The Monsters of Templeton

by Lauren Groff

  I went down the steps and smiled up at him, shading my eyes with my hand. “Oh, I think we’ll know each other again, Zeke,” I said. “Ezekiel. Sexy old Felcher, you,” I laughed and I heard his reluctant chuckle all the way down Fair Street to the wide blue spread of the lake.

  RIGHT BEFORE MY going-away dinner we had appetizers on the porch, and Clarissa was telling, with her usual wild gestures, a story about an undercover assignment she’d once done as a stripper in a North Beach club. Her shtick, of course, was a schoolgirl dancing to AC/DC, and she made great money on the stage, but always fell into arguments when it came time to do the lap dances.

  “Then,” she was saying, “the night the city commissioner came in and wanted me to call him ‘Uncle Billy’ and tug on his tie until he couldn’t breathe, that was the end. I gave a little shimmy and was reaching out toward his tie when I planted my foot in his…”

  I had just gone inside to open another bottle of wine. I’d heard this story before, many times, and so I was already laughing softly when I saw, in the bouquet of mail my mother had brought in earlier, the unmistakably lurid corner of a postcard. My heart did a slow revolution in my chest. My stomach sank, sour. I pulled the postcard out until I could see it whole.

  On the front was an overexposed photograph of a municipal building that could’ve been from anywhere in the country: Redwood City, California; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; Delhi, New York. A boxlike 1960s affair, bland and gray.

  I turned the postcard over, and, next to my name and address, was one word: Sorry.

  For a moment, grief woke and stretched like a cat in me. Primus, I thought, and imagined him in his Mr. Toad waistcoat, stealthily slipping the postcard into the mailbox and hurrying away into the California sun. But then I looked more closely and recognized the script. Neat, tight. Architectural. Sully, from his small Arizona town.

  I held the postcard and looked outside where Clarissa was miming putting her dukes up for my mother and Reverend Milky, who were laughing, clutching their ample sides. She grinned and shook her finger at her imaginary opponent; their laughter pealed into the dusk. I could’ve brought the postcard out to show her, put it on her pillow for her to find later; it was, I think, what Sully had intended by sending it; it was what I would’ve done before that summer. Instead, I spun it across the room like a Frisbee into the trash, where it settled among the wet coffee grounds and soaked brown and unreadable. Then I slid open the vast glass door and stepped through it, closed it behind me. I walked toward Clarissa, who was finishing her story, whose face had a faint flush to it, and I was already applauding.

  I left Templeton as the sun began to set in the crown of trees on the West Lake hills. In the rearview mirror, I watched as my mother held Clarissa beside her, and my best friend settled into Vi’s kind bulk. Reverend Milky had a plump hand on my mother’s shoulder, and this little cluster seemed so right, so good, I almost turned the key and stepped out of the car again, and joined them in the magnificent Templeton August dusk. But I didn’t. I put the car into gear and rolled up Lake Street, pinching them small and then smaller in the mirror, until they disappeared.

  As my car hummed over the Susquehanna, I had a bright vision of myself coming home. And unlike fantasies, where I am far more glamorous and beautiful than I ever end up becoming, this, I knew, was real: there was a child in my arms, a plumpness swelling in my belly, and it was nighttime, and the lights of Templeton glittered in the deep black of the lake. Some dark shadow beside me was a husband, maybe, and perhaps he was singing, and though I couldn’t hear the voice or the words, I know it made me calm.

  This stayed in my mind like a song, this vision of myself, as I drove out of Templeton that evening. The air through my windows smelled fresh, pine-clean. I thought of Primus Dwyer, awaiting me in his little office at Stanford, and though I tried to be stern with myself, I couldn’t help a tiny little smile from spreading over my face before I tamped it down again. I couldn’t wholly swallow that rising knot of badness in me.

  But then the road uncoiled long and shaded before me, the good, glorious world in its perpetual rot, in its constant downswing, the whole world before me in its headlong, flaming fall, and I still didn’t know when the dark ground would rush up toward us. Just then, I couldn’t care. My town glimmered at my back. The asphalt hummed underneath. And the last sunlight sparking off the lake winked through the spinning trees.

  35

  The Running Buds (Big Tom, Little Thom, Johann, Sol, Doug, Frankie) Yet Again

  THIS DAWN, WE all saw it, we have seen it, we know it; we all saw that gold leaf as it fell from the tree. We ran up to it, we ran under it, we ran past it, we fell silent. The arbiter of autumn and we watched its long, slow seesaw all the way to the ground. It is now September, the summer will be over; it was long, it was hard, but soon there will be the geese. Soon, breath in the mornings, soon long sleeves and tights, headbands to protect our delicate ears. The dawns will turn blacker and they will come later, we will skip work for the cold football field, the leaf smoke in our noses, coffee in hand, cheering those young boys who could be our sons but are not, and we will stand there watching for the fun of it, for the game. We will watch their young legs run and cheer them on. Today the dock is being taken out at the country club. The tourists have thinned after the Baseball Museum Induction Weekend, the opera singers have packed themselves into their undramatic little sedans and driven home to Manhattan or Topeka. The Chief Uncas, the guide boat in the lake, will be withdrawn tomorrow and packed away in a boat hangar in Hartwick. We will settle in, settle down, curtail our runs to under four miles. We will then wait for winter.

  Big Tom has his daughter back, detoxing at his camp on the west side of the lake. She won’t say where she was, but she is back. Little Thom underwent a bypass, and all looks good; he will run again with us in a few months. We are planning to make tee shirts saying CAUTION: OUR TICKERS ARE TIME BOMBS. Now he meets us at the Cartwright Café and drinks his decaf and laughs at Frankie. Frankie is happier, has gained weight back, has scattered his parents’ ashes over the ocean on his vacation. Doug was dumped by his little mistress for a six-foot-eight ex-baseball catcher whose name is being bandied about to be added to the baseball museum. His wife forgave him. The IRS has not, but his jail time will be short, and we will not speak of it ever afterward. Johann’s daughter brought home her lover, and she’s so funny, so butch she looks like a man, so good with power tools that they’ve made plans to put up wainscoting in the guest bedroom on their next visit.

  And Sol, Sol was the big winner, Sol the childless, three-time divorcee with a sudden daughter, wowzers, Willie Upton, Amherst and Stanford graduate, smart as all get-out, beautiful, a girl who even babysat for us when our own children were small. Who would have thought that all this time, when we thought we knew of all the affairs, the old hurts, the wounds, that Sol could hide something as big as an affair with that old hippie Vivienne Upton? He didn’t know about his daughter, of course. But that Willie has restored his faith in his own pecker, his virility, his manliness. No more ground tiger’s penis, no more tisanes of strange black herbs slipped to him under the counter at Aristabulus Mudge’s pharmacy. That Sol could make a child like Willie was worth three dead marriages, as he said yesterday, unable to contain his grin.

  We all hooted, we all ran a little faster. And then yesterday, Big Tom said something that made us all quiet again for two good miles. We ran in silence, in awe. We didn’t even spit. We didn’t even fart. We were struck with joy that was as big as the Templeton we were circling on our run, on our loop, spread before us.

  Even now, on our run today, we are so glad, we see it as if it had happened before us: Big Tom’s meth-head daughter swimming alone at three in the morning, sleepless in withdrawal, swears she went under the dark water once. She opened her eyes. She looked in the person-size face of a small white monster, staring at her curiously and waving its fish tail. She says it was much like our monster, our vast haul that morning in July, but in
miniature. The girl forgot to tread water, sank lower and lower, and the monster sank right along with her. The girl looked at the big, bulging belly. The dancer’s neck. The feet with articulated phalanges. The little monster opened its mouth with its inkblack teeth, and Big Tom’s girl swears it smiled.

  The girl was so relaxed she almost took a breath. She almost let water into her lungs and let herself drown. But she didn’t, she kicked up, kicked to the surface, passed that little monster that accompanied her up. She took a big, fresh lungful of air. The monster swam back with her to the dock, and looked up at her as she climbed out. She never once felt fear, the girl said. It was not out to harm her. It just wanted a friend. Before the monster flippered back to its depths, she reached out a finger and felt the downy skin. And she was washed with happiness like honey. The monster grinned its inky grin again, and away it dove.

  So. We ponder this as we run. We have a monster in the lake again, a baby, an offshoot of our old one. We probably should tell the authorities, but we can’t make ourselves, we can’t bring back the divers, the scientists, the media, we can’t give it again to the world. It is ours, Templeton’s. We will keep it close.

  We will swim on Lake Glimmerglass on the Fourth of July next summer, take out all our motorboats and float in the lake. Drunk, we will dive into the water when the sun sizzles out over the west hills, and the bats flit above, and the brass band at the Firemen’s Carnival on Lakefront Park will start up, and the smell of cotton candy will blow out over the lake, and we will gather there in the water as the launch at Fairy Springs begins to send bright fireworks into the night sky. We will kick and kick in the water there, run in the water together, watching the bursts reflected on the water around us in gold and green and red, and we will swim and watch the stars when the fireworks fall, and we will feel good, we will feel glee, because below our feet, there will be swimming a white monster, a beautiful thing, brushing its back on our feet, young and naughty. And it will be Templeton’s. It will be ours, and ours alone.

  Epilogue

  ON THE DAY it Dies, the Monster Thinks of:

  fish and fish and fish and fish and fish;

  the darkness soon lightening, the sun soon opening its eyes;

  how it will soon see the wriggly duck-bottoms from below;

  now the pain rising dark and terrible from the monster’s deepest parts;

  and how it will soon see the people legs kickety-kicking up there in the bright surface and how it loves to watch the legs kickety-kick and how it always hopes the people belonging to the legs forget to go up into the air and begin to sink;

  how the people sink and scream bubbly underwater screams and hurt the monster’s ears, and then they stop screaming and thrashing;

  how the monster darts like a minnow to the limp and falling body, puts out its hand and catches the falling person;

  how upon falling into the monster’s hand the person’s face would soften and the person would stop screaming and thrashing and a peaceful look would come over it;

  and how the monster loves them, those pretty unmoving people, takes them and strokes their hair like moss and holds their smoothness to its chest and lets the warmth of those tiny bodies touch the cold of its big body;

  now the pain, the searing, the terrible pain;

  and how sometimes the little dead people would come untethered from the lakeweed the monster had tied them in so they wouldn’t go floating up into the broad air, for even when they turned purple and their flesh fell off, the monster loves them;

  and even when their flesh is polished off with water and leaves only their gleaming bones, the monster even still loves them;

  now the pain the pain the pain the terrible pain;

  and when the monster only has the delicate bones left, it cradles them and carries them to the little shelf near the tower of stones that the men had built only a few heartbeats ago, where the monster keeps its beautiful bones and it sweeps the mud from the many bones and places the new bones beside the other bones and gently presses them into the clay there;

  now another rip of pain;

  and the monster makes a sound and watches three months’ worth of air leave its mouth, watches the huge bubble spin toward the surface to explode;

  how the monster has no strength to go the great distance from the dark depths to the bright air for another breath;

  now the pain, faster now, deeper, darker;

  the nights the monster spent with its ear twenty feet below the surface, listening to the roar of the people of Templeton, breathing and moving and speaking, the fishes and the leaves wiggling in the trees;

  the pain, darkest now;

  now the monster’s gaze is darkening and it is beginning to float upward through the thick water and into the thin;

  and one last wrench of pain;

  now a tiny blinking thing in a pool of spooling blood, a queer, pale thing with a long neck, with the monster’s own hands;

  now the vast ancient monster and the small new monster stare at each other;

  and the vast monster floats upward, away, and the last thing it sees is the little monster snapping with its black teeth at a little fish going by;

  and as the vast monster’s membranous eyelids go down, it remembers the music of the surface, that intricate music of wind and human and animal and other;

  how with that music the monster was not all alone, not alone, for a while;

  how the darkness falls even as the monster floats into the light, thinking of music;

  how the darkness falls and the water is pricked with dawn-light;

  how it is good

  and it is good

  and it is good

  Acknowledgments

  MY DEEPEST THANKS to…

  all the people at Hyperion and Voice who worked so hard and made this book stronger, but especially my champions, Pamela Dorman, my brilliant editor, and Ellen Archer, Voice’s publisher, both of whom believed in this story from the beginning;

  Sarah Landis, associate editor extraordinaire, Beth Gebhard, Voice’s publicity director, and my own publicist, Allison McGeehon;

  Bill Clegg, my agent, who flew to Louisville and won my eternal adoration;

  The UW-Madison MFA faculty: Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Ron Kuka, Judith Claire Mitchell, Rob Nixon, and Ron Wallace;

  With a special thanks to Lorrie Moore, who is lovely and wise beyond belief;

  My buddies in the program, among whom Steph Bedford, Christopher Kang, Anna Potter, and Rita Mae Reese gave more than I could ever return;

  Kevin A. González, a friend in need and deed (indeed);

  Yaddo and the Vermont Studio Center, havens for hungry writers;

  Anne Axton and the University of Louisville Creative Writing department for the astounding gift of the Axton fellowship;

  All my friends whom I neglected when writing took over, especially Katie Harper and Jaime Muehl;

  My midnight skinny-dippers Lisa (Senchyshyn) Trever, Meghann (Graham) Perillo, and Jeff Dean;

  The original Running Buds: Pat Dietz, Donny Raddatz, Jerry Groff, Mikey Stein, Bobby Snyder, and Bill Streck, whose whip cracked all the way to Wisconsin;

  My husband, Clay, gentle giant, first reader, and favorite person in the world;

  Adam and Sarah, my siblings (and the fire in their bellies);

  Cooperstown, and all the people who live there, have lived there, or loved the village even a little;

  And, last and best, my parents, Gerald and Jeannine Groff, for their boundless love, support, and foresight for giving us such a gift of a hometown.

  Reading Group Guide

  1. What did you think of the range of voices and time periods the author employs in The Monsters of Templeton? How would the novel have been different had the story been told from a single point of view, or been set in one era?

  2. “As soon as it died, our lives spiraled down,” the Buds lament in Chapter 13, on the death of the Lake Glimmerglass monster. Why are so many p
eople in Templeton affected by the monster’s death? What did the monster represent to them?

  3. Given her conflicted relationship with her mother and, to a lesser extent, with her hometown, why do you think Willie Upton decides to go back to Templeton? What was Willie looking for when she returned to Templeton? Does she find it?

  4. In what instances do ghosts make appearances in The Monsters of Templeton? What do the ghosts represent? What other symbols does the author employ in the novel? What do they mean?

  5. In the Author’s Note, the author discusses writing about her hometown of Cooperstown, New York, and calling the fictional town Templeton. Do you think that The Monsters of Templeton could have taken place in any other locale? Why is the actual town’s history so important to the book’s present-day events? How would the book have changed if she had decided to call the town Cooperstown?

  6. For twenty-eight years, Vivienne has told her daughter that Willie was the product of a hippie commune. The day that Willie returns home, she decides to tell her the truth: that her father was a man in Templeton. What would you have done if you were in Willie’s position? Or in Vivienne’s?

  7. Of the many characters from the past—Marmaduke Temple, Davey Shipman, Charlotte and Cinnamon, Elizabeth Franklin Temple, to name a few—which one(s) stood out for you? Why?

  8. Vivienne’s life is seemingly full of contradictions: She’s a former drug-using hippie with a child out of wedlock who later converts to Christianity and becomes the chaste girlfriend of a minister. Talk about these and other aspects of Vivienne’s character. How are she and Willie different, and similar?

  9. What did you think of Willie’s search to uncover her father’s identity? What did each new layer of history teach Willie about her family? Why was it important that Willie learn everything she learned?

  10. What was your opinion of Ezekiel Felcher at the beginning of the novel? Did it change as the novel progressed? Did you think that Willie might stay in Templeton to be with him? What do you think she should have done? What do you think she will do in the future?