by Tom Drury
A clever man named Daniel Hanover must be given the credit for Ashland’s appearance. He has been dead for one hundred and fifty years, but in 1828, acting on a hunch, he had the center of Ashland torn down and rebuilt to resemble the ancient Ionian city of Miletus. Thus the band shell is in a park on the shore of String Lake and the shopping district, or “Agora,” is up the hill past the Temple of Hephaestus. A bronze statue of the Milesian philosopher Thales stands in the park. Thales believed that water was the mother of elements and that magnets had souls. Daniel Hanover spent his last years trying to change the town name to New Miletus, but this met with no success locally, and when he turned to state officials in Hartford and New Haven without the backing of his own city, he became the object of derision.
Still, the Hanovers have always held much of the influence in Ashland. Historically speaking, they were of that class which might be called Painting Industrialists. In a different time than our own swift era, the whole family would sail overseas in early summer and return before the first snowfall with their minds full of images. They executed Etruscan landscapes and Moroccan street scenes, not from love of land or paint but as a way to share what they had seen with the company workers. Over time, however, the paintings became less tied to place. The abstract expressionist and chairman of the board Gilbert Hanover (1921–1992) was the last artist in the family and once sold a series of lithographs to the American Psychiatric Association for distribution to its affiliated offices at reasonable prices.
Like all American merchants of the first brigade, the Hanovers have made money with one eye on their given industry and another eye on industries that might do them better. They never remained faithful to a single product: kettles, glass, matches, sewing-machine parts, and fasteners have taken their turn in the parade of goods from the workshops of the Hanovers. (Contrary to logical assumption, Ashland’s name has no connection with the match trade. Moses Ash was a seller of dry goods who died in 1721 after rolling down Turpentine Hill.) The match company, known as Hanover Strike-Anywhere, prospered mightily in the years following the Civil War, doubling the population of Ashland, which came to be known as “The Match City.” But a problem developed around the turn of the century as workers began to sicken and die of necrosis of the jaw. The disease killed terribly, and Ashlanders began to wonder whether the capitalist impulse had led them down the garden path.
The Phosphorus Tax of 1910 nearly bankrupted the company, forcing the transition to bobbin production, which was conducted under the name of the Ashland Bobbin Works. By omitting their family name from this new venture, the Hanovers seemed to be expressing contrition as well as deflecting blame for the necrosis epidemic. The bobbin works lasted a generation before Gilbert Hanover scrapped it in favor of plastic industrial fasteners. Gilbert was a thoughtful and enigmatic figure who in the 1960s realized that the profound postwar expansion would soon have everyone too busy buying new textiles to worry about mending the old. Bankers from Boston to Poughkeepsie admired Gilbert Hanover’s strategy and let him write his own check. Only the workers, with sentiment and superstition, mourned the demise of the bobbin works. This feeling faded, as feelings will, and today the workers are happily too young to remember anything. All they know is that every parachute harness in the world contains components made in Ashland, Connecticut, and that whenever world peace is threatened, AF&B stock rises.
Today Ashland has thirty-three thousand residents, seven houses of worship, nineteen taverns, four schools, three fire engines, and twenty-two gas stations, run mostly by hollow-eyed teenagers who could not change the oil in your car if their lives depended on it; they don’t even know where to look for the oil cap. Crime keeps hidden. Drug dealers, burglars, and embezzlers walk among us, but not so many. If headlines in the Ashland Sun suggest that sports betting has taken off in the past several years, we may console ourselves with the certainty that this problem is not only Ashland’s, as the nation has become so antagonistic and simple-minded that even the confirmation of Supreme Court justices is conducted as a corrupt weekend marathon . . .
11
Paul would need a driver’s license and he would need a job. He walked down the hill into Ashland feeling as intrepid as Richard Dreyfuss heading off to the planet of the saintly aliens in the movie he had watched with Barbara. It was an August day without a cloud in the sky. He crossed a bridge over a river. At the courthouse across the street from the Salvation Army, Paul passed through a metal detector with a handwritten notice saying NO KNIVES IN COURT.
The driver’s license bureau shared a hallway with the state’s attorney’s office, and to get to the former you had to stand in line with those bound for the latter. Voices came from behind him.
“‘What did they get you for?”
“Disturbing the peace. And you?”
“Assault third.”
“Domestic?”
“As it happens.”
“Is she here?”
“She had to work.”
“That’s a stroke of luck.”
“Except I’m on probation for something last year.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I’m only hoping they won’t violate me.”
“They don’t for domestic.”
“Really. I never heard that.”
“No, it’s a funny thing. They do not violate for domestic.”
Paul opened an oak door and found a woman sitting at a desk wrapping orange yarn around a clothespin.
“Are you looking for a license?” she said. “This is a wishing doll I’m making for a benefit for the hospital. Do you have a valid license currently? If it isn’t a renewal, there could be a problem.”
Paul handed over his licenses. “I have one for Belgium and one for Washington.”
“D.C. or state?”
“State.”
“Let’s take a look.” She put the yarn figure down on the desk and studied the licenses, one in each hand. Then she raised them to either side of her lightly glossed forehead. She had a narrow face and broad shoulders. “Were these revoked for cause, or did they only expire?”
“The Belgian one is still good.”
She looked at the licenses again. “Fair enough. Why don’t we go ahead and get you legal? My name is Carrie Wheeler.”
“Is there a test?”
“This is the licensing bureau. If you want a test, go to the testing bureau, right? Come around behind the desk and have a seat by the camera.”
Carrie Wheeler stood and stared into a gleaming metal camera on a white tripod; it looked like a camera in a Broadway musical about photography. She clicked the shutter once, and again. She looked up, tall and narrow-hipped in a red skirt and pin-striped shirt, and crossed her eyes in comically exaggerated frustration. “O.K., this isn’t working.”
“The camera?”
Carrie came toward him and scratched the back of her head. “I’m not getting what I’m after.” She took his left arm in both hands as if she wanted to remove it and put it aside for the time being.
“What are you after?”
“Well, I don’t know, that’s the thing.”
“It’s just a license picture.”
Carrie laid his forearm across his knee, which pulled his left shoulder down. She angled his face with both hands. She stepped away, leaned back, crossed her arms. “Not to say ‘just,’ Paul Emmons. Yeah. Let’s go with this.”
“Do you always put so much work into it?”
She shook her head slowly and with great concentration. “Do . . . not . . . move,” she said. She stepped behind the camera and began taking pictures. “Good,” she said. “That’s right — be confused. I don’t blame you. ‘What’s it all about? Who is this lady? Where is she coming from?’”
He left the office with a new license, hot from the laminating machine. The two men who had st
ood behind him in line were a bit closer to the door of the state’s attorney’s office.
“If you hurt anyone, I will find out,” said Paul. “And it will work to your detriment.”
“You’re going to do this?” said one of the men. “You don’t look like much.”
“Don’t you know me? I’m Paul Emmons, the outlaw accountant. I have cruel friends all over New England. You must have heard of the Record Family. It’s a bad bunch and I wouldn’t mess with them if I were you.”
Later he got his hair cut at a barbershop with elaborate chairs and overheard a conversation about the hair found in wigs. It came about because a mother was overseeing the cutting of her daughter’s long hair. Blond curls fell to the linoleum floor as it began to rain outside.
“You could do something with that,” said the mother.
“When you get a wig, all the hair comes from Italy,” said the barber. “The nuns in Italy grow their hair very long and cut it to sell for wigs.”
Paul imagined a line of nuns making their way to vespers along a trail with the sun going down. Some of the nuns had hair falling down their habits and others were newly shorn, like Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls, A windmill turned slowly in the background.
Hungry, he went to a health-food store to buy a sandwich. He stood in line for a long time as a clerk with a crocheted hat consulted a series of elaborate price lists in three-ring binders. Paul did not know why the purchases in American health-food stores had to be so complicated.
In the lobby of the Pail Hotel he ate the sandwich and read the Ashland Sun. A player piano played “Lara’s Theme” with ghostly keys moving of their own accord. Paul decided not to try for an accounting job because he had been out of the business too long and the want ads listed acronyms he had not heard of. “Must have demonstrated experience in VINOS and FFLS.” The newspaper itself sought someone called a swing reporter to write about the towns surrounding Ashland. The job title intrigued Paul with its echo of the Big Band era. He had no experience as a reporter but had written essays for Québec Libre, the literary magazine of Sherwood University. The magazine’s name had appealed to Paul’s youthful belief that whatever existed should be replaced by something new. Let Québec go free, let science roll back its oppressive findings, let capitalism crumble. When the magazine type did not fill the space, he would write little column enders: “The oppressed are moved to battle the oppressors, who are not anxious to be displaced.” Paul also wrote about occult matters. One of his longer essays had told the story of “Mad” Anthony Wayne, a Revolutionary War major general who seemed to have left a trail of hauntings wherever he went. Nancy Coates’s frail ghost appeared sometimes around Lake Champlain — she had drowned herself after becoming convinced that Mad Anthony loved another. The major general’s own spirit had been known to cross Lake Memphremagog with eagles clutching his wrists.
Folding the newspaper, Paul rose to go. A plaque on the wall said the Pail family had been investors in the match trade.
Paul bought a three-piece wool suit from London for two dollars at the Salvation Army, put it on, and went to see about the job at the Sun. His old clothes were in a bag that he carried over his head to keep the rain off. The newspaper occupied the long white building known as the Temple of Hephaestus; the front door stood in a grove of columns. Paul filled out a true-false form in a small room in the basement that had coarse maroon fabric on the walls. The questions induded:
T F When you get right down to it, I probably have the same hang-ups or anxieties as anyone else.
T F There is no shame in “ratting out” pen and paperclip thieves.
T F Charlie McCarthy was a senator from Wisconsin who accused subversive elements of infiltrating the government.
T F Most harassment cases could be resolved short of adjudication if people would simply “let their hair down” a little bit.
T F It upsets me terribly when I see that a possum has been hit by a car.
T F I take a drink now and then.
T F I am a social drinker, and what’s the harm?
T F Sometimes I drink until I black out.
T F It upsets me terribly when I see that a deer has been hit by a car.
T F The meek shall inherit the earth.
Paul finished the test and gave it to the director of human resources, who sat for a moment scribbling on the questionnaire with a red marker and then rolled it up briskly and slid it into a cloudy plastic canister, which he then fitted into a vacuum tube that ran up the wall.
The canister rattled, lifted, and disappeared into the ceiling. “You’ll be going up to see Pete in a moment,” he said. “Pete sees all applicants.”
“Who’s Pete?” said Paul.
“Pete Lonborg,” said the personnel man. “He’s the editor and publisher.”
Paul had to go up a flight of stairs to see Pete Lonborg. Rubber treads covered the metal stairs and printer’s ink stained the walls. A sign counted the days since the last injury on the job. The publisher may have insisted on interviewing all applicants, but he did not seem personable or especially tolerant. His temples bulged — you could see the ridges of his skull where they disappeared into his hairline — and his mouth turned down at one corner. He had clear blue eyes, widely separated, that made Paul think of those animals (whales, for example) whose eyes come nowhere near each other. Who knows what their vision must be like?
“Call me Pete,” he said. “Let me tell you how it works here. First, everybody calls me Pete. Second, we have a young staff. We get a lot of kids come through here straight out of school and wanting to make their mark. That’s all right. Might only be here six months. Nothing wrong with that. We’ve got a woman right now, twenty-five years old, speaks four languages. Three of them happen to be languages nobody around here speaks. Still, it’s a hell of a thing. But she’ll be gone soon. In our minds we’ve already said goodbye to her.”
Pete hitched up his cuffs, crossed his legs, picked up a pack of cigarettes upside down so that the cigarettes fell out, dropped to his knees, gathered the fallen cigarettes, stuffed them back in the pack. All the while he kept talking. “. . . Oh, the world is full of smart young people . . . they use us, we use them, and no one’s the wiser . . . Then you come along, not really fitting the profile.” He lifted Paul’s application and tapped it with the back of his fingers. “You’re thirty-nine years old and looking for your first reporting job. You’re changing your career in midcareer. All right then. I don’t know why, maybe you don’t know why. Comme ci, comme ça.”
“I was an accountant for a number of years, and then I operated my own business in Belgium,” said Paul.
Lonborg picked up a spray bottle and began dousing a bonsai tree on his desk. He did this for a good long time. Paul thought he would drown the plant if he did not stop. “That makes a certain amount of sense,” he said. “You wanted to test your theories.”
“Hmm?” said Paul.
“Your business theories,” said Lonborg. He paused with the sprayer in his hand. “I’m suggesting you wanted to test them.”
“That’s true,” said Paul. “I had a farmhouse-inn sort of thing called Auberge des Moines.”
“People like Europe but they never love it,” said Pete Lonborg. He set the spray bottle down and turned the branches of the bonsai this way and that. “Well, I take that back. People love Spain. I knew a guy went to Spain, and when he came back all he could talk about was levantar el vuelo. You would go to his house and it was levaniar el vuelo this and levantar el vuelo that. I thought, Fine, you’ve been to Spain, next topic. I’ll tell you what I like about your résumé, and it’s the knowledge of finances. I write the editorials around here, that’s my job, or a part of it at any rate, and from time to time I have to say something about the Fed. The Fed should pull back, the Fed should push forward, the Fed is charting a risky course. Fact
is I have no idea what the Fed is. Like how many people or where they work.”
“There are twelve banks around the country.”
“And that’s the kind of thing I need to know.”
Pete Lonborg showed Paul the pressroom, quiet at this hour; the circulation room, where a dozen people were all talking on the phone; and the conference room, a long and track-lit space where a reporter labored, with graphs and charts, to explain his idea for a five-part series.
“Why five parts?” said Lonborg impatiently.
“I’m glad you asked, Pete,” said the reporter. “One, what is eczema? Two, who gets it? Three, I’m not sure what three will be yet. Four, which medications are good and which are a ripoff. And five, hope for the future.”
“Isn’t it just a minor nuisance?” said Lonborg
“That’s what I thought until mine started acting up,” said the reporter. “It’s a million-dollar industry.”
“Still, I don’t know,” said Pete.
A woman with braided brown hair looked up and shrugged. “I’m not wed to the five parts,” she said.
“This is Jean Jones, our city editor,” said Pete. “Paul has applied to be swing reporter and he needs to take the writing test. Paul, I’m handing you off now to Jean.”
Jean took Paul’s hand and led him into the newsroom, where a large brass sun hung on the wall above a row of clocks indicating the times in Tokyo, Moscow, Melbourne, Paris, Ashland, and Los Angeles. The writing test seemed so earnest or naive as to embarrass Jean Jones and the three other staff members required to administer it. “This is on the lame side, but it’s what we do,” she said.
Paul played the role of a reporter confined to the newsroom and piecing together the story of a disaster unfolding that moment at the airport. The newspaper was supposed to be right on deadline, so not only did people keep shouting tragic new developments at Paul, but others came over every few minutes to demand what he had written up to that point. Everyone smiled bashfully, and the test seemed like a party game based on an air traffic controller’s nightmare.