Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  “You mean like a journal?” He eyes me dubiously.

  “Right. Like that.”

  “We did that at camp. Then we used our journals to wipe our asses and threw them in bonfires. That was the best use for them.”

  Around and down the cross street I now unexpectedly see the Baseball Hall of Fame, a pale-red-brick Greek Revival, post-office-looking building, and I make a quick, hazardous right off what was Chestnut and onto what is Main, postponing my drink for a drive-by and a closer look.

  Full of baseball vacationers, Main Street has the soullessly equable, bustly air of a better-than-average small-college town the week the kids come back for fall. Shops on both sides are selling showcases full of baseball everything: uniforms, cards, posters, bumper stickers, no doubt hubcaps and condoms; and these share the street with just ordinary villagey business entities—a drugstore, a dad ‘n’ lad, two flower shops, a tavern, a German bakery and several realty offices, their mullioned windows crammed with snapshots of A-frames and “view properties” on Lake So-and-so.

  Unlike stolid Deep River and stiff-necked Ridgefield, Cooperstown has more than ample 4th of July street regalia strung up on the lampposts and crossing wires, stoplights and even parking meters, as if to say there’s a right way to do things and this is it. Posters on every corner promise a “Big Celebrity Parade” with “country music stars” on Monday, and all visitors strolling the sidewalks seem glad to be here. It seems in fact and on first blush like an ideal place to live, worship, thrive, raise a family, grow old, get sick and die. And yet: Some suspicion lurks—in the crowds themselves, in the too-frequent street-corner baskets of redder-than-red geraniums and the too-visible French poubelle trash containers, in the telltale sight of a red double-decker City of Westminster bus and there being no mention of the Hall of Fame anywhere—that the town is just a replica (of a legitimate place), a period backdrop to the Hall of Fame or to something even less specific, with nothing authentic (crime, despair, litter, the rapture) really going on no matter what civic illusion the city fathers maintain. (In this way, of course, it’s no less than what I imagined, and still a potentially perfect setting in which to woo one’s son away from his problems and bestow good counsel—if, that is, one’s son weren’t an asshole.)

  We cruise slowly by the unimpressive little brick-arched entryway to the Hall, with its even more post-office-ish, Old-Glory-on-a-pole look and a single flourishing sugar maple out front. Several noisy citizens seem to be parading in a little circle on the sidewalk, doing their best, it looks like, to get in the way of paying customers who have walked over from nearby inns or hotels or RV parks and want to get inside for a quick evening tour. These circlers all have placards and signs and sandwich boards and, when I let Paul’s window down to hear, are chanting what sounds like “shooter, shooter, shooter.” (It’s hard to know what could be worth picketing in a place like this.)

  “So who’re those morons?” Paul says, and makes a quick eeeck followed by a look of dismay.

  “I got here when you did,” I say.

  “Hooter, hooter, hooter, hooter,” he says in a gruff, giant’s voice. “Neuter, neuter, neuter, neuter.”

  “That’s the Baseball Hall of Fame right there, though.” I’m disappointed, to be honest, but with no right to be. “You’ve seen it now, so we can go home if you want to.”

  “Hooter, hooter, hooter,” Paul says. “Eeeck, eeeck.”

  “Do you want to just get it over with? I’ll get you back to New York early tonight. You can stay at the Yale Club.”

  “I’d rather stay up here a whole lot longer,” Paul says, still watching out his window.

  “Okay,” I say, deciding he means he’d rather not go to New York. Though the air of anger flushes right out of me then, and I see my job as father once again to be a permanent, lifelong undertaking.

  “What actually supposedly happened here? I forgot.” He is musing out at the milling sidewalk traffic.

  “Baseball was supposedly dreamed up here in 1839, by Abner Doubleday, though nobody really believes that.” All info courtesy of brochures. “It’s just a myth to allow customers to focus their interests and get the most out of the game. It’s like the Declaration of Independence being signed on the Fourth of July, when it was actually signed some other time.” This, of course, is straight from avuncular old Becker and probably a waste of time now. Though I mean to persist. “It’s a shorthand to keep you from getting all bound up in unimportant details and missing some deeper point. I don’t remember what the point is with baseball, though.” A second wave of deep fatigue suddenly descends. It’s tempting to pull over and go to sleep on the seat and see who’s here when I wake up.

  “So this is all just bullshit,” Paul says, watching out.

  “Not exactly. A lot of things we think are true aren’t, just like a lot of things that are, you don’t have to give a shit about. You have to make your own assessments. Life’s full of little potted lessons like that.”

  “Why, thank you, then. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” He looks at me with amusement, but he is scornful. I could easily pass out.

  Though I’m still not to be turned aside, under the syllabus topic of separating the wheat from the chaff, or possibly it’s the woods from the trees. “You shouldn’t get trapped by situations that don’t make you happy,” I say. “I’m not always very good at it. I fuck up a lot. But I try.”

  “I’m trying,” he says—to my great and heart-wrenching surprise—moved by something. A platitude. The strength of a simple platitude. What else do I offer? “I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do.”

  “Well, if you’re trying, that’s all you can do.”

  “Eeeck,” he says quietly. “Hooter.”

  “Hooter. Right,” I say, and we motor on.

  I drive us farther down Main into the tree-thick neighborhood of expensive and familiar Federalist and well-preserved Greek Revivals—all in primo condition and shaded by two-hundred-year-old beeches and red oaks—which in Haddam would cost a million eight and never come on the market (friends sell to friends to keep us realtors out of it). A couple here, though, have signs on their lawns, one with a JUST REDUCED sticker. Another paperboy is here, walking his route, swinging his swag sack full of afternoon dailies. An older man, in bright-red jackass pants and a yellow shirt, is standing in a yard behind a picket fence, holding an icy drink and raising his free hand for the boy to throw him a paper, which he does, and which the man snags. The boy turns toward us idling past, waves a furtive little wave at Paul, mistaking him for someone he knows, then quickly douses it and looks off. Paul, though, waves back! As though he thought, like a good dreamer, that if we all still lived in Haddam and life was revised back to what it should be, this boy would be him.

  “Do you like my clothes?” he says, closing his window with the button.

  “Not much,” I say, steering the curve around onto another shaded street, where there’s a blue HOSPITAL sign, and women in nurses’ garb and men in doctors’ smocks with dangling stethoscopes are walking down the sidewalk, headed for home. “Do you like mine?”

  Paul looks me over seriously—chinos, Weejuns, yellow socks, Black Watch plaid short-sleeve from Mountain Eyrie Outfitters in Leech Lake, Minnesota, clothes I’ve worn as long as he’s known me, the same as I wore the day I stepped off the New York Central in Ann Arbor in 1963 and am at home in still. Generic clothing.

  “No,” Paul says.

  “But see,” I say, the crunched Self-Reliance still under my thigh, “in my line of work I’m supposed to dress in a way that makes clients feel sorry for me, or better yet superior to me. I think I accomplish that pretty well.” Paul looks over at me again with a distasteful look that might be ready to slide into sarcasm, only he doesn’t know if I’m making fun of him. He says nothing. Though what I’ve just told him, of course, is merely true.

  I steer us back now through a nice but less nice neighborhood of red-and gree
n-shuttered houses on narrower streets, thinking by this route to wind back to 28 and find the Deerslayer. Plenty’s for sale here too. Cooperstown, it seems, is up for grabs.

  “What’s your new tattoo say?”

  Paul instantly holds his right wrist up for me to see, and what I make out upside down is the word “insect,” stained in dull-blue Bicpen-looking ink right into his tender flesh. “Did you think that up by yourself,” I say, “or did someone help you?”

  Paul sniffs. “In the next century we’re all going to be enslaved by the insects that survive this century’s pesticides. With this I acknowledge being in a band of maladapted creatures whose time is coming to a close. I hope the new leaders will treat me as a friend.” He again sniffs, then worries his nose with his dirty fingers.

  “Is that a lyric from some rock song?” I’m getting us back into the traffic flow, heading toward the center of town again. We have made a circle.

  “It’s just common knowledge,” Paul says, rubbing his knee with his wart.

  Almost immediately I see a sign I missed when Paul and I were arguing: a tall, rail-thin, buckskin-and-high-moccasined pioneer man in profile, holding a flintlock rifle, standing on a lakeshore with triangular pine trees in the background. DEERSLAYER INN STRAIGHT AHEAD. A blessed promise.

  “Don’t you have a better view of human progress than that?” I push right out across Main among the late-Saturday traffic and trolley vans shunting tourists hither and yon. Lake Otsego is unexpectedly straight out ahead—lush, Norwegian-looking headlands miles away on its far shore, lumping north into the hazy Adirondacks.

  “Too many things are bothering me all the time. It gets to be old.”

  “You know,” I say, ignoring him, “those guys who founded this whole place thought if they didn’t shake loose of old dependencies they’d be vulnerable to the world’s innate wildness—“

  “By place do you mean Cooperstown?”

  “No. I don’t. I meant something else.”

  “So who was Cooperstown named after?” he says, facing toward the sparkling lake as if it were space he was considering flying off into.

  “James Fenimore Cooper,” I say. “He was a famous American novelist who wrote books about Indians playing baseball.” Paul flashes me a look of halfway pleasant uncertainty. He knows I’m tired of him and may be making fun of him again. Though I can also see in his features—as I have other times, and as the dappled light passes over them—the adult face he’ll most likely end up with: large, grave, ironic, possibly gullible, possibly gentle, but not likely so happy. Not my face, but a way mine could’ve been with fewer coping skills. “Do you think you’re a failure?” I say, slowing across from the Deerslayer, ready to turn up the drive through two rows of tall spruces beyond which is the longed-for inn, its Victorian porches shaded deep in the late day, the big chairs I’ve daydreamed about occupied by a few contented travelers, but with room for more.

  “At what?” Paul says. “I haven’t had enough time to fail yet, I’m still learning how.” I wait for traffic to clear. Lake Otsego is beside us now, flat and breezeless through an afternoon haze.

  “I mean at being a kid. An ass-o-lescent. Whatever it is you think you are now.” My blinker is blinking, my palms gripping the wheel.

  “Sure, Frank,” Paul says arrogantly, possibly not even knowing what he’s agreeing to.

  “Well, you’re not,” I say. “So you’re just going to have to figure out something else to think about yourself, because you’re not. I love you. And don’t call me Frank, goddamn it. I don’t want my son to call me Frank. It makes me feel like your fucking stepfather. Why don’t you tell me a joke. I could use a joke. You’re good at that.”

  And then a sudden stellar quiet settles on us two, waiting to turn, as if a rough barrier had been reached, tried, failed at but then briskly gotten over before we knew it or how. I for some reason sense that Paul might cry, or at least nearly cry—an event I haven’t witnessed in a long time and that he has officially ceased yet might try again just this once for old times’ sake.

  But in fact it’s my own eyes that go hot and steamy, though I couldn’t tell you why (other than my age).

  “Can you hold your breath for fifty-five seconds straight?” Paul says as I swing up across the highway.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Do it,” Paul says, looking straight at me, deadpan. “Just stop the car.” He is opaque and gloating with something hilarious.

  And so, in the shady drive to the Deerslayer, I do. I hit the brakes. “All right, I’m holding it,” I say. “This better be really funny. I’m ready for a drink.”

  He clamps his mouth shut and closes his eyes, and I close mine, and we wait together in the a/c wind and engine murmur and thermostat click while I count, one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand …

  When I closed my eyes the dashboard digital read 5:14, and when I open them it reads 5:15. Paul has his open, though he seems to be counting silently like a zealot speaking some private beseechments to God.

  “Okay. Fifty-five. What’s the punch line? I’m in a hurry.” My foot is easing off the brake. “‘I didn’t know shit could hold its breath so long?’ Is it that good?”

  “Fifty-five is how long the first jolt lasts in the electric chair. I read that in a magazine. Did you think it seemed like a long time or a short time?” He blinks at me, curious.

  “It seemed pretty long to me,” I say unhappily. “And that wasn’t very funny.”

  “Me too,” he says, fingering his bunged-up ear rim and inspecting his finger for blood. “It’s supposed to knock you out, though.”

  “That’d be a lot better,” I say. Parents, of course, think about dying day and night—especially when they see their children one weekend a month. It’s not so surprising their children would follow suit.

  “You just lose everything when you lose your sense of humor,” Paul says in a mock-official voice.

  And I’m back in gear then, tires skidding on pine needles and up into the cool and (I hope) blissful removes of the Deerslayer. A bell is gonging. I see an old belfry stand in the side yard being clappered by a smiling young woman in a white tunic and chef’s hat, waving to us as we arrive, just like in some travelogue of happy summer days in Cooperstown. I wheel in feeling as if we were late and everybody had been distracted by our absence, only now we’ve arrived and everything can start.

  9

  The Deerslayer is as perfect as I’d hoped—a wide, rambling, spavined late Victorian with yellow scalloped mansards, spindle-lathed porch railings, creaky stairs leading to long, shadowy, disinfectant-smelling hallways, little twin pig-iron bedsteads, a table fan, and a bath at the end of the hall.

  Downstairs there’s a long, slumberous living room with ancient-smelling slipcovered couches, a scabbed-up old Kimball spinet, a “take one, leave one” library, with dinner served in the shadowy dining room between 5:30 and 7:00 (“No late diners please!”). There is, however and unfortunately, no bar, no complimentary cocktails, no canapés, no TV. (I have embellished it some, but who could blame me?) And yet it still seems to me a perfect place where a man can sleep with a teenage boy in his room and arouse no suspicions.

  Drinkless, then, I stretch out on the too-soft mattress while Paul goes “exploring.” I relax my jaw sinews, twist my back a little, unlimber my toes in the table-fan breeze and wait to let sleep steal upon me like a bushman out of the twilight. To this end I again braid together new nonsense components, which seep into my mind like anesthesia. We better dust off our Sally Caldwell … I’m sorry I drove your erection you putz … Phogg Allen, the long face … eat your face … You musta been a beautiful Doctor Zhivago, you stranger in the Susquehanna … And I’m gone off into tunneling darkness before I can even welcome it.

  And then, sooner than I wanted, I’m emerged—lushly, my head spinning in darkness, alone, my son nowhere near me.

  For a time I lie still, as a cool la
ke breeze circulates thickly around the spruce and elms and into the room through the soft fan whir. Somewhere nearby a bug zapper toasts one after another of the big north-woods Sabre-jet mosquitoes, and above me on the ceiling a smoke detector beams its little red-eye signal out of the dark.

  Floors below I hear fork and plate noises, chairs scraping, muffled laughter followed by footfalls trudging up the stairs past my door, the sound of a door closing and soon a toilet-flush—water skittering, splashing through pipes. Then the door reopens and more heavy footfalls fade into night.

  Through a wall I hear someone sawin’ ’em off just the way I must’ve been—stertorous, diligent, thorough-sounding breaths. Someone’s playing “Inchworm” on the spinet. I hear a car door open in the gravel lot below my window—the muffled ping, ping, ping of the interior “door open” bell—then a man and a woman talking in low voices, affectionately. “It’s dirt cheap here, really,” the male says in a whisper, as if others needed to be kept in the dark.

  “Yeah, but then what?” the female says, and giggles. “What would we do?”

  “What d’ya do anywhere?” he says. “Go fishing, play golf, eat dinner, fuck your wife. Just like home.”

  “I choose window number four,” she says. “There’s not enough of that back home.” She giggles again. Then thump, the trunk is slammed; chirp, a car alarm activated; crunch, their feet cross the gravel headed toward the lake. They are talking houses. I know. Tomorrow they’ll do some window-browsing, check with an agent, look through some listing books, see one house, maybe two, to get a feel, discuss a feasible “down,” then wander dreamily off down Main Street and never think one thought of it again. Not that it’s always that way. Some guys write out whopper checks, ship their furnishings, establish whole new lives in two weeks—and then think better of it all, after which they list the house again with the same realtor, take a beating on the carrying charges, shell out a penalty for early pay-off, and in this way, in the process of mistake and correction, the economy remains vibrant. In that sense real estate is not about finding your dream house but getting rid of it.