by Richard Ford
A typical mystery would be traveling to Cleveland, a town you have never liked, meeting a beautiful girl, going for a lobster dinner during which you talk about an island off of Maine where you have both been with former lovers and had terrific times, and which talking about now revivifies so much you run upstairs and woggle the bejesus out of each other. Next morning all is well. You fly off to another city, forget about the girl. But you also feel differently about Cleveland for the rest of your life, but can’t exactly remember why.
Mrs. Miller, when I come to her for a five-dollar consultation, does not disclose the world to me, nor my future in it. She merely encourages and assures me about it, admits me briefly to the mystery that surrounds her own life, which then sends me home with high hopes, aswarm with curiosities and wonder on the very lowest level: Who is this Mrs. Miller if she is not a Gypsy? A Jew? A Moroccan? Is “Miller” her real name? Who are those other people inside—relatives? Husbands? Are they citizens of this state? What enterprise are they up to? Are guns for sale? Passports? Foreign currency? On a slightly higher level: How do I seem? (Who has not wanted to ask his doctor that?) Though I am fierce to find out not one fleck more than is incidental to my visitis, since finding out more would only make me the loser, submerge me in dull facts, and require me to seek some other mystery or do without.
As I expected would happen, simply proximity to the glow through her warm curtains—like the antique light of another century—plucked my spirits up like a hitchhiker who catches a ride when all hope was lost. More seemed suddenly possible, and near, whereas before nothing did. Though as I glanced back nostalgically at Mrs. Miller’s squared ranchette, I sensed the front door had opened an inch. Someone there was watching me, wondering who I was, what I’d been up to. A love car? The police? A drunk sleeping it off? I was not even sure the door had opened, so that this was as much a riddle to me as I was to whomever I took to be there. A shared riddle, if he/she existed, a perfect give and take in the spirit of a marriage. And I slid off quickly into the south-bound traffic as renewed as a baby born to middle life.
I took the first jug-handle turn and zipped back up the Great Woods Road through the dark apple orchards, sod farms, beef alo barns, the playing fields of De Tocqueville Academy and the modern world-headquarters lawns, all of which keep Haddam sheltered from the dazzling hubcap emporia, dairy barns and swank Radio Shack hurdy-gurdy down Route 1 toward the sullen city of brotherly love. I was not ready for bed now. Far from it. Factuality and loneliness had been put in their places, and an anticipation awakened. The day, changed to a spring evening, held promise only an adventure would unearth.
I idled down Seminary Street, abstracted and empty in the lemony vapor of suburban eventide. (It could always be a sad town.) The two stoplights at either end were flashing yellow, and on the south side of the square only Officer Carnevale waited in his murmuring cruiser, lost in police-radio funk, ready to catch speeders and fleeing ten-speed thieves. Even the seminary was silent—Gothic solemnity and canary lights from the quarreled windows aglimmer through the elms and buttonwoods. Sermonizing midterms were soon, and everybody’d buckled down. Only Carnevale’s exhaust said a towny soul was breathing inside a hundred miles, where above the trees the gladlights of New York City paled the sky.
Nine o’clock on the Thursday before Easter far down the suburban train line. A town, almost any town, would seem to have secrets all its own. Though if you believed that you’d be wrong. Haddam in fact is as straightforward and plumb-literal as a fire hydrant, which more than anything else makes it the pleasant place it is.
None of us could stand it if every place were a grizzled Chicago or a bilgy Los Angeles—towns, like Gotham, of genuine woven intricacy. We all need our simple, unambiguous, even factitious townscapes like mine. Places without challenge or double-ranked complexity. Give me a little Anyplace, a grinning, toe-tapping Terre Haute or wide-eyed Bismarck, with stable property values, regular garbage pick-up, good drainage, ample parking, located not far from a major airport, and I’ll beat the birds up singing every morning.
I slowed to take a peek at the marquee of the First Presbyterian, at the edge of the seminary grounds. I occasionally pop in on a given Sunday just to see what they’re up to and lift my spirits with a hymn. X and I attended when we first moved here, but she eventually lost interest, and I began working Sundays. Years ago, when I was a senior and in need of an antidote to the puddling, laughless, guilty ironies of midwar Ann Arbor, I began attending a liberal and nondogmatic Westminster group on Maynard Street. The preacher, who referred to himself as a “moderator,” was a tall, acned, open-collared scarecrow who aimed his mumbled sermons toward world starvation, the UN and SEATO, and who seemed embarrassed when it came time to stand up and pray and always kept his darting eyes open. A skinny little anorexic wife was his assistant—they were both from Muskegon—and our congregation consisted mostly of elderly professors’ widows, a few confused and homely coeds and a homosexual or two just coming to grips with things.
I lasted five weeks, then put my Bible away and started staying up Saturday nights at the fraternity and getting good and drunk. Christianity, like everything else in the Ann Arbor of those times, was too factual and problem-solving-oriented. The spirit was made flesh too matter-of-factly. Small-scale rapture and ecstasy (what I’d come for) were out of the question given the mess the world was in. Consequently I loathed going.
But the First Presbyterians of Haddam offer a good, safe-and-sound approach to things. Their ardent hope is to bring you down to earth by causing your spirit to lift—a kind of complex spiritual orienteering. The regulars all have no doubts about what they’re there for; they’re there to be saved or give a damned good impression of it, and nobody’s pulling the wool over anybody else’s eyes.
What I could read off the marquee, however, seemed strange business, though it will probably turn out to be as ordinary as toast—a trick to lure the once-a-year guys into thinking church has changed.
“The Race To The Tomb”
The preacher will have some witty, eyebrow-arching joke to start off: “Now this fella, Jesus, he was really some heckuva peculiar kind of guy, wouldn’t you say so?” And we all would. Then straight away we’d get to the hard-nosed corroborating of the resurrection and suggesting how such a fate might be ours.
I slipped on by, gave Officer Carnevale the lucky thumbs-up, which he managed moodily to return, then drove straight over to The Presidents—up Tyler, down Pierce and winding a sinewy way to Cleveland Street, before stopping under a giant tupelo across from 116, X’s little white clapboard colonial. Her Citation sat in the narrow drive, an unknown blue car parked at the curb.
Quick as a ferret I left my car, crossed the street, crouched and laid my hand on the hood of the unknown blue car—a Thunderbird—then stole back to mine before anyone on Cleveland Street could see. As I had hoped, the Bird was as cold as a murderer’s heart, and I was relieved to believe it belonged to a neighbor, or to some relative visiting the Armentis next door. Though it could’ve been a suitor I knew nothing about—one of the fat-belly credit card boys from the country club, a thought which changed relief back to doubt.
My plan had been to pay an innocent visit. I hadn’t seen Paul and Clarissa in four days, a long interval in the normal course of our lives. The two of them usually waltz by after school, eat a sandwich, sit and chat together, rummage around their former rooms the way they used to, play Yahtzee or Clue, read books, all while I try by fervent misdirection to prove a continuity in their little lives with my presence. Periodically I quit the work I’m doing and clump upstairs to tease and flirt with them, answer their questions, challenge them and try to woo them back to me in some plain and forthright way, a strategy they’re wise to but don’t mind because they love me, know I love them, and have no choice, really. We are, all four of us in this, a solid and divided family, doing our level bests to see our duty clearly.
Last night I hoped to stay for a dr
ink, see the kids to bed, yak with X for half an hour, then end up, possibly, spending the night on the couch, something I hadn’t done in some time (not, in fact, since I met Vicki) but felt a fierce urge to do suddenly.
Still if I’d gone hat-in-hand up to the door, on a mission of somber fatherhood, I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t have interrupted an intime—the kids away on overnights at the Armentis, the lights turned up to facilitate the best atmosphere of grownup-bittersweet-excitement-since-so-much-has-gone-before, for the benefit of neighbors interested in seeing a proud woman make the best of a fractured life. I would’ve been thunderstruck to intercept some well-dressed corporate-level type with love in his eyes, athwart the precise couch I hoped to curl up on. X would’ve been in her rights to say I’d torpedoed her attempts at getting her feet on the ground, and the fellow would’ve been in his rights to run me out or punch me. And we’d have both ended up having to leave (the two men always have to trudge off into the night alone, though occasionally they become friends if they meet up later in a bar).
My whole scenario, in short, had lost its glow, and I was left in the dark understory, facing the blue intruder car with nothing to do more than breathe the plush air and endorse X’s neighborhood. The Presidents, with their precise fifty-foot frontages, their mature mulberries and straight sidewalks, are actually an excellent location for a young, divorced lady with children, steady means and an independent bent, to dig her heels in. Up and down the street are other young free-thinking people on the way someplace in the world, sharp-eyed, idealistic folks who spotted a good investment and acted fast, and now have some value to sit on. The immigrant Italians who built them (some chosen right out of Sears catalogs) now prefer Delray Beach and Fort Myers and citizens’ groups more their own age, and have left their neighborhoods to the young, though hardly ever their own young, who prefer the likes of Pheasant Run and Kendall Park. The banks have proved compassionate with mortgage points and variable rates, and as a result the young liberals—most of them prospering stockbrokers, corporate speech writers, and public defenders—have revived a proud, close-knit neighborhood and property-value ethic where everybody looks after everybody else’s kids and grinds their own espresso. Bright new façades and paint jobs. New footings dug. A reshingled weather stoop. Smart art-deco numerals and a pane of discreetly stained glass done at home. All of it promisingly modern.
X, I think, is happy here. My children are close to their school, their friends and me. It is not the same as Hoving Road where we all once hung our hats, but things change in ways none of us can expect, no matter how damn much we know or how smart and good-intentioned each of us is or thinks he is. Who’d know that Ralph would die? Who’d know that certainty would grow rare as diamonds? Who’d know our home would be broken into and everything suddenly break apart? Did Walter Luckett know he’d meet Mr. Wrong two nights ago and alter his life again after his wife already had? No, you bet not. None of our lives is really ordinary; nothing humdrum in our delights or our disasters. Everything is as problematic as geometry when it’s affairs of the heart in question. A life can simply change the way a day changes—sunny to rain, like the song says. But it can also change again.
The clock at St. Leo the Great sounded ten, and something began happening at 116 Cleveland.
The yellow stoop light flashed on. Someone inside spoke in a tone of patient instruction, and the front door opened. My son, Paul, stepped out.
Paul in tennis shorts, and a Minnesota Twins shirt I brought him from a trip I took. He is ten, small and not overly clever yet, a serious, distractable boy with a good heart, and all the sweet qualities of second sons: patience, curiosity, some useful inventiveness, sentimentality, a building vocabulary, even though he is not much of a reader. I have tried to think that things will turn out well for him, though when we powwow up in his room, a place he keeps furnished with Sierra Club posters of eagles and large Audubon mergansers and grebes, he always seems to display a moody enthrallment, as if there is some sovereign event in his life he senses is important but cannot for some reason remember. Naturally I am very proud of him, and his sister, too. They both carry on like soldiers.
Paul had brought outside with him one of the birds from his dovecote. A mottled rock dove, a handsome winger. He toted it manfully to the curb, using the two-handed professional bird handler’s way he’s taught himself. I surveilled him like a spy, slumped behind the steering wheel, the shadow of the big túpelo making me not especially noticeable, though Paul was too intent on his own business to see me.
At the curb he took the pigeon in one small hand, slipped the hood and neatly pocketed it. The bird cocked its head peckishly at his new surroundings. The sight, though, of Paul’s familiar, serious face calmed it.
Paul studied the pigeon for a time, grappling it once again in both hands, and via the still darkness I could hear his boy’s voice talking. He was coaching the bird in some language he had practiced. “Remember this house.” “Fly this special route.” “Be careful of this hazard or that obstacle.” “Think of all we’ve worked on.” “Remember who your friends are”—all of it good advice. When he’d finished, he held the bird to his nose and sniffed behind its beaky head. I saw him close his eyes, and then it was up, pitched, the bird’s large bright wings seizing the night instantly, up and gone and out of sight like a thought, its wings white and then quickly small as it cleared the closure of trees—gone.
Paul looked up a moment, watching it. Then, as if he’d forgotten all about any loosed bird, he turned and stared at me across the street, slouched like Officer Carnevale in my cruiser car. He had seen me probably for quite some time, but had gone on with his business like a big boy who knows he’s watched and doesn’t care for it, but understands those are the rules.
Paul walked across the street in his little boy’s ungainly gait but with a gainly smile, a smile he’d give, I know, to a total stranger.
“Hi Dad,” he said through the window.
“Hi, Paul.”
“So what’s up?” He still smiled at me like an innocent boy.
“Just sort of sitting here now.”
“Is it all right?”
“It’s great. Whose car’s that out front there?”
Paul looked back behind him at the Thunderbird. “The Litzes.” (Neighbor, lawyer, no problem.) “Are you coming inside?”
“I just wanted to check up on you folks. Just being a patrol car.”
“Clary’s asleep. Mom’s watching news,” Paul said, adopting his mother’s way of dropping definite articles, a midwest mannerism. They went to market. She has flu. We bought tickets.
“Who was that you gave his freedom to?”
“Ole Vassar.” Paul looked up the street. Paul names his birds after hillbilly tunesters—Ernest, Chet, Loretta, Bobby, Jerry Lee—and had adopted his father’s partiality for oie as a term of pure endearment. I could’ve hauled him through the window and hugged him till we both cried out, so much did I love him at that moment. “I didn’t give him his freedom right off, though.”
“Old Vassar has a mission first, then?”
“Yes sir,” Paul said and looked down at the pavement. It was clear I was burdening his privacy, of which he has plenty. But I knew he felt he had to talk about Vassar now.
“What’s Vassar’s mission?” I asked bravely.
“To see Ralph.”
“Ralph. What’s he going to see Ralph for?”
Paul sighed a small boy’s put-on sigh, transformed back from a big boy. “To see if he’s all right. And tell him about us.”
“You mean it’s a report.”
“Yeah. I guess.” Head still down at the pavement.
“On all of us?”
“Yeah.”
“And how did it come out?”
“Good.” Paul avoided my eyes in another direction.
“My part okay, too?”
“Your part wasn’t too long. But it was good.”
�
�That’s all right. Just so I made it in. When’s Ole Vassar reporting back?”
“He isn’t. I told him he could live in Cape May.”
“Why is that?”
“Because Ralph’s dead. I think.”
I had taken him and his sister to Cape May only last fall, and I was interested now that he supposed the dead lived there. “It’s a one-way mission, then.”
“Right.”
Paul stared fiercely at the door of my car and not at me, and I could sense he was confused by all this talk of dead people. Kids are most at home with sincerity and the living (who could blame them?), unlike adults, who sometimes do not have an unironical bone in their bodies, even for things that are precisely in front of them and can threaten their existence. Paul’s and mine, though, has always been a friendship founded on sincerity’s rock.
“What do you know tonight to tickle me?” I said. Paul is a secret cataloger of corny jokes and can make anyone laugh out loud, even at a joke they’ve heard before, though he often chooses to withhold. I myself envy his memory.
For this question, though, he had to consider. He wagged his head backwards in pretend-thought, and stared into the tree boughs as if all the good jokes were up there. (What did I say about things always changing and surprising us? Who would’ve thought a drive down a dark street could produce a conversation with my own son! One in which I find out he’s in contact with his dead brother—a promising psychological indicator, though a bit unnerving—plus get to hear a joke as well.)
“Ummm, all right,” Paul said. He was all Johnny now. By the way he stuffed his hands in his pockets and averted his mouth I could tell he thought it was a pretty funny one.
“Ready?” I said. With anyone else this would spoil the joke. But with Paul it is protocol.
“Ready,” he said. “Who speaks Irish and lives in your back yard?”
“I don’t know.” I give in straight away.