green-Wood in Brooklyn, and especially the cemetery in Key West with its memorial to the destruction of the Maine. Did anyone Remember the Maine anymore? And elsewhere in the same graveyard, the tombstone that read i told you i was sick.

  The cemetery had been sited to give best possible views of the river, and she could tell by the moss and eroded edges of the headstones that the oldest graves were above her, at the very top, with the best view of the Hudson and the huge blue country beyond. There were vast old trees here, oaks and beeches and elms, and venerable dogwood, azaleas, and rhododendron. There were two nineteenth-century mausoleums, one carved with weeping angels and a plaque explaining that it held the remains of a young girl drowned in a boating accident, and of her mother who died of grief on the anniversary of the disaster. golden lads and girls all must, As chimney sweepers, come to dust was the epitaph. Perhaps the only lines from Cymbeline that everybody knew, Maggie thought.

  There were many headstones with biblical quotations, especially for veterans of the Civil War. She found the family plot of the founder of Rye Manor School, and on the shoulder of the hill a family plot in pie formation, with the founding couple in the center, their children and children’s spouses in a ring around them, the grandchild generation in an outer ring, and on the fringes, pets and two ladies born in Ireland who had died at great ages in Rye-on-Hudson, who Maggie guessed were family servants. The founding couple’s graves were placed so that on the day the seventh seal was cracked and the graves flew open they could sit up and see the river. All their descendants and dependents were buried with their feet toward the center of the pie so that they would arise facing their progenitors. She was just as glad that she would not be present to see this reunion. Unless it had been a most unusual family, there could be problems.

  Maggie had just taken out her Moleskine to sketch when she heard from over the brow of the hill a loud splash. That was interesting. There must be another pond up here. Which made sense; if you drove up here on a summer’s day before the advent of the automobile, it would be a long hot climb for the horses. Perhaps it was also a collect pond for the use of the cemetery groundskeepers. She made her way upward.

  The pond came into view as soon as she crested the hill where the town’s founders were enclosed within low iron railings. There were graves here from the very early nineteenth century and not a few from the eighteenth. The railings must have marked the original boundaries of the parcel, since they would have kept neither intruders out nor the dead in. The pond beyond looked like a typical farm pond. Clearly man-made, oval, and from the color, not deep. A walkway around it had been laid out in local stone, and a pair of carved granite benches tilted on the near side of the pond, with a weeping willow planted between them for shade. It looked like a Victorian sampler.

  A small motion drew her eye to either a young teenage boy or short-haired girl, kneeling beside the willow. The author of the splash. He had a fisherman’s net and a knapsack full of gear on the bank beside him. She watched as he took up the net and sat still as stone until he saw what he was looking for, then dipped swiftly into the water among some reeds. He brought the net up, dripping. By the pull of the netting she knew that he had caught something, and soon, by a familiar glunk sound, that it was a bullfrog. Quite a big one, and it wasn’t happy.

  Maggie had spent plenty of long afternoons in the creeks and streams of western Pennsylvania catching pollywogs and watching water bugs and dragonflies. She watched with a memory of that pleasure as this lone naturalist held his catch in his hand and studied it. She could see his profile now. He had blond-white hair, frizzly like Little Orphan Annie’s in the comic strips of her childhood. His skin was surprisingly pale. He looked as if he spent more time in the cellar or under his bed than outside.

  He was busy now with his prize, whether examining or doing something to it she couldn’t tell. She hoped he wasn’t hurting it. The boy stood up suddenly and posed as if to pitch a baseball. Then he hurled what he was holding in a high arc over the pond. He had timed his pitch exactly right this time, for at the apogee of the arc, there was a powerful bang, and the frog exploded in a spray of guts and rusty goo as the boy emitted a high-pitched giggle of excitement.

  “Hey!” Maggie shouted. The boy didn’t even turn around. As if by a conjuring trick, he and his gear had disappeared into the shrubbery.

  The bell tinkled as Maggie reentered the Frigate.

  “I’m back,” she declared to the bookman, panting slightly.

  “You are,” he said.

  “I just saw something disgusting.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear it. Can I help?”

  She hesitated, just then realizing that it might be slightly odd in a moment of crisis to head for the nearest bookstore. Could he help?

  “There was a boy up in the cemetery. I saw him catch a bullfrog and blow it up with a firecracker.”

  “I’m Mattias, by the way,” said the bookman.

  “Maggie.” They shook hands. “Is there a policeman in town, or a—I don’t know, a game warden?” Not that frogs were game. What did she mean, animal control officer? The man who comes to help when there’s a skunk under your porch? Or truant officer? Shouldn’t that boy be in school?

  Mattias said, “We call the big city if something serious happens. Otherwise it’s just us and the social contract. Some of the volunteer firemen are auxiliary police. You might go to the firehouse.”

  “Where is it?”

  The firehouse was a brick building on the uphill side of the village a block from Main Street. The truck bay door was open, and a gleaming red engine stood facing out, ready for action. It was squeaky clean and lovingly polished. In the dark recesses of the bay behind the truck, she could hear voices.

  Sitting around a battered table at the rear of the building she found three men playing Texas Hold’em. One was small with a belly that looked as if it needed a cantilever to hold it in place above his pants. One was young and fair-haired with a toothbrush mustache. The third was Ray Meagher. They all stopped their play to turn and look at her.

  “Help you?” asked the man with the belly. Ray Meagher was looking at her as if he couldn’t place where he’d seen her before.

  “I just saw a boy up in the cemetery blow up a frog with a firecracker.”

  The men looked at each other.

  “It’s very serious,” she added, in the voice that had made captains of industry snap to attention when their children were on the carpet in her office. “Torturing animals is part of a dangerous pattern . . .”

  “Ma’am? Me a
nd Ray are only auxiliary. We can’t intervene unless we actually see a crime committed. And I don’t know if this would even count. Ray? Would it?”

  Maggie knew little of the requirements to qualify for auxiliary police, but evidently they didn’t involve a very rigorous study of the statute books.

  “Aren’t fireworks illegal?” Her tone was steely.

  They thought about that. It looked to her as if the young man with the mustache was trying not to smile. Right, she thought. Even if he wouldn’t blow up a frog himself, he’d think it would be cool to see it happen.

  “Look. That boy is disturbed. Fireworks are illegal, and cruelty to animals is a crime. His parents and his school need to know that he’s in serious trouble.”

  All three men looked solemn. Like boys acting contrite in the principal’s office when you know they’ll be giggling and imitating her as soon as they’re free and out of earshot. Hope would have done this better, Maggie thought. Hope would have sat down and played a few hands with them and then persuaded them to let her ride shotgun as they went to arrest the felon.

  “Whad’dee look like?” the man with the belly asked. “The firecracker kid.”

  She described his pallor, his frizzy bush of freakishly light hair. She saw the men look at each other.

  “You know him.”

  “It’s a small town, ma’am.”

  “So, who is he?”

  “Sounds like Jesse Goldsmith,” said the belly.

  The name startled Maggie. “Does his mother teach at the Manor? That Goldsmith?”

  “Yeah. They’re doing the best they can with him,” said the man with the mustache. “We all seen him grow up.”

  “How old is he? Shouldn’t he be in school?”

  “Sixteen? Seventeen?”

  Maggie was surprised. He looked younger.

  “Think he might be homeschooled.”

  “Or done,” said Ray.

  “Yeah, he might be done,” said the belly. “He’s a little . . . what’s that thing where you can’t stop washing your hands or folding your sweater?”