“Maybe we’ll see some of your old friends from when you used to live here,” said the boy. “You never told me even what their names used to be.”
“I didn’t have one friend in this town,” Caitlin said. “Not even anyone to talk to. No one wanted anything out of life more complicated than a soda and a date. I just felt completely alone.”
“Sometimes it seems you still think you’re alone,” the boy said, his tongue suddenly thick.
“Isn’t this where we met when you took Joe and me to that Nazi summer camp?” asked Gordon, pointing to a street corner where there now stood a Texaco gas station. “There used to be a diner here or something. Am I right?”
“It was a butcher shop,” said Caitlin.
“Did your mother ever tell you about our visit to … what was it called? Camp Sunrise?” he asked the boy through the rearview mirror.
“I think so,” he said. “I’m not sure.” He turned to his mother. “Did you?”
“Yes,” said Caitlin. “I guess you had other things on your mind at the time.” She leaned forward. “Turn left at the next intersection,” she said.
Single-family houses where shopkeepers had once lived were now broken up into two or four apartments. Open fields had been seeded over with lawn, clover-leafed with driveways, and filled with new pastel ranch houses. Swimming holes were choked with cattails and ablaze with the commerce of the red-winged blackbirds. Barns had either been razed or turned into garages or workshops, where a new generation pursued what it called hobbies, and where the phrase “do-it-yourself” was suddenly current, as if it were a daring decision to glue together your own broken chairs.
Yet, when Gordon steered the car onto River Road, thirty years disappeared before the turn signal clicked off. Most of the river families were no longer in their mansions, but the walls and gates remained, the fields were still tended, still full of cattle and sheep, and even the purple asters and the chicory that grew wild at the side of the road seemed cultivated.
“Where’s your house, Mom?” asked Caitlin’s son. He hadn’t been in Leyden in ten years, but he remembered the mansions on the road where his mother had once lived. He gave things like that too much thought, in Caitlin’s opinion. His impulses were archival. Nostalgia was tough to take in the old; it was simply unacceptable to her in the young.
“We certainly have time to pay it a visit,” said Gordon, looking at his watch, pretending to come to the decision spontaneously.
“Just around this turn,” said Caitlin. “There’s a white oak, the largest oak tree in New York. And then the main gate is right after. It’ll probably be locked.” Her voice was light, hollowed out. She was leaning forward, her arms resting on the back of Gordon’s seat.
They came to the iron gate. It was wide open, and where the No Trespassing sign had once been there was a placard that said WELCOME TO OUR LABOR DAY PICNIC! It was a hand-drawn sign with pictures of frankfurters and balloons on it.
“Oh, let’s go in,” said Gordon. “I’d like to see where you grew up.”
“Is this your way of getting out of taking us to lunch?” asked Caitlin. She’d meant it to be a tease and was again surprised to hear how stern her voice sounded.
“Yeah,” said her son. “Let’s check it out. Please.”
“I can’t tell you how many lousy memories I have of this place.”
“But you always said it was so beautiful,” said her son. He was still at the age when he pounced on contradictions, as if they were a kind of betrayal.
“Plantations are beautiful, too,” said Caitlin. “But the freed slaves didn’t come back sightseeing.”
“Aw, come on,” said Gordon. “We’ve come this far.”
They were silent. Caitlin felt as if her blood had momentarily stopped flowing and then it began again, with a lurch. Her eyes stung and she realized she could no more turn away from Twin Ponds now than she could fail to greet an old friend on the street.
“I guess I knew all along we’d be coming here,” she said.
The driveway was no longer packed dirt but bright white pebbles. The stones crunched beneath their tires as they entered Twin Ponds. To the left were the ponds that had given the estate its name: one right next to the other, forming a gleaming aquatic 8 in the sunlight. A tractor came into view, a new blue Ford. But it wielded no thresher, no harrow; instead it pulled a slatted wagon that was full of elderly people wearing straw hats.
It had been eight years since a Fleming had lived at Twin Ponds. After Fulton and Mary were gone, Jamey and his wife, Consuela, had tried to live there, but the inheritance of property had exceeded the inheritance of cash, and as Jamey had put it in an interview in Fortune (an article called “The Land-Poor Gentry”), “It was like owning the sky but not having an airplane—what good does it do?” Jamey had sold the house and the three hundred acres in a down market to the Baptist Charitable Trust, which then turned Twin Ponds into a convalescent home.
Gordon steered the Fairlane along the gravel drive. Red reflectors on steel rods stood between the trees. To save on taxes, Jamey and Consuela had razed some of the outbuildings. The ice house was gone, a couple of the large, more unstable barns, the converted root cellar where Shorty Russel and his family used to live—gone now except for the slab of concrete foundation still stuck into the side of the hill.
Yet the yellow-and-white Victorian where Peter and Annie and Caitlin had lived was still there. It was painted brown now; its gingerbread trim had been removed and it seemed like a very ordinary house indeed. A Plymouth station wagon was parked in front. Peter’s compulsively proper plantings were nowhere in sight. The blueberry bushes that came ripe in regular waves, the cascades of baby carnations, the hedge of laurel—uprooted, or expired from neglect. All that was around the house was flat lawn that looked badly in need of fertilizer and water. There was a rusting metal swing set along the side of the house. Two small boys in crisp trousers and striped tee shirts swung back and forth, their faces composed, their hair wet and combed precisely.
“Here’s where we lived,” said Caitlin and then lurched forward as Gordon applied the brakes.
Dust seeped through the gravel and rose into the warm, still air like smoke.
“It doesn’t look like the pictures,” said her son.
“Are you going to get out and look around?” asked Gordon.
“No, it’s OK.” She tilted her head, trying to get a view of what had once been her bedroom window. “I always had a Mason jar of fresh violets on the windowsill,” she said. “Back then, most all the violets grown in America came out of Leyden, winter and summer.”
“I don’t think anyone grows violets anymore,” said Gordon. He shifted the car into Park and then put his hand in the back of his shirt to scratch an itch near his spine.
“I think we should get out,” said the boy. “We may never come here again for the rest of our lives.”
“Would you really like to see it?” asked Caitlin.
“Me? Sure.”
She thought for a moment. “I think we’d be intruding. It’s not as if this was a national monument.”
Just then, a man in his thirties wearing a tan short-sleeved shirt came out of the house. He had a small, curious face, blue eyes, practically nonexistent eyebrows. He stood on the porch, looking at their car.
“The picnic’s up by the main facility,” he called out.
Gordon lowered his window and smiled at the man on the porch. Years of working as a photographer had given Gordon the idea that it was easy for him to charm and manipulate that mass of strangers he called The Public. “Howdy,” he said. Coming from the Midwest, he thought that his common touch was as indelible as a thumbprint.
“What?” the man on the porch said, cupping his ear.
“My friend back here was raised in your house and we were wondering if we could have a look around,” said Gordon.
“Gordon, please,” said Caitlin, softly. Her heart jumped like a dog that’s been kicked.
&
nbsp; “Unless it’s any trouble,” Gordon added, with the bountiful spirit of someone assured of cooperation.
The man from the porch stared into the back seat of the car. He nodded formally to Caitlin and then addressed himself to Gordon.
“My wife and I are physical therapists; we work up at the main facility,” he said.
Gordon nodded enthusiastically. “Well, that’s fine,” he said. “Just fine.”
“Today’s our day off and my wife’s cleaning the house,” the man said. His voice was sharpening itself like a knife against a whetstone. “Afraid she just couldn’t have any visitors right now.”
“You see,” said Gordon, “it would just be for a minute.” His smile was starting to droop and he forced the corners of his mouth up again. “We’ve had, well, you know, quite a long drive.”
“Sorry,” the man said.
“Gordon, will you please drive away from here?” Caitlin said. She half rose from her seat and spoke to the man through Gordon’s open window. “Thank you anyhow. It was just a passing thought.”
Gordon turned. “Don’t you want to see your old house?”
“I see it.”
“I mean the inside.”
“Gordon, if you don’t drive away from here right now I’m going to bite you.”
“I have this friend in Chaucer class who everyone calls The Biter,” said her son.
“Well, thanks anyhow,” Gordon said to the man, who nodded, and stepped back toward the porch as Gordon put the car into gear and gently pressed the accelerator. Caitlin looked back at the house and the space its sloping roof wedged out of the deep blue sky and the children going back and forth on their swings like two out-of-synch pendulums, and then without quite knowing why she reached over and took her son’s hand.
At what was once the Flemings’ house what passed for Labor Day festivities were under way. Except for the ramps that led into the various entrances, no obvious changes had been made in the mansion. Yet it looked as transformed as the Van Fleets’ stripped-down Victorian. Its shabby edges had been shored up, the stone-pointers had been at it, the siding salesmen had made a killing, the painters had been busy, and the overall effect was somehow sad, even upsetting: it was like seeing an elegant old woman dressed in a bright polyester pants suit.
The Baptist Home had hoped to attract townspeople to this Labor Day celebration, but all who were there were inmates of the home and family members who had come to spend the day. In clusters of three and four, they wandered around the lawns holding picnic baskets and blankets, choosing places to sit that afforded the best views of the river.
Caitlin, Gordon, and Monk stood in front of the house, looking up at it as if it were a ship that had just docked.
“I don’t think anyone would mind if we walked in and looked around in there,” Gordon said.
“My mother scrubbed every room in this house. That was her life’s work. And now …” Caitlin shrugged.
“And now they’re dusty again,” said her son.
“Monk,” Gordon said, in a faintly admonishing tone.
“I don’t want to go in there,” Caitlin said, taking Gordon’s arm.
He placed his hand on top of hers.
“Then we don’t have to,” he said.
Yet without a plan to see the rooms in which Caitlin’s past had unfolded and with no one at the home to visit, they were suddenly without anything to do, any reason to be there, and this lack of purpose struck each of them with its own eerie power. And so, like frightened tourists, they attempted to assert not only their right to be there but their very reality by shopping for something to buy.
Folding tables filled with foods, crafts, semi-antiques, and old books had been set up near the house, and Caitlin, her son, and Gordon inspected the baked goods and bought a mince pie and a dozen apple-spice cupcakes. Then they compared a blue afghan with an orange-and-white one. The woman who was selling the knitted goods assured them that each piece had been hand-fashioned by a resident of the home, and she immediately quoted the price of whatever one of them touched.
The sun was suddenly very warm. A drone of bees. The far-off singing of the old people in the tractor-drawn wagon. Everywhere the smell of the trees and shrubs her father had planted.
Caitlin turned away from the house, to face the hill from which Jamey used to say there was the best view of the river and its valley, the place where you could see no other house, no evidence at all of civilization, a crypt of beauty that time could not penetrate. It’s time that makes us human, Caitlin thought. She heard the sound of the tractor motor and she thought of her father, riding high in the steel bucket seat of the old International Harvester. How he had begged the Flemings to buy another tractor, but they were not interested in machinery: it made no sense to them; they didn’t care for it. And if it saved labor, what did they care? They didn’t do the work and they barely paid the men who did. It was more picturesque and somehow more comforting to have most of the work done by hand or animal.
Caitlin, her son, and Gordon drifted along from table to table. Gordon bought some old daguerreotypes at the knick-knack table and Monk bought a pretty beaded purse for Janet, paying for it with sweaty, crumpled dollars from his front pocket. Caitlin watched the old woman’s long, rouged face as she smoothed out the boy’s money and laid it to rest in the gray tin money box.
Finally, they came to the table where the used books were sold. Monk was happy to find a copy of Farewell My Lovely in paperback and Gordon bought an old Howard Fast novel about Thomas Paine. Some of the books were discarded from the library, others had been donated by people in town, or by the families of the home’s residents—there seemed to be a general divestment of Pearl Buck and A. J. Cronin in process—and some of the books had been left behind by the Flemings when they sold Twin Ponds. Caitlin recognized some of the leather-bound decorative volumes that had been in their library—Captain Horatio Hornblower, De Profundis, The Selected Essays of Edmund Burke.
And then, as she browsed through the cartons of books, Caitlin saw Home Front by Joseph Rose, its jacket still intact, showing the American flag with the stars replaced by swastikas. She turned slightly, not wanting either Gordon or the boy to see what she had found, at least not yet. She opened the book.
“If it’s not marked, it’s a quarter,” said the man behind the table. He had an egg-shaped, bald head, long-sleeved tee shirt, suspenders. He looked at Caitlin with unnerving intensity, as if he were trying to read her thoughts.
Caitlin looked down at Home Front. A bookplate had been glued onto the end paper. The bookplate showed a drawing of the mansion and beneath it said “From the Library of James Fleming.”
She remembered wondering once, long ago, if Jamey had ever read Joe’s book. She turned the pages and saw that not only had Jamey read it but he’d annotated it as well, and had even debated it in the margins here and there.
“Look what I found,” Caitlin said, showing the book to Gordon.
“Oh my God,” Gordon said. “Will you look at that.”
“Now, there’s a blast from the past,” said Monk. “We’ve got to buy it.”
“Well, we can’t very well leave it here,” said Gordon.
“I’ll take it home with me,” said Caitlin.
“Hey, look at this,” said her son. “This book has your father’s name in it.” He was holding a falling-to-pieces copy of Great Expectations. The red top stain had faded; it was practically white. He showed the inscription to his mother. It said: “Peter Van Fleet, Twin Ponds, New York. 1919.”
“This is the copy he read aloud to me,” said Caitlin.
“It’s only fifty cents,” said her son.
“This is amazing,” said Gordon.
“Thank you,” Caitlin said, softly, taking the book in her hands. She had a brief fear that it would just crumble to dust at her touch, like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake, but it felt heavy, solid. It was the first thing of her father’s that she had touched since his death. And after she
bought it, it would be the only thing of Peter’s she would own.
“Oh, hey, now look at this,” said Gordon. He was going through a box of books rather quickly, feeling a little competitive now that both Caitlin and the boy had discovered treasures. “A really beautiful edition of War and Peace.”
“Maybe it’s yours, Mom.”
Caitlin looked at the book in Gordon’s hand. It was a thick brown book with black lettering on the spine. “L. Tolstoy” it said, just as her copy had.
“Maybe it is,” she said. She felt the sudden pressure of tears in her eyes. Of course, she had a copy of War and Peace back in her apartment, but to find the pages through which she had first devised her vast picture of the world, to find her Napoleon, her Natasha, her beloved Rostov.
She placed Home Front and Great Expectations on the card table.
“Do you want these?” the man behind the table asked.
But she did not answer. She solemnly accepted War and Peace from Gordon and opened the cover.
Yet she did not find her own name inscribed on the end paper.
She found the name of Michael Burnett, poor Michael Burnett, whose body was swallowed into that broken maw of ice more than thirty years before and at whose funeral she had wept such copious tears.
Caitlin held the book before her, as if waiting for someone to take it from her and relieve her of the burden. “I never knew him,” she said, covering her eyes. “We could have been such friends.”
Gordon reached out as Michael Burnett’s book slipped from Caitlin’s grasp, and he caught it gracefully with his large, steady hands before it hit the lawn.
NINE
SEPTEMBER 2, 1945
Somewhere in gray, trembling Tokyo Bay, General MacArthur had just accepted the official Japanese surrender, and in New York the police were out in numbers, hoping to contain the celebration they felt would surely come. But the joy that greeted this, the official end of the war, was quiet, contained—nothing like the night of delirium in August, when the Japanese first raised the flag of surrender. Today was a Monday, it was the end of the Labor Day holiday, the first three-day holiday in America since the beginning of the war. As if there were a collective desire to escape the waking nightmare of history, there seemed to be more people celebrating Labor Day than the final victory over Japan.
Secret Anniversaries Page 20