Serendipity Green
Rob Levandoski
New York
To Manoucher Parvin, for his friendship, the little
Ghiradelli chocolates, and for lending me Pirooz.
PART I
“How happens it that in the United States, where the inhabitants arrived but as yesterday upon the soil which they now occupy, and brought neither customs nor traditions with them there; where they met each other for the first time with no previous acquaintance; where, in short, the instinctive love of country can hardly exist—how happens it that everyone takes as zealous an interest in the affairs of his township, his county, and the whole State, as if they were his own?”
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy In America, 1835
1
Green.
Yellow.
Red.
The cars on South Mill stop. The cars on Tocqueville go.
It is only fifteen past six, but this being February, and this being Ohio, the sky is already the purple-black of frostbitten toes. An unimpeded prairie wind is driving the snow horizontally.
One of the cars stopping for the new traffic light at South Mill and Tocqueville is an American-made Japanese luxury sedan. It is the kind of car you’d expect someone like D. William Aitchbone to be driving: Sensibly pretentious. Benignly authoritarian. A muted pewter paintjob worthy of the car’s hefty sticker price.
Unlike the other denizens of Tuttwyler, Ohio, squashed bumper-to-bumper at that new traffic light, fat flakes of horizontal snow befouling the windshields of their minivans and sport utility vehicles like squirts of gooseshit, D. William Aitchbone is not the least bit impatient. He likes the new traffic light. Likes it fine. Likes the growth and prosperity it symbolizes.
The more cars that traffic light traps the better. Stuck flies on the spider web of progress.
Fourteen years earlier, when he was fresh out of Cleveland Marshall College of Law, there hadn’t been a light at South Mill and Tocqueville; nor at North Mill and East Walnut; nor at Church and West Wooseman. Tuttwyler then was a village of just twenty-two hundred, a musty old quilt of a village draped over criss-crossing state routes that went ostensibly nowhere. Then eight years ago the long-awaited eastern leg of I-491 was completed, making Cleveland and its spreading suburban miasma a doable commute. Developers descended on the farmers living east, west, north and south of the village, making them offers they’d simply be nuts to wrinkle their noses at. Barns were bulldozed. Fence-rows plucked. Topsoil rich with a century’s worth of cow manure was scraped and piled as high as ancient Indian burial mounds, so it could be trucked off, vomited into polyethylene bags, and then sold at garden centers for anything but dirt-cheap prices. After the farms were erased, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of houses were built. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of expensive houses with to-die-for foyers, cavernous carpet-gobbling greatrooms, sunny gourmet kitchens, and too many bathrooms. Hundred and hundreds and hundreds of houses with big-nut-to-crack mortgages. Mortgages that required two incomes. Mortgages that required fatigued and sexless marriages. Mortgages that sooner or later required legal separations, restraining orders, divorces, custody fights, new wills, complicated codicils to old wills, and—bless the weak hearts of these mortgage holders—probate when they fell over dead from exhaustion, prenuptial agreements when they cautiously fell in love again. Yes. Big-nut-to-crack mortgages that required the ongoing services of a lawyer like D. William Aitchbone.
So D. William Aitchbone likes the new traffic light at South Mill and Tocqueville. Likes it fine. Stuck flies on the spider web of his personal progress.
But D. William Aitchbone does not live in one of the new subdivisions. No big-nut-to-crack mortgagor he. He is Old Tuttwyler. Original Tuttwyler. He lives in one of the coveted nineteenth-century Victorians in the original part of the village, just a hundred yards from where he now sits in his American-made Japanese luxury sedan, patiently drumming his fingers to a New Age CD, Yobisch Podka’s lively Insipientia.
Red.
Yellow.
Green.
The cars on Tocqueville stop. The cars on South Mill go.
D. William Aitchbone drives through the intersection. He’s spent the day in New Waterbury, the seat of Wyssock County, expediting the end of one heavily mortgaged marriage after another. Through the horizontal snow goose-shitting his windshield he now sees his own precious house. It is a magnificent three-story Queen Anne, built in 1883 by his great uncle, John W. Aitchbone, the first of the Aitchbones to wisely give up tilling fields in favor of tilling the Ohio Revised Code. The house, as square and white as a new bar of soap, has dozens of dark green shutters, a wraparound porch with lacy scroll-sawn spandrels connecting the posts, a confusion of gables dripping with decoration, and a bell-roofed turret that rises up the side of the house like the proud old phallus it is.
He drives past his driveway. No dinner with Karen and kids tonight. Nosireebob. Tonight is too important for that unnatural ritual. Tonight—just an hour and thirteen minutes from now, in fact—is the year’s first meeting of the Squaw Days Committee.
South Mill is Tuttwyler’s most impressive street. One of the most impressive streets in the state. It is newly paved with historically accurate burnt-orange bricks. Wide slate sidewalks rise and fall over the roots of grand oaks and maples. And the Victorians! Sweet Jesus the Victorians! Impressive Queen Annes. Impressive steep-roofed Gothics. Impressive flat-roofed Italianates. Impressive Second Empires with cake-like mansard roofs. Equally impressive are the antebellum Greek Revivals, with their squat triangular pediments, intricate cornices, broad doors and stoic pilasters. And just as impressive as the Victorians and Greek Revivals are the square-jawed Prairie School houses. One of them, the one that D. William Aitchbone is passing now, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright himself. There is also a sprinkling of early twentieth-century Tudors and colonials and capes, even a few arts-and-crafts bungalows built in the teens and twenties. Regardless of their age and style, all of the houses on this impressive street are painted the same clean soapy white as D. William Aitchbone’s Queen Anne. And all have dark green shutters.
All but one house.
This house, a narrow two-story frame built on a shoestring during the Great Depression, is not painted white. It is not painted at all. Just the sight of its raw, gray-brown clapboards, its filmy, shutterless windows, its sagging, leaf-filled gutters, its moss-covered shingles, its tilting porch and untrimmed beard of shrubs, sends a river of burning black bile into D. William Aitchbone’s temperamental bowels. “Lazy bastard,” he hisses through his thin lips. The lazy bastard is, of course, Howie Dornick, the owner of that paintless, shutterless, unimpressive two-story frame.
D. William Aitchbone reaches the village square and circles it, pulling into a parking slot in front of Paula Varny’s Just Giraffes stuffed animal shop. He trots through the horizontal snow, stuffed leather attaché in hand, to the Daydream Beanery for a double cappuccino, lowfat zucchini muffin and a final strategy session with himself. The dressed-all-in-black counter girl, nose ring dangling above her blackcherry lips, punches his Coffee Club card; one more punch and his next cappuccino is free.
Despite the numbing dulcimer music sprinkling from the speaker box above his head, D. William Aitchbone’s strategy session with himself goes well. At 7:25 he starts toward the library on the opposite side of the square. Except for the Daydream Beanery and the Pizza Teepee, all of the shops on the square are closed for the day, drifting snow barricading their sunken doorways. As he walks past the square’s grand gazebo, he frowns at the huge red bows and plastic pine garlands still dangling from its roof. “What’s that lazy bastard waiting for, Easter?” he hisses through even thinner lips, the lazy bastard
once again being Howie Dornick, owner of the unpainted two-story frame on South Mill and the village’s maintenance engineer.
When D. William Aitchbone reaches the library he does not head for the glass double-doors at the front of the old ginger-brown brick building, but follows the shrub-lined walk that leads to the back. He crunches down a set of concrete steps sprinkled with blue ice-melting pellets, to a windowless gray metal door. Stenciled across the door, in efficient, two-inch-high black enamel letters, are the words COMMUNITY ROOM. He takes the cold knob in his hand and twists it. He eases the door open, just a quiet inch. He presses his ear into that quiet inch. Inside, the other members of the Squaw Days Committee are just beginning to wonder if their busy new chairman will make it on time. “Maybe he slid off the road,” Delores Poltruski worries to Katherine Hardihood.
“The D. William Aitchbones of the world never slide off the road,” Katherine Hardihood says.
What better cue than that? D. William Aitchbone flings the door wide and blows in, like the winter wind that he is, brushing the snow from the shoulders of his epauletted, belted Burberry, the expensive trenchcoat he always wanted and bought for himself just before Christmas at the new mall at the I-491 interchange. “Not late am I?”
“I was afraid you slid off the road,” Delores Poltruski says to him.
The new chairman of the Squaw Days Committee hangs up his Burberry and takes his seat at the head of the table. “Almost did a couple of times,” he says, cleansing the committee with his perfected courtroom smile. “Everybody here then?”
Everybody is.
In addition to Katherine Hardihood and Delores Poltruski, Mayor Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne is there. He is Tuttwyler’s first Democratic mayor since before the Civil War. Had former Mayor Donald Grinspoon not tried for an eighth term—and hadn’t fallen off the stage at the Meet The Candidates night at G.A. Hemphill Elementary School, reminding everyone he was a less-than-nimble seventy-nine—Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne would still be a harmless ward councilman and cable TV installer.
“Evening, Woody.”
“Evening, Bill.”
Former Mayor Grinspoon is there, trembling fingers making his Styrofoam cup of black coffee squeak.
“Glad you could make it, Donald.”
Dick Mueller is there. He is post commander of the VFW and owner of Mueller Auto Parts.
“How’s the new addition coming, Dick?”
“Floor’s going down Thursday,” Dick Mueller reports proudly. Everyone at the table knows he is not talking about the floor at the VFW hall, or the floor of his auto parts store. He is talking about the floor of the new Sunday School wing at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, where he is treasurer of the building fund.
“Tile or carpet?” Delores Poltruski asks him, already knowing the answer.
“Tile,” Dick Mueller answers too quickly.
Everyone at the table knows why Delores Poltruski feels it necessary to ask a question for which she already knows the answer, and why Dick Mueller has answered her so earnestly. Dick and Delores are trying to hide their love affair. They have been copulating not-so-secretly once a week since 1986, the year after his wife of thirty years died of cervical cancer, and two years after her husband of thirty-five years drowned in Hornpayne, Ontario, while on his annual fishing trip with his Knights of Columbus buddies. Not only are their relentless efforts to conceal their affair in vain, they also are unnecessary. Everyone at the table knows. And no one gives a damn—understanding that if Delores wasn’t such a good Catholic, and Dick wasn’t such an important Lutheran, they surely would be married by now, copulating legally, if not quite as often.
“Tile is always a good choice,” Delores Poltruski says.
In addition to her work on the Squaw Days Committee, Delores Poltruski sells real estate and sits on the school board. Some in Tuttwyler consider this a conflict of interest, inasmuch as the houses she so enthusiastically sells requires the school board to put a new tax levy on the ballot every year or two. D. William Aitchbone is not so narrow-minded. He doesn’t like the higher taxes, of course, and regularly votes against them, but he does like all the new kids crowding into the schools, a small but profitable percentage of them sure to require some sort of legal representation before they graduate.
There are two people on the Squaw Days Committee from the new housing developments north, south, east and west of the village. One is Paula Varney, owner of Just Giraffes. Paula Varney hardly sells enough stuffed giraffes to pay the shop’s light bill, let alone the rent. But making money isn’t the objective. The objective is something for Paula Varney to do now that her twin sons Sean and Jarrod are away at Kenyon College, one studying anthropology, the other modern dance. Her husband Dave’s enormous salary as comptroller for Zedonk Industries Inc. easily covers Just Giraffe’s light bill and rent, just as it easily covers two tuitions and the mortgage on their five-bedroom faux-Georgian in the new Mallard Lakes Estates, built on the rolling hills of Bud Paddaway’s old two-hundred-cow dairy farm.
“I see Zedonk’s stock has bounced back a bit after that takeover rumor,” D. William Aitchbone says to Paula Varney, his courtroom smile in full flower.
The smile she returns is little more than a twitch. “That takeover was just a rumor, Bill.”
The other committee member from the new developments is Kevin Hassock. Kevin Hassock does not want to be at this meeting. He does not want to be on the Squaw Days Committee. He wants to spend this evening and every evening full-tilt in his black leather recliner, flipping between ESPN and ESPN-2, in the sunken family room of his faux-French country house in Woodchuck Ridge, where old Norm Umplebee used to raise a lot of corn and soybeans. But Kevin Hassock’s employer, DWP America Ltd., likes its young executives to get involved in their communities, even if they are likely to be transferred or downsized within twenty-four months. “How you like these Ohio winters of ours?” D. William Aitchbone asks him.
“They keep you awake, that’s for sure,” Kevin Hassock answers in his native North Carolinian. He does not know that his unhappy wife just that morning called D. William Aitchbone’s office for an appointment.
So everyone is there. D. William Aitchbone had spent much of his hour and five minutes at the Daydream Beanery assessing how to handle each of them.
Some have to be handled with respect.
Donald Grinspoon certainly has to be. The former mayor is a fellow Republican, and a successful businessman to boot—successful, that is, until the mall opened at the I-491 interchange. Grinspoon’s Department Store had been a fixture on the village square since 1893. It had survived the Great Depression and Tuttwyler Mills’ decision in 1975 to close the snack cake line. It even survived the explosion of shopping plazas on West Wooseman. But the new mall was another matter and Grinspoon’s was forced to close just two weeks before the same November election that ended Donald Grinspoon’s twenty-six year stint as mayor. Most of the village’s political insiders, D. William Aitchbone among them, had expected him to retreat to the family condo in Key Largo after those back-to-back defeats. But Donald Grinspoon is a genetically optimistic man. He not only remained in his big impressive Victorian Gothic on South Mill Street, he also held onto his chairmanship of the Squaw Days Committee. And he still would be chairman if his wife of fifty-two years, Penelope (nee Tuttwyler) Grinspoon, finally hadn’t surrendered to the hat trick of emphysema, osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s creeping respectively through her lungs, bones, and brain since Reagan’s first term. Now Donald Grinspoon’s days are filled with long visits to the Sparrow Hill Nursing Home forty miles north in Strongsville. And although he is happy to stay on the Squaw Days Committee as long as the others will have him, he has turned the chairmanship over to younger blood. In particular, the younger blood of his personal lawyer and political protégé, one D. William Aitchbone. So a certain amount respect for Donald Grinspoon is in order.
A certain amount of respect also is in order for the new mayor, Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne. Public r
espect anyway. Woody Sadlebyrne not only is Tuttwyler’s first Democratic mayor since the Civil War, he also is Tuttwyler’s youngest mayor ever, just twenty-eight on election day, just twenty-nine now. Woody has big plans for the village. But Woody also has a big problem—a big problem named D. William Aitchbone, president of the village council, vice-chairman of the Wyssock County Republican Party, and now, chairman of the Squaw Days Committee. D. William Aitchbone also is the man certain to unseat him in the next mayoral election. Everybody understands the inevitability of that. Even Woody Sadlebyrne himself surely understands the inevitability of that.
Other members of the committee simply can be tolerated.
Dick Mueller and Delores Poltruski fall into that category. Paula Varney, too. As the months whittle toward August they will have plenty to say at these meetings, but in the end nothing at all to say about the big changes D. William Aitchbone has in mind.
One member of the committee can be ignored completely.
That member, of course, is Kevin Hassock. He is there because his résumé requires it. He will appreciate the new chairman’s inattention.
That leaves Katherine Hardihood. She must be handled with oven mitts.
“Well,” D. William Aitchbone says, “what do you say we get started.”
2
“I suppose the first thing we need to do,” begins D. William Aitchbone, “is to make sure everybody is happy with their subcommittee assignments.”
This is the customary way to begin the year’s first meeting of the Squaw Days Committee; not just the actual discussion of subcommittee assignments, but the words “make sure everybody is happy.” Those are the exact words Donald Grinspoon used every year since the first Squaw Days was planned, thirteen years ago. Now it is D. William Aitchbone’s turn to use those words, to simultaneously pay homage to his predecessor while stealing away his power and prestige. “Dick, you’ll coordinate the parade again, won’t you? And the memorial services?”
Serendipity Green Page 1