The Mt. Monadnock Blues

by Larry Duberstein

  He braced himself anew, in case the little devil came after him on one-night stands, or started tabulating orgasms, but the gunfire had ceased. The smoke had cleared. Enneguess had a number, and he turned his attention back to Barnes.

  “The AIDS,” he said. “What can you tell me of Mr. Bannon’s health, with particular respect to the AIDS?”

  “Tim’s health is excellent. He hasn’t lost a sick day at work in four years. His blood pressure is normal, his weight enviably in line with the Surgeon General’s guidelines, and you see for yourself he has good color.”

  “Who is being facetious now, counsellor?”

  “Not toward the court, your Honor.”

  “You are telling me the claim is patently false. Mr. Bannon does not in fact have the AIDS.”

  “That is my understanding, your Honor.”

  “Mr. Giddings, I assume you have medical records to back up your assertion?”

  “Not at this time, your Honor.”

  “This is the time of the hearing, is it not? You have your information from what source, counsellor?”

  “At this time, your Honor, we would rather not say.”

  “You did not subpoena the medical records?”

  “I didn’t expect them to deny a known fact.”

  “You must not have endured the beneficial exercise of moot court at your law school, Mr. Giddings.”

  “It was a fishing expedition, like the hunting expeditions aforementioned,” said Barnes, on surer footing now. Enneguess had proved an equal opportunity sarcast, but for the moment Giddings was again in his crosshairs. “Here, however, is a fact. Earl Sanderson has smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for twenty-five years.”

  “Your Honor?” Merle did appear genuinely astonished.

  “Oh, I suppose we are informal enough to hear about your client’s bad habits, Mr. Giddings. If that is the point?”

  “His health more so than his habits, your Honor. He smokes two packs a day and his beer consumption is both fact and legend, apparently. Given that he is seven years Mr. Bannon’s senior, the medical experts would place him much closer to glory, statistically. If that is the point.”

  “For the love of God, your Honor.”

  “Your Petition does invite this line of thought, Mr. Giddings.”

  “But surely AIDS—”

  “The medical records would have been helpful,” said Enneguess, who then dismissed them for lunch with such mournful, martyred eyes that Tim nearly blurted out a full confession to relieve the man’s suffering.

  They went back to Lindy’s, where this time Tim matched his attorney cheeseburger for cheeseburger. “I’m glad to see you have your appetite,” said Barnes, who apparently always had hers.

  “It’s strange, but I don’t feel nervous anymore.”

  “Well, the worst is over.”

  “Is it? What happens next?”

  “Judge Anyone’s-Guess is a tough read. He seems to get a kick out of keeping everyone off balance.”

  “The AIDS. Does your client have The AIDS,” mimicked Tim, doing a foreigner attempting tricky English.

  “He does play little games. But there’s something I learned about this court. They’ll assign a G.A.L. in ugly divorce cases, but never in a guardianship. Just doesn’t happen.”

  “But then—”

  “Guardianships are usually stopgap. A single mom goes into rehab, or a single mom with an abusive boyfriend fights to keep her kid in the house. So they designate the grandmother, on a temporary basis. Unless the father kills the mother, which happened in one of Enneguess’ cases a few years ago. He designated the grandmother on a permanent basis for that one.”

  “You’re saying it’s always the grandmother.”

  “I’m saying they don’t like assigning a guardian ad litem. Which is why I did what I did.”

  “You were sensational, Attorney Barnes. But what did you do, exactly?” Tim was confused, still sorting out the part about grandmothers. Anne wouldn’t throw her hat in the ring, would she?

  “I put Jill in front of that man and tried to keep her there, that’s all. Because if this case was Bannon versus Sanderson?—he would decide it today, with no G.A.L. and no further expense to Cheshire County.”

  “But it is Bannon versus Sanderson. He’s got those two sets of papers all but balanced on the scales of bloody justice there.”

  “To me, it’s Hergesheimer versus Sanderson. I’ve felt that very strongly—felt I was representing Jill. I wanted her pounding on that man’s door in a hurricane, demanding to be let in.”

  The waitress, remembering them from breakfast, was ready with the coffeepot and Barnes nodded assent to her fifth cup in this venue. Likely her tenth of the day (dissolute?) as Tim could hardly imagine her leaving Boston with less than a quart in her fuselage.

  “I also turned up an article about Enneguess in an old law journal, a profile they ran when he was appointed to the bench. In which he is quoted as saying he walks home for lunch every day—to avoid the cigarette smoke in restaurants.”

  “You really are thorough. So that was Earl and his two packs a day.”

  “The beer, who knows. But we had to get the cigarettes in. I’m betting it gets us our G.A.L.”

  “Really? The way that guy was grilling me about my sex life? He looked at me like I was a copulating fruit fly or something.”

  “No comment.”

  Well well. Barnes still had not finished processing the tough parts, yet she had advocated for Tim as though there were none. He wished he could hug her.

  “If you’re right, Attorney Barnes, and I come out of this no worse off than I went in?—you are definitely worth every penny I haven’t paid you.”

  V

  THE MT. MONADNOCK BLUES

  At four o’clock, Tim called around to report on their victory: case continued for a month, a G.A.L. to investigate. By ten that night he was calling everyone back, crying out for help. “I’ve never been so depressed in my life,” he whined to Karl.

  “It’s like a post-partum letdown,” Karl assured him, though he had no idea if this had any validity. “You want the baby, but there’s a chemical kickback.”

  Highpowered chemicals. The walls had closed in on him now, the trap was fully sprung, and Tim wondered how he would kill the night, much less the month. Or ten years.

  The night, at least, he killed with Jack Daniels. In the morning Ellie called, concerned and hoping to help by tendering a paid sabbatical. “Charles and I will manage through Labor Day. It’s a slow time. And he’s fine with the money.”

  “He must be getting a little,” said Tim, incapable of being straightforward in the face of charity, however couched.

  “Maybe Charles and I are both getting a little.”

  “Fair enough.”

  And it was fair. They had to work, but were happy, while he was liberated from work and miserable. Except that he wasn’t; not one bit. Karl was right. After that dark post-partum night, what fell out was a sweet, surprising time of grace. A magic. It would be days before Tim trusted it, even slightly, and a week before he identified it as the breezy expansiveness of summer vacation. Something one had as a child, then lost forever. Something Tim had accidentally regained.

  As they slipped across the gin-clear water of Thorndike Pond on Tuesday, he wondered how such a paradise could be so exclusively theirs. Then he remembered, the rest of the world was at work. They paddled round the island, stripping blueberries from the overhanging bushes, then sat in the canoe eating. Soft blue sky, soft sun on the water, not a soul in sight. When they swam, their toes were in perfect focus far below the surface.

  They stopped at Coll’s for a dozen ears of fresh corn, steamed them that night, and ate four apiece. Billy still wanted his money’s worth, eating right down to the marrow; Cindy still used corn as a means of drinking butter. Her cobs were scratched and gnawed as though by rodents, while half a pound of butter disappeared. Tim let them taste the wine and they both hated it cheerfully
.

  By Thursday Tim was so relaxed he took a nap. With a mystery story tented on his chest, senses humming with rural grace notes, he drifted off in the hammock. Twice, briefly, he opened his eyes on a sky so intensely blue it seemed painted. Yet napping, like paragliding, was a trick Tim had never even attempted.

  Billy took charge on Friday. His father had read a short story about a man who runs from one end of town to the other, jumping into every swimming pool as he goes. Doesn’t say hello or introduce himself, just dives in, swims a length, and heads for the next pool. Joking, Monty suggested Camp White Sneaker should undertake a lake-and-pond version of this bizarre quest, but it was no joke to Billy Hergie. He drew a map, worked out an itinerary; he set goals and he waited, and today was the day.

  “It’s an awful lot of driving,” said Tim, glancing at the paperwork. His true concern was emotional, for what did it say (or not say) that Monty was the unaccredited source of the scheme?

  “Forty miles,” said Billy with a dismissive shrug. Then came the accreditation: “It’s worth it—for Dad.”

  Worth it, to be sure. This proved to be one of the most joyful days of Tim’s life and much of the joy derived from the fact that it was so silly, pure nonsense. What a freeing-up lay there, essentially in becoming young again. (Younger than sex, Tim smiled. Innocent, he would later elaborate—for all his insights came retrospectively.) Tim was a neophyte at the sort of freedom that had no truck with good old promiscuity and dissolution.

  Contoocook Lake was sandybottomed, Skatutukee and Frost were squishy and festooned with liquid green shadows. A wind they encountered nowhere else came roaring across Nubanusit, but today they didn’t need to fight it. They jumped in at the boat launch, swam the obligatory minute, and sped away to Dublin Lake. Cindy’s trail mix (a few peanuts in with the Raisinets and M&M’s) was a far cry from the healthy seeds of Camp Keokuk’s recipe, but no one could deny their energy level was extraordinary.

  The weekend filled with the children’s friends. Saturday they played baseball on a real ballfield in the village, with a real scoreboard covered in zeroes, Home and Visitor with nothing to show. Billy blasted home runs (no zeroes for him) and Cindy snagged a “really high fly.” On Sunday the same wolfpack reassembled on the lawn for tag and dodgeball, oldfashioned games Tim assumed had vanished from the planet.

  These children got along so well. Ranged in age from six to fourteen, they exhibited a complete mastery of inclusion and tolerance. Lord of the Flies was made to seem a big lie. Maybe if you put them in uniforms, with parents in the grandstand shouting, they would go tooth and claw. Self-governed, however, they had astonishing reserves of fairness and compassion. They had innocence.

  Tim was moved to undertake ice cream all around as a reward. He wrote down orders (two scoops, three scoops, marshmallows, sprinkles) and enlisted Cindy’s help. She in turn subcontracted a McManus twin (Hugh?) as her own helper, for there was some serious girdling to be done at the base of so many fastmelting cones in transit.

  “You performed a miracle,” Alice McManus would tell him later. “My twins were actually apart for half an hour.”

  Tim and Alice were standing by Jill’s perennial bed, the colors quieted in the fading light. “I thought it was a miracle those kids stayed outside all day,” Tim said. “No TV, no headsets? No video games?”

  “It is relentless sometimes, isn’t it?”

  A hush fell with the dew. Tim was not bored, not depressed. If sad, then a little sad to see Alice McManus where Jilly should be standing. Jill (arms folded over her breasts, brown hair loosened at the temples by work) proudly surveying her Canterbury bells. Her lemon gems. This moment should be Jill’s.

  Alice felt it too. It was a truth so palpable that she stayed, and in no accidental way maintained with him the holy silence. It was full dark when childrens’ voices called them inside.

  “It’s partly this incredible weather. And the countryside really is beautiful.”

  “Sure, but you hate the country, Tim. Remember?”

  “No, sirree, I’m from the country.”

  “That’s probably why you hate it.”

  “Karl, I like it. It’s beautiful, and very calming.”

  “Well, you always said you hated the country.”

  “Not hated—only that I couldn’t live there.”

  “But could what? Die there?”

  “Be there. Maybe live for a while. All I know is I’ve been happy. Plus I don’t have to worry about Joe Average up here.”

  “I thought he stopped anyway.”

  “He started back up. But the messages aren’t really hostile. It’s like he’s an old friend wondering why I don’t call him back.”

  “He leaves his number?”

  “Of course not. I’m just saying he sounds needy.”

  “My heart bleeds for the sicko. But getting back to your lovely landscape, I’m coming up this weekend.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes, and I’m coming by myself this time. To follow up on a few ideas I had. So I thought on Saturday—”

  “Saturday’s pretty full for us. I promised to take the kids shopping in the morning, and the G.A.L. is coming to observe us all afternoon.”

  “I’ve got a busy day too—because people are harder to find on Sunday.”

  “The hell. I found twelve of them on my lawn yesterday.”

  “My lawn? Tim Bannon, country squire? Listen, I won’t come to observe you, I’ll just show up at six with three pounds of salmon.”

  “You’re saying dinner.”

  “We’ll grill. That’s okay, isn’t it? You country squires would be grilling of a summer evening, no?”

  “I’ll grill you, you sonofabitch. You and your ideas.”

  Tim had done no back-to-school shopping since the days of 89¢ black marbled notebooks and four dollar dungarees. Now a glance at the advertised “specials” served notice he could be in over his head at the mall. Perhaps the time was right for inquiring into Jill and Monty’s assets.…

  “Frozen. It’s all been frozen,” Attorney Phil Jellinghaus told him. “Nothing is lost, you understand—it gathers interest.”

  “But there’s cash flow—”

  “No there isn’t,” said Attorney Phil, unable to pass up the opening. But hale fellow not so hale was Jellinghaus. Not hostile, merely businesslike. Yet the last time through he had been all set to have Tim down to the club for some racquetball. Of course he knew exactly why Merle had frozen the assets.

  Tim called Erica to propose a deal. Until the court’s decision came down, why not have each faction cover half the children’s expenses? What could be fairer than that?

  “How are you going to pay your Boston lawyer if you can’t even pay for sneakers?”

  “Good question, sis. I don’t suppose you want to pay half the attorney’s fees too?”

  “Yeah, right.” But she was laughing.

  “After all, you guys are why I have a Boston lawyer.”

  Erica’s laughter was real. Her brother could be a funny guy. He had always been funny and Ric enjoyed his sassy brand of humor—until she stopped letting it in. When was that? And why? It was Earl, she would have to concede (or being such a couple) and then there was the whole gay thing. That was pretty bad. Embarrassing, mainly.

  “Forget the lawyer’s bill, let’s talk about sneakers and Trapper Keepers.”

  “I don’t even know what that is, but the answer’s no. Earl will say it’s a matter of principle.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. But what do you think the principle is?”

  “Doesn’t make a cat’s hair difference what I think. That’s what he’ll say and he won’t even tell me what the principle is.”

  “You could leave him, you know. Flat in his tracks. You and I could raise the kids; maybe get Mom to move up north.”

  “One big happy family.”

  “Why not?”

  “Surprise, Tim, I’d rather live with my husband than with my mother. And my c
razy brother.”

  “You believe that? I’m crazy?”

  “Gay, then,” she said, though she did mean crazy in a benign sense. Zany, with a sprinkle of some negative spice.

  “So gay is crazy. Different is crazy.”

  “Whatever,” she said, merriment still ringing in her undervoice. “Hell’s bells, Timmy, why don’t you just borrow some money from the bank? I mean, sneakers?”

  Things were not that bad. Unless his Boston lawyer smacked him with a sizable bill, Tim was not yet destitute. He called her next, to worry about it, and reliably she advised him not to. “Put it on a credit card,” she counselled. It would stand as a clear record of expenditures and he could pay it off later, once the frozen funds were thawed.

  Such an approach had its risks for Tim. Where cash was not required, he tended to operate differently—as though no cash would ever be required. So at The Pants Man, where they sold a lot more than pants, he signed for $300. At the sneaker man (who, based on his price schemes, must be right up there with the Kuwaiti oil sheiks) $200 more. And this was only the beginning, for Billy had grown an inch, Cindy had grown two. Their arms were longer and they had new feet.

  By age twelve, Tim consoled himself, most girls would reach full growth. But no, full height. There would still be the “chest,” as Anne Bannon always called it, and the backside. There would be the hips.

  They each required four “Trapper Keepers” for their school-work ($30 worth of Trapper Keepers!) so he signed for $100 more at Steele’s and they had yet to procure the recommended pencils. Unloading all these purchases shortly before the G.A.L. was scheduled to arrive, Tim was torn between hiding the stuff and flaunting it. Was it proof of his fine upright guardianship, or evidence that he was buying votes?

  The same uncertainty carried through Michele Taggart’s ugly four-hour visit. Should he ‘fess up to fried food at Trumball’s or pretend he prepared only the most virtuous of meals, carrot-rich and tofu-centric? What about television? Tim considered TV a blight on the minds of the young. Ten years ago the experts agreed, or at least understood; now it was scarcely a point of view. TV had replaced life itself. TV was the lifeline that kept America breathing, it was the normalcy thing entire.