The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  Though passing down these quiet, reserved streets—not splashy but good—I sometimes think I might’ve left for the Shore and Sea-Clift a bit too soon in 1992, since I missed the really big paydays (I still made a pot full). But by then I had an unusual son in my care, clinging precariously to his hold on Haddam High. (He actually graduated and left for college at Ball State—his odd choice.) I had a girlfriend, Sally Caldwell, who was giving me the old “now or never.” I was forty-seven. And I was experiencing the early, uneasy symptoms—it pretty quickly got better—of the Permanent Period of life. I couldn’t have told you what that was, only that after Paul left for Muncie, I began to feel a sort of clanking, mechanistic, solemn sameness about flogging these very houses, whereas earlier in my realty life I’d felt involved in, even morally committed to, getting people into the homes they (and the economy) wanted themselves to be in (at least for a while). Though what had always accompanied my long state of real estate boosterism was a sensation I’ve described in differing ways using differing tropes, but which all speak to the dulling complexity of the human organism. One such sensation was of constantly feeling offshore, a low-level, slightly removed-from-events, wooing-wind agitation that doing for others, in the frank, plain-talk way I was able to as a house seller, generally assuaged but never completely stilled. Experiencing the need for an extra beat was another of my figures. This I’d felt since military school in Mississippi—as if life and its directives were never quite all they should be, and, in fact, should’ve meant more. Regular life always felt like an unfinished flamenco needing, either from me or a source outside me, a completing beat, after which tranquillity could reign. Women almost always did the trick pretty neatly—at least till the whole thing started up again.

  There were other such expressions—some warriorlike, some sports-related, some hilarious, some fairly embarrassing. But they pointed to the same wearying instinct for becoming, of which realty is an obvious standard-bearer profession. I really did fantasize that if Clinton could just win the White House in ’92, then a renaissance spirit would open like a new sun, whereby through a mysterious but ineluctable wisdom I would be named ambassador to France—or at least the Ivory Coast. That and a lot more didn’t happen.

  Only, neuron by neuron, over a period of months (this was nearing the middle of the doomed and clownish Bush presidency) I realized I was feeling different about things. I remember sitting at my desk at my former employer, the Haddam realty firm of Lauren-Schwindell, tracking down some computerized post-sale notes I’d made on a house on King George Road that had come back on the market six months later, sporting a 30 percent increase in asking, and overhearing a colleague three cubicles away saying, just loud enough for me to take an interest, “Oh, that was Mr. Bascombe. I’m sure he would never do or say that.” I never found out what she was talking about or to whom. She normally didn’t speak to me. But I went off to sleep that night thinking of those words—“Mr. Bascombe would never…”—and woke up the next morning thinking them some more. Because it occurred to me that even though my colleague (a former history professor who’d reached the end of her patience with the Compromise of 1850) could say what Mr. Bascombe would never do, say, drive, eat, wear, laugh about, marry or think was sad, Mr. Bascombe himself wasn’t sure he could. She could’ve said damn near anything about me and I would’ve had to give the possibility some thought—which is why I’d never take a lie-detector test; not because I lie, but because I concede too much to be possible.

  But very little about me, I realized—except what I’d already done, said, eaten, etc.—seemed written in stone, and all of that meant almost nothing about what I might do. I had my history, okay, but not really much of a regular character, at least not an inner essence I or anyone could use as a predictor. And something, I felt, needed to be done about that. I needed to go out and find myself a recognizable and persuasive semblance of a character. I mean, isn’t that the most cherished pre-posthumous dream of all? The news of our premature demise catching everyone so unprepared that beautiful women have to leave fancy dinner parties to be alone for a while, their poor husbands looking around confused; grown men find they can’t finish their after-lunch remarks at the Founders Club because they’re so moved. Children wake up sobbing. Dogs howl, hounds begin to bark. All because something essential and ineffable has been erased, and the world knows it and can’t be consoled.

  But given how I was conducting life—staying offshore, waiting for the extra beat—I realized I could die and no one would remember me for anything. “Oh, that guy. Frank, uh. Yeah. Hmm…” That was me.

  And not that I wanted to blaze my initials forever into history’s oak. I just wanted that when I was no more, someone could say my name (my children? my ex-wife?) and someone else could then say, “Right. That Bascombe, he was always damn blank.” Or “Ole Frank, he really liked to blank.” Or, worst case, “Jesus Christ, that Bascombe, I’m glad to see the end of his sorry blank.” These blanks would all be human traits I knew about and others did too, and that I got credit for, even if they weren’t heroic or particularly essential.

  Another way of saying this (and there’re too many ways to say everything) is that some force in my life was bringing me hard up against what felt like my self (after a lengthy absence), presenting me, if I chose to accept it, with an imperative that all my choices in recent memory—volitions, discretions, extra beats, time spent offshore—hadn’t presented me, though I might’ve said they had and argued you to the dirt about it. Here, for a man with no calculable character, was a hunger for necessity, for something solid, the thing “character” stands in for. This hunger could, of course, just as easily result from a recognition that you’d never done one damn substantial thing in your life, good or otherwise, and never would, and if you did, it wouldn’t matter a mouse fart—a recognition that could leave you in the doldrums’ own doldrum, i.e., despair that knows it’s despair.

  Except, I’ll tell you, this period—1990–92—was the most exhilarating of my life, the likes of which I’d felt once, possibly twice, but not more and was reconciled perhaps never to feel again, just glad to have had it when I did, but whose cause I couldn’t really tell you.

  What it portended—and this is the truest signature of the Permanent Period, which comes, by the way, when it comes and not at any signifying age, and not as a climacteric, not when you expect it, not when your ducks are in a row (as mine back in 1990 were not)—it portended an end to perpetual becoming, to thinking that life schemed wonderful changes for me, even if it didn’t. It portended a blunt break with the past and provided a license to think of the past only indistinctly (who wouldn’t pay plenty for that?). It portended that younger citizens might come up to me in wonderment and say, “How in the world do you live? How do you do it in this uncharted time of life?” It portended that I say to myself and mean it, even if I thought I said it every day and already really meant it: “This is how in the shit I am! My life is this way”—recognizing, as I did, what an embarrassment and a disaster it would be if, once you were dust, the world and yourself were in basic disagreement on this subject.

  Following which I set about deciding how I should put the next five to ten years to better use than the last five—progress being the ancients’ benchmark for character. I’d by then started to worry that Haddam might be it for me—just like Mike sweats it about Lavallette—which frankly scared the wits out of me. As a result, I immediately resigned my job at Lauren-Schwindell. I put my house on Cleveland Street on the rental market. I proposed marriage to Sally Caldwell, who couldn’t have been more surprised, though she didn’t say no (at least not till recently). I cashed in the Baby Bells I’d been adding to since the breakup. I made inquiries about possibilities for real estate at the Shore and was able to buy Realty-Wise from its owner, who was retiring to managed care. I made an unrejectable offer on a big tall-windowed redwood house facing the ocean in Sea-Clift (the second-home boom hadn’t arrived there yet). Sally sold her Stick Style bea
ch house in East Mantoloking. And on June 1, 1992, with Clinton nearing the White House and the world seeming more possible than ever, I drove Sally to Atlantic City and in a comical ceremony in the Best Little Marriage Chapel in New Jersey, a pink, white, and blue Heidi chalet on Baltic Avenue, we tied the knot—acted on necessity, opted for the substantial in one simple act. We ended up saying good-bye to the day, my second wedding day and Sally’s, too, and the first full day of the Permanent Period, eating fried clams and sipping Rusty Nails at a seaside fish joint, giggling and planning the extraordinary future we were going to enjoy.

  Which we did. Until I came down with a case of cancer shortly after Sally’s first husband came back from the dead, where he’d been in safekeeping for decades. Following which everything got all fucked up shit, as my daughter, Clarissa, used to say, and the Permanent Period was put to its sternest test by different necessities, though up to now it’s proved durable.

  Mangum & Gayden Funeral Home, on one-block, oak-lined Willow Street, is a big yellow-and-brown-shingled Victorian, with a full-gingerbread porch above a bank of vociferous yews, with dense pachysandra encircling a large, appropriately-weeping front-yard willow and a thick St. Augustine carpet out to the sidewalk. For all the world, M&G looks like a big congenial welcoming-family abode where people live and play and are contented, instead of a funeral parlor where the inhabitants are dead as mallets and you feel a chill the instant you walk in the front door. What distinguishes it as a mortuarial establishment and not somebody’s domicile is the discreet, dim-lit MANGUM & GAYDEN—PARKING IN REAR lawn sign, a side porte-cochère that wasn’t in the original house design and two or three polished black Cadillacs around back with apparently nothing to do. A recent Haddam sign ordinance forbids any use of the word funeral, though Lloyd Mangum got his grandfathered. But nobody flying over at ten thousand feet would ever look down and say, “There’s a funeral home,” since it’s nestled into a row of similar-vintage living-human residences that list for a fortune. Lloyd says his Haddam neighbors seem not to mind residing beside the newly dead, and proximity has never seemed to put the brakes on resale. Most new buyers must feel a funeral home is better than a house full of attention-deficit teens learning the snare drum. And Lloyd, who’s a descendant of the original Mangum, tells me that mourners routinely stop by for a visitation with Aunt Gracie, then throw down a huge cash as-is offer for building and grounds before they’re out the door. Lloyd and family, in fact, live upstairs.

  I park a ways down Willow and walk up. The new weather announced in the skies over Mullica Road is quickly arriving. Metallic rain smell permeates the air, and clouds back over Pennsylvania have bruised up green and gray for a season-changing blow. In an hour it could be snowing—a sorry day for a funeral, though when’s a good day?

  Outside on the bottom front step, having a smoke, are Lloyd and another man known to me, both friends of the deceased and possibly the only other mourners. Ernie McAuliffe, to be honest, took his good sweet time departing this earth. Everybody who cared about him got to say they did three times over, then say it again. His wife, Deb, had long ago moved back to Indiana, and his only son, Bruno, a merchant mariner, came, said his brief strangled good-bye, then beat it. Ernie himself took charge of all funerary issues, including terminal care out at Delaware-Vue Acres in Titusville, and set out notarized instructions about who, what and when to do this, that and the other—no flowers, no grave-side folderol, no funeral, really, just boxed up and buried, the way we’d all probably like it. He even made arrangements with an unnamed care-giver to ease him out when it all got pointless.

  I am, I realize, violating Ernie’s wishes by being here. But his obit was in the Packet on Saturday, and I was coming over with Mike anyway. Why do we do things? For ourselves, mostly. Ernie, though, was a grand fellow, and I’m sorry he’s no more. Memento mori in a sere season.

  Ernie was, in fact, the best of fellows, someone anybody’d be happy to sit beside at a bar, a wounded Viet vet who still wore his dog tags but didn’t let any of that bring him low or fill him with self-importance. He’d seen some ugly stuff and maybe did a bit of it himself. Though you wouldn’t know it. He talked about his exploits, about that war and his fellow troopers and the politicians who ran it, the way you’d describe how things had gone when your high school football squad went 11–0 but lost the state championship to a scrappy but inferior team of small-fry opponents.

  Ernie was brought up on a dairy farm near La Porte, Indiana, and went to a state school out there. When he left the Army minus his left leg, he went straight into the prosthetic-limb business as a supersalesman and ended up “opening” New Jersey to modern prosthetic techniques, then managing some big accounts and finally owning the whole damn company. Something about the savagery of war and all the squandered youth, he said to me, had made him feel prosthetics, rather than dairy herding, was his calling in this life, his way of leaving a mark.

  Ernie, even with a space-age leg, was a great tall drink of water who walked up on the ball of his one good foot, which was barge material, wore his brown hair long and pomaded, with a prodigious side part that made him resemble a forties Hollywood glamour boy. He also was said to possess the biggest dick anybody’d ever seen (he would sometimes show it around, though I never got to see it) and on certain occasions was given the nickname “Dillinger.” He had a superlative sense of humor, could do all kinds of howling European accents and wacky loose-jointed walks and was never happier than when he was on the golf course or sitting with a towel draped over his unit, with his fake leg leaned against the wall, playing pinochle in the nineteenth hole at the Haddam Country Club. Deb was said to have gone back to Terre Haute for sexual reasons—probably so she could sleep with a normal man. Ernie, however, only spoke of her with resolute affection, as though to say, You can’t know what goes on between a man and a woman unless you write the novel yourself. He never, for obvious reasons, lacked for female companionship.

  Of my two fellow mourners on Mangum’s front steps, the other is Bud Sloat, known behind his back as “Slippery Sloat.” Both are in regulation black London Fogs, in tune to the weather. Lloyd is tall, bareheaded and solemn, though Bud’s wearing a stupid Irish tweed knock-about hat and saddle oxfords that make him look sporting and only coincidentally in mourning.

  Both Lloyd and Bud are members of the men’s group that “stepped up” when Ernie found out he had lymphoma and started going down fast. They organized outings to the Pine Barrens and Island Beach (close to where I live) and down to the Tundra swan sanctuary on Delaware Bay, where they trekked the beach (as long as Ernie was up to it), then sat around in a circle on the sand or on the rocks and told stories about Ernie, sang folk songs, discussed politics and literature, recited heroic poems, said secularist prayers, told raunchy jokes and sometimes cried like babies, all the while marveling at life’s transience and at the strange beyond that all of us will someday face. I went along once in late October, before Ernie needed transfusions to keep himself going. It was an autumn morning of pale water-color skies and clear dense air—we were just down the beach from my house—five of us late middle-agers in Bermudas and sweaters and tee-shirts that said Harrah’s and Planned Parenthood, plus ever-paler one-legged “Whatcha” McAuliffe (his other nickname), looking green and limping along without much stamina or joie de vivre. I thought it would just be a manly hike down the beach, skimming sand dollars, letting the cold surf prickle our toes, watching the terns and kestrels wheel and dip on the shore breezes, and in that fashion we would re-certify life for those able to live it.

  Only at a certain point, the four others, including Lloyd and Bud, circled round poor Ernie—stumping along on his space-age prosthesis but still game in spite of being nearly dead—and rapturously told him they all loved him and there was no one in hell who was a bit like him, that life was here and now and needed to be felt, that death was as natural as sneezing. Then to my shock, like a band of natives toting a canoe, they actually picked Ernie up and walked w
ith him—peg leg and all—up on their shoulders right into the goddamn ocean and, while cradling him in their interlaced arms, totally immersed him while murmuring, “Ernie, Ernie, Ernie” and chanting, “We’re with you, my brother,” as if they had lymphoma, too, and in six weeks would be dead as he’d be.

  Once such bizarre activities get going, you can’t stop them without making everybody feel like an asshole. And maybe calling a halt would’ve made Ernie feel lousier and even more foolish for being the object of this nuttiness. One of the immersion team was an ex-Unitarian minister who’d studied anthropology at Santa Cruz, and the whole horrible rigamarole was his idea. He’d e-mailed instructions to everyone, only I don’t have e-mail (or I wouldn’t have been within a hundred miles of the whole business). Ernie, however, because nobody had warned him, either, struggled to get the hell out of his captors’ grip. He may have thought they were going to drown him to save him from a drearier fate. But the defrocked minister, whose name is Thor, started saying, “It’s good, Ernie, let it happen, just let it happen.”