The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  Sincerely, Caroline Huddy

  Chapter Sixteen

  She owned a nicer home than might be expected of an unmarried black nurse: a two-story redbrick, built for the upper middle class in the nineteen forties, rigorously constructed, Bavarian in its details, and now, almost seven decades later, made elegant by time and the upward spiraling of Boston ivy. Three gorgeous elm trees shaded the backyard. There were stained-glass windows in the kitchen and master bedroom, two richly manteled fireplaces, a dumbwaiter, a roomy and mostly dry basement. She’d been fortunate on two accounts. The previous owners—an elderly black married couple, proprietors of a nearby hardware store—had been meticulous caretakers of the property. But when she’d bought the home, eleven years earlier, the neighborhood was skirting toward a neglected state. A few windows in nearby houses had been sealed with plastic. There was windblown litter in the streets. Worrying signs, to be sure. She’d acquired the house for just sixty-four thousand and braced herself for further decline. Almost at once the opposite happened. Other bargain hunters—black, white, Asian, gay—began buying up properties along her street. In a short while the neighborhood had stabilized, and each year since then it had incrementally improved. If she had to, she could sell the house now for more than twice what she’d paid for it.

  Her guest for the weekend, Wyatt Huddy, seemed impressed without knowing a shred of this history. “Harriet?” he said while towing his luggage along the neat little sidewalk to the front steps. He lifted his head in order to follow the sprawl of ivy all the way up to the eaves of the second floor. “This is your house,” he said, as if trying to convince himself. “Harriet, are you . . . ?”

  Most likely he’d wanted to know if she was rich. It wasn’t politeness that kept him from asking. He’d been hushed by the arched church door entranceway, with its cast-iron knocker, hushed again by the warm burnished woodwork of the interior hallway, the tiled kitchen, the living room with its plump oak mantel. She escorted him from room to room and watched him absorb each detail: a sharp, craning glance from his tilted head, a huff of surprise or quick grimace of satisfaction. How nice to feel that the home she’d perfected over the years was so appreciated. Then again, what did Wyatt Huddy have as points of comparison? When measured against the Huddy farm or Living Cottage No. 8, it must seem like she lived in a cut-from-a-storybook palace.

  She took him to the guest room and placed his rollaway luggage on a sea chest, showed him the bathroom and the portable radio, which he could use to listen to the Cardinals game that evening. Then, though she’d meant to save the surprise for later, she led him to a narrow door off the kitchen and down a flight of steps to a basement that was lit by dusty bare bulbs. The surprise was in the far corner: a long and wide tarp-covered platform. She pulled back the tarp.

  Not just a model railroad layout; that would be neither accurate nor fair. On the platform was an expansive reproduction of a bygone midwestern town, a settlement of some twenty faux-wood buildings—from the nineteen thirties maybe, but also timeless—set among rolling hills and mossy green pastureland and circled by three interweaving track lines. A very energetic town, by the look of it. A throng of customers, tiny but ecstatic, crowded around a produce truck. Little men heaved pickaxes on the gravel shoulders of the tracks. At the baseball park an Irish setter had raced out onto center field, where it took a joyful, frozen leap. All of it, of course—the figures, the buildings, the lush landscape—was too painstaking and pure to have ever existed in real life.

  The layout had been a gift for James and had arrived four years after the closing of Kindermann Forest, when the boy was nine years old. It had come from Schuller Kindermann, who’d telephoned one morning to announce to Harriet that he’d sold his St. Louis town house and was moving to a retirement community in nearby Webster Groves. He was then eighty-two years old. His brother, Sandie, had recently passed away. Most of their town house possessions had been let go in an estate sale. But Schuller had a very special model railroad layout he’d like to pass on to James. “Would that be all right with you, Nurse Harriet?” he’d asked, a steady tremor of apprehension in his voice. They’d not seen or spoken to one another in several years. Perhaps he was worried she’d refuse his offer. Or resurrect a past grievance. But why on earth would she do either of those things? “Yes,” she’d said. “Thank you. That would be very nice, Mr. Kindermann.” He’d let forth a sigh of relief and said he’d send some boys over on Saturday morning. She had better, he suggested, make a little room in her basement.

  She couldn’t remember now what exactly she’d expected—a delivery boy maybe, hauling a large box of wire train track down into her basement? Instead there’d been a rented U-Haul truck and a team of three very earnest boy-men hired from a local hobby shop. Her basement doorway hadn’t been wide enough. The boy-men needed to dismantle one of the basement window wells and pass the platform through in eight separate sections. Then, over the course of the day, they reassembled the layout, glued and painted the seams, reconnected the wiring, tested the lights inside the little buildings, the track, the locomotives, and set out the tiny human and animal figurines. The finished platform occupied a third of Harriet’s basement. She might have been outraged if the layout hadn’t been so absurdly beautiful. James was overwhelmed: a miniaturized world all to himself. For years he regarded the layout with quiet adoration. No single item Harriet had given the boy had produced such awe and lasting pleasure.

  As she expected, Wyatt Huddy was astonished. But his clear, grinning surprise was tempered by his need to inspect the layout up close. He knelt on one knee at the edge of the platform and touched, very gently, the round red and white Rx sign mounted above the drugstore. He asked to know who’d built the layout. Was it James? Had James put this together all by himself?

  It had come to James, she explained, as a gift. From Schuller Kindermann. This fact appeared to complicate Wyatt’s satisfaction: a gift from Schuller Kindermann, who had died seven years after moving to his retirement community, died of a stroke at the prosperous age of eighty-nine. This made the layout an heirloom, an artifact handed down from a man whose lifework as a summer camp owner Wyatt had helped bring to an early end.

  “Was it made especially for James?” Wyatt asked.

  “I don’t think so, no. I think Mr. Kindermann and his brother made it especially for themselves. When he got old and moved to a nursing home, Mr. Kindermann decided to pass it along to James. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “It is. Very beautiful.”

  Over the years she’d led dozens of guests down to her basement and pulled back the tarp. She’d enjoyed the variety of surprised reactions. One evening she’d revealed the layout to a rowdy group of women nurses who’d gathered at her house for after-work margaritas. The sight of the layout had made them gasp and put their hands to their mouths. Where had it come from? they wanted to know. Harriet explained how the layout had been a gift created by a pair of elderly brothers, bachelor brothers, never married, never even dated, as far as anyone knew. “Amazing,” her friend Patty Donahue said. She sipped her drink and grinned. “So this is what grown men do when they’ve given up all hope. When there’s no chance they’ll ever get laid.”

  There was a sudden peal of laughter from the other nurses—a bark of laughter, exuberant, righteous, feminine. They stepped closer to the platform, took another look at the tidy little features of the layout, and raised their margarita glasses in salute.

  After lunch Wyatt Huddy helped her rake grass trimmings and tree branches from her backyard. They loaded debris into recycling bins, and he hauled them out to the back alleyway. How pleased he looked, how satisfied, to help her with these chores. He was equally content to walk with her along the tree-shaded sidewalks of her neighborhood, out to the main thoroughfare. It was her good fortune to live in an area of the city known for its boutique shops and art cinema and ethnic restaurants, known also for its generous mixing of races and for its tolerance of street musicians, loiterers, eccen
tric personalities. Few people stared at them as they walked along.

  Already she’d developed a steady sense of his presence, a step behind her, head lowered, no sound from him except the low scuff of his sneakers on the pavement. Her constant companion.

  More constant than her son, James. This wasn’t a complaint, not exactly. She was wholly grateful to be his mother. But what a richer and more demanding experience it had been to be the guardian of his childhood. James was twenty years old now, and she’d like to say that he’d been successfully launched into adulthood. And who knew? Maybe it was true. He lived an independent life. He made fiberglass sculpture and played bass in an indie-rock band and worked as a parking valet, a courier, a Web designer, a part-time vendor of jewelry and obscure T-shirts. She suspected he smoked too much pot. All of these activities he conducted three hundred miles away in Chicago. He’d moved there for no better reason than to share an apartment with friends. That was two years ago. Since then he’d finished one semester of college. He’d had several serious relationships with girls. Several relationships. It sounded reassuring. But Harriet could phrase it differently. She could say he’d been co-opted by several young women, a certain kind of young woman: dreadlocked, tattooed, either African American or Caucasian, free spirits, or so it seemed. With James these women, girls really, saw an opportunity to claim an inward and obliging young man and enlist him in their service. Eventually he got tired of it and stood up for himself.

  In these matters Harriet kept her opinions mostly to herself. How could she not? She’d been involved in her own romantic relationships over the years. When it came to men, she hadn’t denied herself. Her work life provided certain opportunities: a hospital security guard, a former patient or two, a male nurse, and even, for a few weeks, a cardiologist. At their best these relationships had reassured her on several fronts. Men still noticed her. At least some men did. She might not have been a striking middle-aged woman. Admittedly, she’d grown thick around the middle. Twenty years of nursing had left her feet uneven and achy, her back a little stooped. Most days she wore a thick support belt to help hoist patients from their beds. Like a lot of other veteran nurses, she teetered a bit when she walked. But the men she dated didn’t seem to notice or mind. They liked her company. In the past she’d worried she might have harbored a secret preference for white men. Yet the strength of her affections didn’t seem to bear this out. She’d dated and slept with a modest but satisfying variety: African American, Jewish, Jamaican, Italian. She’d had no crippling need, as some of her friends did, to marry these men or occupy the same address.

  Throughout these relationships, and over the course of fifteen years, there’d been James to consider, and beyond James, always in the background, always waiting for her in a locked-down state institution, Wyatt Huddy. She’d only told a few close friends about Wyatt. Among her fellow nurses, Harriet didn’t announce her intentions. She never said, Is it Tuesday afternoon already? Well then, I’m off to the Gateway Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center to see my poor, dear friend, Wyatt Huddy. At the Gateway campus she was known to the security officers and care attendants as Wyatt Huddy’s advocate, his devoted lady friend. They approved of her commitment. Over time they’d come to treat Harriet with a fussy brand of respect.

  But they didn’t know her reasons. And they had an unreliable memory when it came to the extent of Harriet’s devotion. At various times during Wyatt’s incarceration, her attendance had been less than perfect. In the summer of 2005, for instance, she’d been occupied with James. He was a stealthy and moody fourteen-year-old boy. Was he sliding into delinquency? Not really. But she wasn’t sure of anything at the time. And she’d been involved that summer with a high school history teacher, a lively and impulsive man who liked to travel to other cities during his summer break. Harriet couldn’t help herself: on her weekends off she’d gone with him to Minneapolis and New Orleans and, once even, all the way to Clearwater, Florida. As for Wyatt, the best she could do was call Living Cottage No. 8 and check in with him. Are you doing all right, Wyatt? Are you getting along okay? He assured her he was. Good, she said. Look here. I’m not going to be able to make it out next Saturday, or for a little while after that. I’m really busy with things, Wyatt. But that’ll change once I get everything . . . you know, in order. All right then. I’ll be out and see you as soon as I can.

  Yes, he said. Yes, thank you, Harriet.

  Then she rushed off with the history teacher—a very able lover—to the Le Pavillon Hotel in New Orleans. At various moments throughout the weekend her heart panged with guilt—for James, mostly. She’d had to send him away to her aunt Marie’s for another weekend. That wasn’t fair, was it? As for Wyatt, his steadfast and complacent tone sometimes irritated her. Yes, thank you, Harriet. Such a dutiful man. It was important to remember though: he was capable of acting on his own. She shouldn’t hold herself responsible for everything. At Kindermann Forest she’d sent him out to find the camp van and to interrupt Christopher Waterhouse. The rest of it—the broken ribs, the traumatic asphyxiation—had been Wyatt’s doing.

  Several more weeks slipped by. Her obligations toward Wyatt weighed on her. It seemed that she’d gone a long time without visiting—a month maybe, or nearly so. One morning at work she’d pulled a calendar from her purse and marked the number of days. It was awful to see it tallied up. Forty-three days had passed since she’d visited the Gateway Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center. Forty-three days. It pained her to imagine the effect on Wyatt. Each of those days he’d been clinging to his routine and waiting for her.

  She’d hurried to her car after work and driven straight to the Gateway campus. The care attendants in Living Cottage No. 8 had been glad to usher her in. Wyatt, they’d called out. Wyatt. Your lady friend is here.

  He’d been seated at the common room table with a jigsaw puzzle set out before him. At the sight of her, he’d sat back in his chair. His odd mouth had creased open. Across his face had bloomed an intense expression—not anger, not aloofness. Either of those would have been easier for Harriet to take. No, this was a trickier reaction to handle. It had made her eyes prick. She’d had to sit down quickly in the nearest chair.

  “Nurse Harriet,” he’d said. His face had reddened, a blush of gratitude. Clearly, he couldn’t help himself; he was so very glad, so very relieved, to see her.

  For dinner that evening Harriet served baked catfish and French fries along with baby carrots she’d slow-cooked in a Crock-Pot. Her guest lowered his head over his plate and ate in neat little bites while wiping the corners of his mouth with a paper napkin. He hardly said a word. As soon as he finished, he stood and, as he’d been taught at Gateway Living Cottage No. 8, rinsed his plate and silverware in water and set them out beside the kitchen sink. He settled back into his chair at the kitchen table.

  “Wyatt,” Harriet said. “If you’re eating a meal someone made for you, and you think it’s good, you can say so. You can say something like ‘This is good catfish, Harriet.’”

  He stretched open his eyes and peered at her from behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right. That’s a good thing to know, Harriet.” There was nothing playful or sarcastic in his remark. On the contrary, he looked very pleased to have been offered this advice.

  “I’d like to ask you something,” she said. “How’s it feel to be away from the living cottage?”

  “Good.”

  “Good? That doesn’t tell me a whole lot. How is it good?”

  He required some time to consider the possibilities. “Well, it’s good to be away from some of the living cottage people . . . B.J. and Miss Gladys. And it’s good to go outside and walk around.”

  “And what else? I’d like to know what’s on your mind. Your opinions of things.”

  He sat up straighter in his chair and nodded to himself. “That was a good catfish dinner, Harriet.”

  “Thank you for saying so. Would you like to cook dinner sometime?”

  “
Me?” he asked. “Oh, no, no, no. I couldn’t do that.”

  “But would you like to learn to cook? Or learn to do something else?”

  “I might,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  “Or go visit some other city?”

  “Yes, maybe,” he said doubtfully.

  “You know what I think about, Wyatt?” she said.

  And he did know, clearly. Because his back and shoulders stiffened and he put his hands on the table edge, bracing himself for her apology. He’d endured at least a dozen apologies from Harriet over the years in various circumstances and in different locations. Certain anniversaries made her apologize. During his incarceration she’d tried to express her remorse each time he’d been placed in a different jail or holding cell. At the Gateway Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center she’d apologized each time he’d had to adjust to a new room or living cottage.

  She said, “I think about how your life would have turned out different if you hadn’t gone to Kindermann Forest and if I hadn’t sent you out to look for the camp van. I’m sure you would have had a very different life, Wyatt. Who knows? Maybe you’d have learned to cook or gone to school or met someone and got married. A lot of different things might have happened to you. It could have been a much, much better life.”

  He sat frowning at what he’d just heard. He shook his head. “It wouldn’t have been that kind of life,” he said.

  “What kind?”

  “Not a much better life.”

  She was taken aback for a moment—by the sharpness of his assessment, by its essential truth. After all these years she could still be fooled by his off-center face and awkward manners. At times she could still make the mistake of thinking him simpleminded, naïve. “But you don’t know for sure,” she insisted, weakly.