The Monsters of Templeton

by Lauren Groff

  Only in recent years did such coolness arise between Vi and me. When I was little, I would play cribbage and euchre with my young mother until midnight, laughing so hard I never wanted to go to the few sleepovers and birthday parties I was invited to. My mother and I held an odd relationship with the town, as we were the last remnants of its founder, Marmaduke Temple, and direct descendants of the great novelist Jacob Franklin Temple, whose novels we read every year in high school, whose link to me would actually make a college professor burst into tears when I confessed it. But we were too poor and my mother was young, unmarried, and too weird with her macramé and loud politics, and so when we left the safety of our eccentric house, it always felt like Vi and me against the world. I remember vividly when I was ten or so—which would have made my mother my age, twenty-eight—listening outside her door as she wept for hours after being slighted in the grocery store, that one memory standing in for many. I dreamt at night of being so big I could march down Main Street, grinding our enemies under my furious ogre’s feet.

  Alone now in the dawn, I drank the rest of my mother’s tea to melt the block of ice in my gut. Vi was wrong: I did want to come home. Templeton was to me like a less-important limb, something inherently mine, something I took for granted. My own tiny, lovely village with great old mansions and a glorious lake, my own grand little hamlet where everyone knows your name, but with elaborate little frills that made it unlike anywhere else: the baseball museum, the Opera, the hospital that had vast arms extending into the rest of upstate, an odd mix of Podunk and cosmopolitan. I came back when I had to, to feel safe, to recharge; I just hadn’t had to in so long.

  For a while I sat alone at the table, watching the crows fall into the vegetable garden, pecking at the heirloom vegetables that thrived every year under Vi’s benign neglect. Then the motorboat that had gone out before zipped back, and soon more motorboats were roaring out into the lake like a vee of geese. Curious, I slid open the glass door and went onto the porch, in the warming dawn. From where I stood, the hills around Lake Glimmerglass looked like the haunch end of a sleeping lion, smooth and pelted. I watched until the motorboats came back into sight, collectively straining to pull something pale behind them, something enormous and glinting in the new sun.

  And that’s how I found myself running barefoot over the cold grass down to Lakefront Park, even as weary as I was at that moment. I went past our pool, now so thick with algae that it had become a frog pond, plunking with a thousand belly flops of terror when I passed. I went down the stretch of lawn, across the concrete bridge over Shadow Brook, trespassed over Mrs. Harriman’s backyard until I stood in the road at Lakefront Park, and watched the motorboats coast in.

  I stood under the bronze statue of the Mohican, the best known of the characters by our town novelist, Jacob Franklin Temple, and, slowly, others gathered around me, people from my childhood who nodded at me in recognition, startled by the great change in my appearance, struck silent by the solemnity of the moment. Somehow, none of us was surprised. Templeton is a town of accreted myth: that baseball was invented here; that a petrified giant, ten feet tall and pockmarked with age, was disinterred from under the old mill—a hoax; that ghosts lived among us. And we had been prepared for this day by the myths we’d always heard about a lake monster, the childhood tales around campfires in the summer camps on the lake, the small rumors filtered down. The town crazy, Piddle Smalley, would stand on a bench in Farkle Park wearing his pants backward— urine-soaked, which is why we called him Piddle—and shout about the rain-swollen April day when he stood on the Susquehanna bridge, staring down into the fat river, and something immense passed by, grinning its black teeth up at him. He’d shriek at the end of his story Glimmey, Glimmey, Glimmey, as if in invocation.

  Most of Templeton was watching as the motorboats cut their engines and glided in. The Chief Uncas tourist boat groaned in the waves against the dock. The Running Buds climbed out with great gravitas, old joints creaking, and secured the beast’s tethers to the iron hitches in the walls at the lake’s edge. And in those brief minutes before the baseball tourists in town heard of our miracle and came running with their vulgar cameras and shouts and poses, before the news trucks drove ninety miles per hour from Oneonta, Utica, Albany, there, in the long, peaceful quiet, we had a few moments to consider our monster.

  In that brief time, we were able to see it in its entirety. The beast was huge, a heavy cream color that darkened to lemon in places, and was floating on its back. It looked like a carp grown enormous, with a carp’s fat belly and round eye, but with a long, articulated neck like a ballet dancer’s, and four finned legs, plump as a frog’s. The ropes of the motorboat had cut into its skin, and the wounds were open to the day, still oozing dark, thick blood. I stepped forward to touch the beast, then everyone else did. When I placed my hand upon its belly, I felt its porous skin, its hairs as small and delicate as the ones on my own arms, but thicker, as if the beast were covered in peach fuzz. And, though I had expected the early sun to have warmed it, the monster burned cold, as if its very core was made of the ice some said still existed at the bottom of our glacial lake.

  It was somehow clear, even then, that the monster had been lonely. The folds above its eye made the old face look wistful, and it emanated such a strong sense of solitude that each human standing in the park that day felt miles from the others, though we were shoulder-to-shoulder, touching. Later, we would hear that when the divers couldn’t reach the bottom of our lake, they called in deep-sea pods to search for another beast like the one that surfaced that day. We would hear that, scour as they might, they couldn’t find another beast like ours, only detritus: rusted tractors and plastic buoys, and even an antique phonograph. They found a yellow-painted phaeton in its entirety, the bones of a small spaniel inside. They also found dozens of human skeletons, drowned or dumped corpses, arranged side-by-side in some trick of current or metaphysics, on a shallow shelf near Kingfisher Tower, beside Judith’s Point.

  That morning, before I drew my hand away from the monster, I felt an overwhelming sadness, a sudden memory of one time in high school when I slipped to the country club docks at midnight with my friends, and, giggling, naked, we went into the dark star-stippled water, and swam to the middle of the lake. We treaded water there in the blackness, all of us fallen silent in the feeling of swimming in such perfect space. I looked up and began to spin. The stars streaked circular above me, my body was wrapped in the warm black, my hands had disappeared, my stomach was no longer, I was only a head, a pair of eyes. As I touched the beast I remembered how, even on that long-ago night, I could feel a tremendous thing moving in the depths below me, something vast and white and singing.

  Marmaduke Temple

  CIRCA 1800, the Gilbert Stuart portrait that now hangs in the Franklin House Museum

  2

  Marmaduke Temple

  AN EXCERPT FROM Tales of the American Wilderness, 1797

  In the spring of 1785 I left my family in New Jersey and traveled into the vast and melancholy wilderness of New York to survey and lay my name on the place that has since made my fortune and renown. It was a wondrous time, after the revolution, and in our young country, a man such as I, a once-unlettered maker of puncheon and barrel, could build himself from nothing and become great. The journey was difficult and the land still frozen, and I was alone in those parts still trod by bloodthirsty natives. I felt all the eyes of the forest upon me and slept with a knife in my hand.

  When at last I reached the edge of my land, I left my horse behind me to crop grass in a green and rich valley and struggled wearily up a great mountain to look upon a place yet untouched by man. The forest was quiet and I passed over the strange orange mushrooms, over the gnarled roots. All was dark at first, and the trees cast a midday twilight upon me. Then there was a rift in the darkness, a cliff where the trees dropped a hundred feet from the mountain’s lip, and there I stepped into the light.

  Below me the lake was cupped in its hills,
shimmering like a plate of glass. Three hawks circled in the pale sky and the hills arched with pines. From my perch I watched a mother bear and her cubs emerge near the river’s mouth to drink at the lake. There was no wind in this desolate New York wilderness, and all was calm.

  Suddenly before me rose a vision of ghostly buildings on the edge of the lake, a true city of spires and rooftops, a phantom bustle in the streets, smoke. I sank to my knees in the strange ferns. On the lip of the lake wavered the city I was to build, Templeton, a place of impossible importance pressed upon that virgin land, a great metropolis like Philadelphia, or London. And when my eyes lifted to the hills, I saw that they were covered in good things: heifers, orchards, vineyards, fields of wheat. I would carve a great civilization from this savage place. I would build a city, myself, from nothing.

  I must have been there for hours on that cliff’s edge, for when I came back to myself my knees ached. My vision had at last been blown by the wind into tendrils of dust and smoke and I had begun to see stranger visions, a huge billowing of something white and struggling in the water, something surrounded by a darkening stain before it sank again. I was later sure it was a cloud reflected in the glassy lake, but at the time this new vision filled my heart with a horrid thrill, and when I stood, I was weak and suddenly cold, shaking as if with an ague. I stood and moved back into the dark forest. Only in the cool embrace of the trees did I remember the glorious first vision I’d had, Templeton, rich with crops and industry. As I slipped over the damp humus I vowed I would return and stamp my will on the wild place, the image of my own hand. I would call the mountain where I had had my first taste of Templeton, Mount Vision, and the glassy lake upon which I looked, Lake Glimmerglass. And as I walked, I believed myself to be an Adam setting foot in a new Eden, sinless and wild-eyed, my sinews still stiff with creation.

  Vivienne Upton

  As a child, in the middle of a recitation for all of her father’s historian friends. And later, as a young hippie.

  3

  Vivienne, Bright and Beautiful

  A GIRL WAS in the sun on a shuddering bus, a rash of acne across her cheekbones. Her polyester dress had been dyed black in the ladies’ room sink of some midwestern terminal, and the dye job was clearly quick and recent: the orange flowers were still bursting across the fabric, though now a cindered color, and there were black marks like bruises wherever the dress touched her skin. The dress didn’t really touch much of her skin, however, as it was both a halter top and a mini-mini skirt, and the girl shouldn’t really have been wearing it, as she was both far too plump for it and goosebumped, having traveled from a mild San Francisco February into an upstate New York ice storm. Of course, she didn’t really feel the cold, having popped a very nice pill only a few hours earlier, and was deep in a voluptuous, openmouthed sleep.

  The farmwife who boarded outside Erie, Pennsylvania, stared at the sleeping girl indignantly, chewing her own upper gum. At last she heaved out “hippie,” having brooded on the word like a hen on an egg for two hundred miles. Now that it was delivered of her, she fell asleep herself, in a position mirroring the young girl’s own.

  The girl was, of course, Vivienne, my mother. It was early 1973, and she was seventeen years old, returning home to Templeton. She would always feel this wild girl was the truest of any of the people she had already been: adored daughter, bourgeois priss, rebel, runaway, dope-fiend San Francisco hippie; or all the people she would later be: mother, nurse, religious fanatic, prematurely old woman. Vivienne was a human onion, and when I came home at twenty-eight years old on the day the monster died, I was afraid that the Baptist freak she had peeled down to was her true, acrid, tear-inducing core.

  But then she was only a girl, though a highly medicated one. A tin peace medallion patted and patted her braless chest with every jerk of the bus, as if in sympathy for her new orphanhood. Both of her parents, she knew hazily, had somehow expired, but she knew little about how or why, and it hadn’t really occurred to her that they were gone. When Vivienne opened her eyes next, it was to behold the white buildings of Templeton at the end of the lake, huddling there like a flock of geese, ready to hiss. She was so innocent she didn’t realize the town would soon turn on her. That girl has gone too far, the gossips would say. Just look at her. She was dangerous, they felt, a one-woman protest march, just tempting their children into pot and sex and sit-ins by the mere unkempt look of her, those hairy legs, those bloodshot eyes.

  Vi as yet had no idea of this imminent betrayal: Templeton was her town, she felt. She was related to the tremendous Marmaduke Temple, a direct descendant of both the great man and his great novelist son, Jacob Franklin Temple. She thought of the town as her ancestral seat, even though she also had a vague idea that, as a hippie, she wasn’t supposed to believe in all that jazz anymore.

  Poor Vivienne. When she disembarked from the bus by the old railroad depot and dragged the (stolen) blue suitcase to the curb, she didn’t realize that there would be nobody to pick her up. She sat there for an hour, quaking with cold, sure she had told her father to come for her when the bus pulled in. At last, she remembered the car accident and the terrible telephone call during a party, when she thought for a long time that the attorney trying to tell her of her parents’ death was a friend playing a practical joke.

  Then the new orphan in her flimsy California dress dragged the suitcase behind her all the way down the lacquered ice on Main Street, past the courthouse, past the Civil War memorial, under the one blinking yellow yield light on Chestnut, all the way to Averell Cottage, where there were no lights, no warmth, nothing to greet her but even more silence.

  She saw the note from the lawyer by the telephone but was too tired to read it. And it was only when she wearily climbed the stairs to where there were twin dips in the mattress where her parents had lain for so many years that she understood what had happened. That though this felt trippy, it was actual unsleepoffable reality. When she awoke in the morning in their bed, her parents were still gone, and she had missed their funeral by a day.

  The next day Vivienne walked about with her head thick, as if overstuffed with wool, feeling for the first time like an orphan. But she didn’t cry then, and wouldn’t cry until years later, when, chopping a tomato still warm from the garden, she would put down her knife and go upstairs to the bed and weep and wail for three days straight, not even getting up when her four-year-old daughter stood in the doorway, sucking her finger, bringing up boxes of cereal and pushing the little o’s one by one into her mother’s wet red face. At the end of which time, Vi would dry her eyes, pick the three dried tomato seeds off her chin, and go back downstairs to restart the gazpacho she was making when she had her little breakdown.

  The official story of my grandparents’ deaths went like this: George and Phoebe Upton (née Tipton) died together by automobile. The obituary said that they were speeding too fast over East Lake Road when they hit an icy skid and roared off a thirty-foot precipice onto soft ice, which they cracked through. Knocked out from the crash, they drowned in the wintry water. George was the town historian, PhD Yale, working out of the New York State Historical Association library. This library was in the vast fieldstone farmhouse called Franklin Manor that George had, perhaps not unrelatedly, donated to NYSHA; although it was built by Jacob Franklin Temple and had been passed through the generations, it was so vast and expensive that George couldn’t carry it with his limited means.

  George was not a man to care about lost fortunes, but his tremulous little wife, Phoebe, often started her sentences with a sigh and, “When we were rich…” As in “When we were rich, the butcher always let us pay with credit,” and “When we were rich, we knew the Roosevelts,” though that was an outright fib: it was George’s parents who had known the Roosevelts. In town, it was commonly assumed the family had lost its fortune in the great crash of ’29, though it was more due to George’s absentminded mismanagement than anything else.

  As George often said, he couldn’t care less
for filthy lucre. He was strange: prematurely antique, stern, smelling of musty books and cattails. Vi never once had a hug from him. But she understood him, she always said: he was raised by his grandmother, whose sole enthusiasm was the orphanage where the old folks’ home, Pomeroy Hall, is now, and Vi often wondered if he felt less like her kin and more like one of her orphans. His own mother had drowned in the lake when George was tiny, and after that he never saw his father, who, crippled with grief, moved to Manhattan and only sent a check and a terse note to the boy every month. Still, George was happy enough, in his way, Vi told me. He, she found out when she returned to Templeton, had a private obsession that had taken up all his attention.

  That morning Vi found herself sitting, shivering, in the lawyer’s office, glimpsing the idea that her father’s passion for his work was deeper than she had imagined. In fact, the lawyer intimated, its souring was perhaps what led her phlegmatic father to send the Cadillac spinning over the brink.

  “Ahem. Your father,” he said gently, “was perhaps too, well, susceptible to criticism?”

  To this, Vivienne could only say, “Hell, yeah,” remembering the way her square daddy-o would freak out even at the slightest criticism of the Republican Party, Templeton, or his own uneven bowties. The lawyer smiled with great unction at the girl. Chauncey Todd was an old friend of her family’s, a man who had a habit of drawling over words he wanted to emphasize. He was also a breast-ogler, addressing her two great sagging boobs as if he were primarily sorry for their loss—of possible support, perhaps—and only secondarily for the girl’s they were attached to. He wondered if what they said was true, and those hippie girls really were as loose as they were said to be.