by Ward Just
But the distance between listless and exhausted was short, and when Ned learned that the weekly newspaper had failed, its mighty Goss presses sold for scrap—well, that closed the door. Ned had grown up on the Press-Gazette, from summer reporter to managing editor, all before he was twenty years old, when he ran away to the morning paper in cosmopolitan Indianapolis. The struggle with his father was titanic. First, Ned had refused to enroll in college; next, he proposed a career in journalism. Judge Ayres was enraged; he had seen newspaper reporters go about their work and was not impressed. They were downside men. He thought them cynical, and the cynicism was unearned. Reporting was a convenient way of avoiding civic responsibility. Much more convenient to write about a problem than actually devise a solution. They led disheveled personal lives. The judge called them cavemen, preferring to write about shadows on the wall than what was in front of their own eyes. They were hell-raisers and drinkers, and the idea that his son, so bright, such a nice boy, would choose that business was—appalling, and worst of all his wife, Olive, saw nothing wrong with it.
She said, Let Neddy chart his own course.
He’s off course, that’s the problem!
He’ll be fine, Olive said.
It’s a junk business, Eric insisted.
Not to him it isn’t, Olive said.
What the hell’s gotten into him?
The world has gotten into him, Eric.
Not to go to college. Not even to try. Bright as he is. It’s disgraceful.
You’re not listening. He doesn’t want the classroom. He wants the street.
You call that ambition?
It’s what he wants, Eric. And if I were you, I’d make it up to him. Or you’ll find yourself on the outside.
I’m not on the outside. He is.
Neddy was a prodigy and a dedicated inside man, an editor, soft-spoken and polite, easy to get along with, somewhat shy, a façade that concealed a fierce ambition. Herman did not reward the strongly ambitious—getting a little ahead of yourself, aren’t you, son?—so Ned learned to keep that side of himself private. However, he was a demanding editor. As his reporters said, The best blue pencil in the business.
In due course, Ned’s father died and his mother relocated to the Everett Nursing Home, in fact down the corridor and around the corner from Uncle Ralph’s old room. She had a nice view of cornfields and the low rise of a hill and in the evening she could watch the sun set. Ralph had died the year before his brother. Ned never failed to say a prayer when he was visiting his mother after wishing the sergeant Godspeed. His mother’s mind had gone to pieces. She was unable to recognize her only child, and indeed rarely spoke when Ned visited. The Everett was failing also, the plumbing erratic and the air conditioning long since switched off. By all rights the Everett should have been condemned as unsafe but there was no place to put the residents. The town had no budget for the necessary repairs so the Everett limped on. Ned’s visits to his mother were brief, and he contented himself by remembering who she had been and what she looked like when he was a boy, her good humor and teasing. Olive Ayres had been an astute observer of Herman, having grown up in Bloomington, where her father was a professor at the university who specialized in the mores of rural life. He had written a book on the subject, Dead Reckoning, a title Eric Ayres despised for its sarcasm and condescension. When they were alone, Eric told his son to pay no attention to his grandfather, who had been born in Massachusetts. Fancy pants, Eric called him. Bolshevik. Olive listened carefully to her father’s theories, nailing the fly to the wall as it were. Ned often heard her tease his father. He heard her say one night, Herman’s such a moral little town, adding a playful giggle. So different from Bloomington, its night life and other amusements, including some hanky-panky. Do you realize, she said, that we know only one divorced couple? We know everyone in town, for God sakes. Plus which, half the people we know don’t even have children. What is it? Something in the water? Ned’s father replied patiently, Herman’s quiet, always has been. No one liked broken crockery. People want to sin, they go to Chicago. Maybe St. Louis. Or a barn somewhere.
Olive said, There’s no sin in Herman?
Oh, his father replied, the usual. Nothing much beyond that.
So they go to Chicago. What do they do there?
Rent a hotel room, I suppose.
I imagine they’d go in separate cars.
I imagine they would, Olive.
With some alibi, a story. A cover story.
I’m sure an alibi would be involved.
I’d better never catch you with an alibi.
And the judge laughed and laughed, and then, because the evening was young, he said, How about a game of gin rummy, Ollie?
A small town, then, like so many in Middle America with an absence of commotion. Herman was what it was, neither more nor less. However, the town did have one singular distinction. It was known from coast to coast because it was the hometown of one of the most popular comedians of the day, Ed Watts, a fixture on Sunday-night radio and later on television. The comedian’s signature routine was a monologue involving Herman. He pronounced it Herrrrrrman and everyone laughed. Then he would tell a story about Herrrrrrman, its narrow-mindedness, its tedium, its squeaky-clean government, its tubby cheerleaders and bone-dumb policemen, its boiling summers and frigid winters when everyone skated on the frozen waters of the shallow Daggett or the Grove Street tennis courts. As if Herman were in Holland! There was malice in his tone, getting even for—well, it could be anything, such as an unproductive and unhappy childhood. Girls loathed him and boys baited him, or that was the supposition, because strangely enough very few in town remembered Ed Watts, his looks or his bearing or where he lived or what his father did. Was he the skinny kid who threw spitballs in math class? Maybe. Maybe not. Just about every small town in America had a local hero, someone who had gone away to the wider world and made good. But instead of a baseball player or minor movie star or musician, Herman had Ed Watts, nonentity, who now lived in a twenty-room mansion in Beverly Hills with five Persian cats and busy wife number four, quite a step up from the three-room bungalow at the wrong end of Benjamin Franklin Boulevard. That was the burden of the cover story in Collier’s, headlined “From Herman to Hollywood: The Ed Watts Story.”
Of course Ed Watts was as popular in Herman as he was elsewhere in America, even as the adults squirmed in discomfort. Their wised-up children laughed, somehow in on the joke and flattered that their town was as well known as South Bend or Muncie. For the adults Ed Watts was a mixed blessing, amusing as an entertainer known from coast to coast, perhaps not so amusing in other contexts. This was the ordeal for any resident of Herman: checking into a hotel in Detroit or renting a car in Chicago, presenting a driver’s license, the traveler would be forced to confirm the obvious: yes, he lived in that Herman. And the clerk would grin and say Herrrrrrman and expect a grin in return because the drawl was so funny. More often than not the clerk would turn to a colleague and say, Here’s a guy from Herrrrrrman! Can you believe it? And the guy from Herman would leave the desk feeling ever so slightly diminished, his identity—well, not stolen, but disclosed. The comedian was beloved, more or less, and after his death people all over America remembered Herrrrrrman and the clowns who lived there. Ed Watts made particular sport of the Christmas pageant, the parade, and the sing-along that followed it. Men on stilts, women dressed as Mother Hubbard, the children as elves. The broadcast was an Ed Watts classic, repeated annually at holiday time. As Herman continued its long decline, those who remained saw an outrageous violation of the proprieties, of privacy itself, a cheap slander. In its own fashion, Herman was a forgiving town, good-natured and slow to take offense. But the slander was not forgotten.
Ned Ayres witnessed all this from a position of neutrality. Perhaps better said, a position of on the one hand this and on the other hand that. Ed Watts did strike a chord, however discordant. Ned knew there was some Herman inside himself, the reticence, the reluctance to judge harsh
ly, suppressed appreciation of the yahoo antics of the town fathers, including his own father. The town seemed to Ned frozen in a past where time did not move except to regress. Ambition was frowned upon. The modern world did not intrude. At eight or so every night, homework completed, Ned slipped out the back door of his house to the big chestnut in the backyard for a clandestine cigarette. He crouched at the base of the tree and looked to the heavens where the uncountable stars spun in their orbits. Years before, his Uncle Ralph had given him a pair of field binoculars and he trained those at the sky, the stars now coming into focus but still without form. He thought of each star harboring a society of its own, with its special surroundings and civilization, its own language and religion. Somewhere high up was a young man very like himself, trying and not succeeding to understand the known world. His earth, too, was motionless while all around it the mysterious stars and planets whirled, each with its specific destination. Ned lit another cigarette and reprised his day, an interminable math class, something incomprehensible in Algebra Two. Ned watched a star fall and disappear. Doris Day was featured at the movie house downtown. Their neighbor had bought a Volkswagen, now the subject of great curiosity. A German car, the only one in Herman. It might as well have been from Mars. Ned attempted a smoke ring and failed. God, he wanted something else, but he did not know what that something else was. He refused to live and die in Herman. He believed he was looking at a stone wall. An article in the paper that afternoon disclosed that Herman’s population was in the upper five percent of longevity in the state of Indiana. He tried to imagine himself at sixty-five in Herman. He would be editor of the newspaper. He would have 2.5 children. He would not own a Volkswagen. He would marry a beautiful young girl who would in a few years be no longer beautiful or young. He himself would run to fat and failing eyesight. He put the binoculars to his eyes once again and was surprised to see a winking red light, an aircraft from somewhere. He had never seen an aircraft in the Herman sky except for the occasional crop-duster. This aircraft was flying west to east. He knew what he wanted. He didn’t know how to get there. He wanted out.
Later on, Ned Ayres came to believe that Herman’s citizens grew up with a foreordained inferiority complex, an unnatural modesty that derived from a kind of existential embarrassment, a deformity like a hunchback or a stammer. Herman was not alone; there were hundreds of Hermans in America. But Ned’s Herman felt trapped in a world of Ed Watts’s making, going slowly to seed, an object of derision. Ned’s father the judge thought it was nonsense. Be at ease, Eric Ayres advised. It’s only a joke. Forget it. Ignore it. It’s only Ed Watts, for God sakes, a third-rate vaudevillian going rapidly out of fashion himself. But Herman’s morale was low and sinking, and the truth was this: anonymous at home, the town was notorious abroad. The inhabitants had trouble enough getting on from day to day with their children leaving home and the stores and businesses closing, the town growing old, a gray-haired community without aspiration. The word for it was morbid. No one saw a way up or a way out, either. They believed they were trapped inside a comedian’s cliché. Herman. Their joke town.
Many years later, in Chicago for a conference, Ned decided to pay Herman a visit. He supposed it would be his last. He booked a rental car—no jokes this time from the young woman behind the desk, but of course Ned’s driver’s license was issued in the District of Columbia. He took the thruway south, then turned east on a two-lane highway that would take him near Muncie on the way to Herman. It was a fine day in late October, autumn slowly dissolving into winter. The fields of grain were fading in the pale sunlight. The farther south he drove, the more pickup trucks he encountered. All the trucks seemed to have a rifle athwart the rear window. Yet the terrain was peaceable and the traffic light. He felt conspicuous in his red Chevrolet. The NPR station began to fade, then was lost altogether. The land was flat, then became hilly as he pressed south. He passed one small town after another, the towns remarkably similar, most of them announced by high church steeples or farmers’ silos. All the towns were sleepy in the twilight. And all this time he was thinking of Herman and his boyhood, Saturdays with Uncle Ralph, evenings under the chestnut tree with a pack of Lucky Strikes and the bright stars above. Without noticing what he was doing Ned had slowed his pace from seventy miles an hour to forty. He knew he was bringing some disdain to what was in front of his eyes. He had escaped the rural life, the quiet regularity of the seasons. His life had commenced in Herman but it would not end there. Bad luck, bad cards, Herman was a failure of the imagination. Ned’s decision to leave Herman had caused a rift with his father that was never healed. His mother was more sympathetic, but still she was in tears when he announced his decision to leave home for Indianapolis and a job as copyeditor on the paper there, one hundred dollars a week, a living wage then. His father was enraged, his only son throwing his life into an ashcan. What’s wrong, Herman not good enough for you? He went on in that manner, his voice rising until Ned was tired of listening. He said at last, rather grandly he thought, I’m trying to escape history, you, Herman, my assigned seat at the table . . .
His father hit him then and he went down, stars in his eyes and his mother’s awful moan in his ears, loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Her hands flew to her mouth. When his father reached down to help him up, Ned swatted the hand away, rose under his own power, and left the room to pack quietly and leave the house by the back door. He was gone before they knew it, and a year lapsed before they were reconciled as a family, everyone giving a little, more than they wanted to, except Ned’s mother, who had watched things go out of control in that chaotic moment but was unable to referee. Her son was as stubborn as she was. And he wanted another sort of life in a place that, whatever and wherever it was, was not Herman. She had seen this coming and dreaded it. She had feared losing him to the outside world. Well, he had the stamina for it. He certainly was old beyond his years and he wanted it badly, whatever “it” was, beyond his desire to be quits with Herman.
Ned remembered all that now, shaking his head at the melodrama of it. “Escape history.” Where had that come from? He had no idea. The phrase had come to mind and he used it, as anyone would. He remembered stopping by the nursing home to say goodbye to Uncle Ralph, but he was not available, “a bad day.” So Ned left Herman without saying goodbye to anyone. He drove on at low speed. Suddenly the road and its surroundings became familiar. He reckoned Herman was fifty miles distant. He passed a political billboard—Lindahl’s the One! Lindahl for Senate! The election was only a few days away. Herman had always been Republican and the billboard displayed dancing elephants in the corners. Ned wondered if Lindahl was little Jerry Lindahl from grade school, a doctor’s son who wore brown wool knickers and was taunted for it. Jerry Lindahl would be an unlikely candidate even without the Herman albatross. Ned had never encountered a classmate in all the years he had been away, Indianapolis and Chicago and finally Washington. It seemed that no one ever left Herman, or if they did, they stayed in the landlocked heartland. He remembered other classmates from the period. He’d had a crush on a girl, Roberta—Bobby—a pretty brunette. They shared a desire to get away from Herman, Ned to pursue his dream of editing a newspaper, Bobby to become a nurse in a large municipal hospital, one equipped with all the latest gear. Ned said she could do much better than that. Why not a doctor? Of course she was offended. Why wouldn’t she be? Both Ned and Bobby were thought to be old for their ages, Ned’s plans centering on one of the Chicago papers. Yes, he thought, she was a hell of a nice girl, bright and focused; and then her family moved to Terre Haute and they lost touch. His mother told him that Bobby had taken a nursing job at the Mill City hospital, a few miles down the road from Herman. She was a nurse in obstetrics or oncology, one of those two. Mill City was a town of roughnecks, many of whom found themselves in Judge Ayres’s courtroom. Breaking and entering. Assault and battery. Drunken driving. The usual plea was nolo contendere.
Then Ned saw Herman in the distance, and a moment after that the sa
nd traps of the Daggett Golf Club. Off to the right, on the low rise on the outside of town, he saw what looked like the shell of the Everett Nursing Home, where his mother and Uncle Ralph had died. From that distance the home appeared to be unoccupied. Ned continued to drive up Benjamin Franklin Boulevard. The Press-Gazette property was now a parking lot, half filled in midafternoon. Across the street was a bodega. There were coffee shops and a tavern whose name was unfamiliar to him. The courthouse was unchanged, a four-story Victorian pile with dormers and a flagpole out front. When his father died so suddenly, the Herman bar wanted to name the building the Eric E. Ayres Courthouse, but nothing came of it. Ned turned at Grove Street and motored slowly to the house he grew up in, the brick one at the corner of Elm. It looked the same. Children’s toys lay scattered in the front yard. If Ned expected an epiphany he was disappointed. He stopped at the curb and got out of the car, wondering about the smell. There was always a special aroma composed of chestnut and oak. It was there still. The sidewalks and lawns were covered with leaves.
Ned had come to Herman to say a word at his father’s and mother’s and Uncle Ralph’s graves, but now he had trouble remembering exactly where the cemetery was. This was strange. He was having a memory block, everything slightly out of kilter. He thought he had made a mistake coming here. Everyone in his family was dead. The town looked shabby, and what he had to go by was the aroma of fallen leaves. His red Chevrolet was the only splash of color in the neighborhood. Ned was an intruder. He did not belong here. He remembered then that the cemetery was near the nursing home, not within sight of it but close by. Other memories came to him but they were featureless. They did not signify. How long had it been since he had seen Herman? Twenty years anyhow, his mother’s funeral, the entire town turned out, at least that portion of it over forty years old. A few of his contemporaries attended, approached to shake hands, offered a pleasantry—You haven’t changed a bit, Neddy—and backed away. He put the car in gear and returned to Benjamin Franklin Boulevard, made a right, and in a few moments he was motoring up the one-lane road. The cemetery was situated in a shallow depression surrounded by a cyclone fence in disrepair, the same cyclone fence that was there in his boyhood, the gate always open, no lock. Ned stopped the car and looked at the cemetery while he listened to the tic-ticof the car’s engine. He was alone, no one in sight.