Mary McCarthy

by Thomas Mallon

  And they were here for the whole month. Mrs. Currier, Adelaide’s mother-in-law, briefly settled this question by calling up the landlady at Meade Farm, who was on the Valley Fair Committee with her. So it was not just a temporary annoyance, which was what everybody had been half hoping; it was the heart cut out of the summer—and the next summer and the next, in all probability. A long-range solution would have to be found, said Margaret Callaway, briskly, in the post office, quoting Pickles. Minster was now facing a problem that had been gripping most of northern New England; a farming area was being converted into the site of a vacation industry that was overturning all the old values. The problem was really worldwide, she explained to a group of mothers as the tobacco-stained old codgers who hung around the post office edged up to listen: it would be the fate of all obsolete civilizations to become the tourist meccas of the civilizations that replaced them. Minster was feeling the effects of a technological revolution that was just as unsettling as a geological upheaval like the Appalachian Revolution, which had metamorphosed the mountain ranges.

  A long sigh rose from around the postboxes. According to Pickles, then, there was no escape, the young mothers queried, absently opening their mail; the postmistress’s rubber stamp stayed poised in the air as she listened. But Margaret shook her head. A strange, new exaltation had appeared in her. Her nostrils quivered; her faraway gaze had taken on a focus of conviction. Pickles was thinking, she said proudly. He was looking at the problem scientifically, in terms of the new situation, and was very near an answer. The mothers exchanged looks. Any “solution” of Pickles’ would have in it something caustic; he would want to rub salt in the community’s wounds as he applied iodine to his boys’ feet when they had cut them. The grandmothers doted on Pickles, but the young mothers had never approved of him since he went into business; they thought him selfish and a snob.

  And yet their own ideas were terribly shaken, they had to confess. They were distressed by the froth of ill will that rose in their breasts whenever they so much as thought about Poor Farm Pond. Instead of hating the intruders, they ought to pity them, they supposed, for being noisy, ugly, and self-satisfied, which was probably the result of conditioning. “Imagine looking like that!” murmured Ginny to Adelaide with a shudder. “Imagine being like that!” retorted Adelaide. “I won’t pretend to be sorry for them; they have free will just like the rest of us.” And absurd arguments began to break out, at parties, about free will, and whether people could help their appearance. One or two of the husbands, plain men, were so irritated by these conversations that they were actually threatening to sell their houses and move away from Minster if the swimming problem was not settled, once and for all, this summer.

  Nothing was the same. Starting with the psychiatrists, many new species of summer people began to be seen in Minster. A bright-red British car with a New York license plate was sighted flashing by on the back roads; slim, tanned, painted, smart women were glimpsed driving about with the real-estate agent, poking into old farmhouses. And all through July—for the first time in history—cars with streamers saying “Ausable Chasm,” “Howe Caverns,” “Desert of Maine” drew up at the parking place at Poor Farm Pond and parties of tourists settled down for an outing, with dogs, potato chips, Cracker Jack, shampoo soap, insect repellent, beer, and all the rest of it. It was unaccountable. Minster had not been written up, so far as anybody could find, in the newspapers or travel magazines. It was as though the news had got about telepathically, as messages fly between birds. One afternoon—an ominous touch—a tall lean coveralled native with pale shifty eyes came with his lean pale-eyed son and a fishing rod and “borrowed” the Curriers’ rowboat; and the psychiatrists had the gall to complain to their landlady (Mrs. Currier had it direct) that “Mirror Lake” was getting spoiled: “We are writing a few friends to join us for a rest—here is so nice and quiet. And now comes a crowd. What can you do? It is America.”

  Even the animals, apparently, had tuned in on the news. The eeriest thing—one afternoon, late, at sunset, when the pond was finally deserted, Adelaide Currier came down with a towel for a swim, and as she sat drying her legs, she heard an unusual sound in the water, not a fish jumping but a beaver swimming. She saw his black tail slapping the surface near the farther shore. And, looking more closely, along the far edge, green and still, under the shadow of the ridge, she noticed for the first time a little paling of dry branches. Her heart nearly stopped beating. Everybody in Minster knew what the beavers meant.

  “Lodestone!” she cried five minutes later, panting across the Callaways’ lawn in her white towelling robe and beach slippers. “The beavers have come over from Lodestone!” She fell into a deck chair. “They’re building, along the far shore. I saw it.” The Callaway children came running out of the house. Pickles set down his highball leisurely, and got up to make her one at the trestle table. “That is very interesting, Adelaide,” he observed with a smile, glancing at his wife and children. “You actually saw the beaver?” Adelaide nodded. Then and there, as she said later, she should have guessed something queer was up. “Very interesting,” repeated Pickles, in his most mystifying young-fogy manner. Adelaide was irritated. She stared from Pickles to Margaret. “You’re taking it so calmly,” she protested. “You’d think you’d never seen Lodestone.” The three children looked at their parents and burst into giggles. “We saw it yesterday!” cried the youngest, gleeful, and dove under the table. “Then you know what it means,” said Adelaide, sternly. “It’s nothing to laugh about.” “No,” agreed the children, but their lips were twitching. “What is this?” she demanded. “Pickles, what are you up to? What were you doing at Lodestone?” All the Callaways smiled enigmatically. “A good question,” said Pickles.

  And, in fact, Adelaide’s puzzlement was well founded. With the coming of the beavers, Lodestone Pond had reverted to wilderness, and the remote little village of Lodestone, five miles up the valley, had dried up and died of neglect. Nobody from Minster ever went there any more, except to show it to visitors as a curiosity. Today, there was nothing left of the village but a paintless church and a post office that sold a few dust-coated packaged provisions to the half-savage natives who lived in the hills on derelict farms, with fierce mongrel dogs and wild, inbred children. Civilization had crept away from Lodestone and left it—rumor declared—to incest and bestiality. The faded old homemade signs, indicating “Lodestone” with a pointer, in frail, spidery lettering, could still be seen nailed to trees along rutted back roads that had once borne a Sunday traffic of picnickers from the granite town and the cheese town and the state capital. But when they fell down, nobody replaced them; the stony mountain roads were nearly impassable to modern, low-slung automobiles, and dogs rushed out of unkempt farmyards, barking amazedly at the rare car that came through, usually with an out-of-state plate and a shaken, scarified driver, who emerged full of sociological questions—questions that won only the briefest retorts from the Minster natives, for Lodestone Pond and the whole infertile scrubby valley round it had the name of a place accursed.

  It had not always been so; the grandmothers could remember a time when Lodestone was the dearest spot in the region, with strawberry festivals and church suppers and a music school and a little local band playing in the picnic grove. And, actually, there was nothing supernatural about what had happened. The beavers had done it. The tree-shaded pond had vanished, like a sunken ship; there was only a noisome still swamp, with dead birch and poplar trunks, stripped of bark, rising like masts or spars from the scummy surface. At one end of the swamp, amid the reeds and yellow water lilies, a remainder of the old diving raft still floated, with its tower. And you could see where the picnic grove had been, by the rope swing still hanging from the big arm of a dying giant maple that stood in a foot of slimy water. Whenever weekend visitors were driven over to see Lodestone, a cry of horror went up as the station wagon drew up on the little peninsula and the deathly sight was disclosed.

  Outsiders found it hard
to understand how the beavers could have done it. They had read in their school natural-science courses that beavers lived in streams and built dams there. They had never heard, they said, awe-struck, of beavers taking over a whole lake. Somebody (most often Pickles Callaway, for whom the place had a fascination) would then have to show them, with a geodetic map and binoculars, precisely what the beavers had done. Offering the binoculars, Pickles would point out the brook that had originally been dammed by the beavers, and explain how, to make their dams and underwater lodges, they had cut down small birch and poplar and dragged them to the lake’s outlet. This obstruction had had the effect of flooding the pond, which had overflowed its borders and killed the surrounding vegetation. The tall dead trees they saw had once been on dry land—they could find it on Pickles’ map. Dammed up, the pond had become a spreading marsh; reeds and water lilies had sprung up in the stagnant water, and scum had slowly covered it. With knitted brows, the visitors would pass the binoculars back and forth, note the interlacing of twigs, branches, and sapling trunks, sawed by the rodent teeth. And in the end they never saw how Pickles could take it so coolly. Facing the ruined pond, fending off the mosquitoes and gnats, sniffing the unwholesome air, they all claimed to feel something vast and unjustifiable in the magnitude of the destruction, as if Nature, in her ordinary business, could never have encompassed such a thing. “The industrious beaver,” they would murmur, the implication making them solemn for the rest of the afternoon. They could not help sensing that the quality of this devastation was human; the decapitated tree trunks made them think of mutilated cities. There was something at once purposive and purposeless in the display of technology before them. “The means,” Margaret always remarked, in her sharp, high, querulous bird voice, “have literally swamped the end.”

  And she told a story that had been told her by the old music teacher in Lodestone—that it was a summer person who was responsible for what had happened to the pond. The beaver had disappeared from the region until a man from New York had come and bought property and imported a pair of beavers to dam up his brook and make him a natural swimming pool. The beavers had escaped and settled in the outlet of Lodestone. Nobody but Margaret put credence in this tale. The beavers, said the grandmothers, had first come to Lodestone years ago, before there were any summer people, except themselves, in the neighborhood. The story was a native fabrication, scoffed Pickles; no summer person could ever have been that thrifty.

  Except Pickles, emended Adelaide, now, on the terrace, turning her bright hazel eyes from one grinning Callaway face to another. Pickles, she said to herself, had always had a mean, frugal streak, just like the man in the story. Adelaide was angry; she hated having mysteries made. “Shall we tell her?” wondered Pickles aloud, tilting his narrow head sidewise. Margaret and the children eagerly nodded.

  “We drove over to inspect the property,” he said, with a sharp look at Adelaide over his glasses. “Margaret bought Lodestone yesterday.”

  Adelaide’s gasp resounded throughout the community. This, at last, was the fruit of Pickles’ thought, and truly it was a stroke of genius, Minster acknowledged—tactful, diplomatic, and remarkably public-spirited. “I believe it will last our time,” Pickles said with modest pride, at a lap supper Margaret gave to explain the idea to their friends. And Pickles had arrived at the idea, emphasized Margaret excitedly, via the social sciences. Using the historical method, he had asked himself (Pickles nodded confirmation) what was the proximate cause of the problem of Poor Farm Pond. The basic cause was, of course, as they all recognized, the social and technological revolution, whose trend, in the long run, was irreversible. But the immediate tendency could be checked or diverted elsewhere, depending on secondary factors. In this case, the secondary factor, or proximate cause, had stared Pickles in the face, the minute he sat down to think: the problem of Poor Farm Pond had come to a head two years ago, when the last, forlorn camp on the shore of Lodestone had been given up and the pond had finally been abandoned to the beavers. The tradition or unwritten law regarding swimming rights had rested on the assumption that there were two ponds to swim in: one for the natives and transients and one for the “old” summer people—separate but equal. The beavers had destroyed this assumption.

  Ergo, concluded Pickles, to restore the status quo ante you had only to eliminate the beavers.

  The main point, which everybody saw at once, murmuring assent to Margaret, was that there was no human component to reckon with. That was the beauty of Pickles’ scheme. Nobody swam at Lodestone now. There could be nobody, therefore, to complain that the summer people had displaced them, as there would have been, inevitably, at Poor Farm Pond, even if Mr. Bascomb had been brought to terms. In this light, all the manifest objections to Lodestone—the sinister and forsaken character of the lake, the stagnant smell, the evil repute the place bore with the natives—became positive assets. Nobody wanted Lodestone, which meant that the land could be bought up dirt-cheap, for the taxes. Much of it, Pickles had discovered, had already been taken over by the bank in Graniteville, through mortgage foreclosures. The bank was delighted to arrange for Margaret to get the whole thing for a song. The bank president, in fact, had nearly wrung her hand off when the deeds were signed, congratulating her on a public service. He seemed to think, actually, that the reclamation of the pond would put the whole village of Lodestone back on its feet.

  Clearing out the beavers, continued Margaret, should not present too much difficulty. Not nearly as much as some people were saying who had not gone into the matter. They were protected for most of the year, of course, but you could trap them during the open season; Pickles and some of the other men might come up for a weekend beaver hunt during the winter. The main thing, however, would be to knock out their dams and lodges with a bulldozer and a dredger—in this state, no conservationist statute could stop you from doing that on your own property. The beavers could shift for themselves, since they were supposed to be very adaptive. The worry would be to not let them get reëstablished in Lodestone after you had driven them out; it might be fun for the children to set up a beaver patrol. Besides the bulldozer and dredger, there would be a few other expenses, for removing the dead trees and landscaping and replanting the shore. It would be nice if the people who were going to be using Lodestone, the “old” summer people and their friends, would get together and share the costs and the labor, just as they had always done with the sand at Poor Farm Pond.

  And the people who put up the money (or the labor, either one) could form a little club—nothing pretentious, just a diving raft and a few bathhouses, since Lodestone was pretty far from home for some of the colonists, and maybe later on a tennis court and a hall for barn dances. You would not have to call it a club, said Margaret, quickly, cutting into the murmur that rose from all sides of her long dining room. If the word “club” struck a false note in Minster, you could call it “Lodestone Associates,” or something of that kind. And it would not have to be snobbish; anybody could buy shares and join—more like a subscription library, really, than a club.

  “Anybody?” said Ginny, sharply. Everybody knew what she was thinking, but there had never been a trace of anti-Semitism in Minster. “Anybody we knew, I suppose,” said Charlotte, with a hesitant look around. “Does that go for the natives?” demanded Bill Husted, in a rather truculent tone. Margaret’s hand, alarmedly, went to her olive brow; she turned to Pickles for help. “Let’s be realistic,” urged Sam Marx in his soft, sweet, husky voice. “The natives won’t come into such a project. It’s a question of economics.” Pickles nodded. “Right. Let’s put it this way. They can join if they want to but they won’t.” “Oh,” said Janet Wheeler, a Girl Scout leader, in a booming voice, “I think it’s disgusting to put it on a basis of economics. I thought we were going to share.” “Don’t be absurd, Janet,” said Adelaide. “The natives are farmers; they work twelve hours a day.” “And they don’t swim, anyway,” said Ginny. “I predicted this,” said Pickles glumly to Margaret as th
e whole room began to talk at once.

  Margaret shook her head. The whole thing, she declared, rapping for order, was eminently fair. The public, including the natives, would get Poor Farm Pond—why should they want Lodestone? Everybody stood to profit. And the old summer people had the right to protect themselves against today’s migratory population by joining together and pooling their resources. Naturally, if the consensus of opinion should be against a club, she and Pickles stood ready to bear the expense themselves and invite their friends to swim with them. But it seemed to her that it was more democratic if everybody did it together; nobody would feel, then, that they were presuming on the Callaways’ hospitality.

  The assembly, uneasily dispersing, had to agree that Pickles’ proposition was logical. To form a club, as they pointed out to each other during the ensuing days, was only to vest in legal form that membership, one of another, that had always been the essence of Minster. The belongingness they all felt, among themselves, the young mothers admitted, had always had its focus on the peninsula at Poor Farm Pond. It was there plans were made, world affairs argued, magazines and newspapers shared; a de-facto club already existed, which Lodestone Associates would merely incorporate formally. There would be no real difference, except in the name. Or would there?