Spirit of the Place (9781101617021)

by Shem, Samuel

  “Thank God.”

  “They send out a call for more police and fire.”

  “As they should.”

  “The town council responds.”

  “We’re saved!”

  “They propose a small tax raise to pay for more police and fire.”

  “Who wouldn’t pay for that?” Orville asked. “Why, no one wouldn’t, no one wouldn’t at all!”

  “And what do the Columbians vote?” Miranda asked.

  “Why, finally they break their streak and vote ‘Yes’!”

  She smiled and shook her head.

  Together, they said, “They vote ‘No’!”

  They chuckled, and Miranda went on, “Columbia remains the most poorly lighted town on the Hudson—maybe in America, perhaps in the civilized world.”

  “And so when my fellow Columbians are given the choice between whether it’s better to light just that one little candle or live in the dark?”

  “They choose the dark. The only light is on Diamond Street, in the whorehouses. When the Quakers leave, Columbia becomes a boomtown in whores.”

  “From Whales to Whores: An American Story.”

  “But in 1953 Governor Dewey shuts Diamond Street down. Thirty years ago now, Columbia loses its last glitter. It goes dark. The same town that in 1790-something missed by one vote being named the capital of New York State is now dead.” She looked at him curiously. “Were you born here?”

  “No.”

  “When did you come here?”

  “In 1946.”

  “Oh. I see.” To him, her expression seemed like what you see at a funeral.

  “Why?”

  “Of all the bad periods of this town’s self-destructive history, you might have chosen the very worst.”

  “Great,” he said in mock appreciation. “You know, I remember Diamond Street. At night it was all lit up. We’d see fancy cars, license plates from Massachusetts, New Jersey—even Canada. Music floated out of the open windows. Women were all dressed up—men, too. Bill Starbuck was their doc. He told me about it. ‘Two dollars for a house call,’ he’d say, ‘or I’d take it in kind. Never came outta there empty-handed.’”

  “Yes, it was famous all over the world,” she went on. “In the Jazz Age, Legs Diamond ran a speakeasy here and a big gambling operation. Look at this.” She handed him a New York Central train ticket. “There was a conductor in Grand Central who, if he saw you were going to Columbia, would punch your ticket like this.”

  Orville looked. “A heart-shaped hole?”

  “For a hundred years, the name ‘Columbia’ was synonymous with vice.”

  “That’s it! That’s why!” He was astonished. “Whenever anyone asked me where I was from, I never said Columbia. I always said, ‘a little town south of Albany.’ And I never knew why. Was I told not to tell? Had I been laughed at, the times I did?”

  “I hate to tell you this, Dr. Rose,” she said in mock seriousness, “but from the time they shut down Diamond Street—you were what, maybe ten?—you grew up in a town that was living in the dark.”

  “I love it!” He grinned from ear to ear. “I wasn’t nuts—I mean, about being bored and beaten up and living with breakage and stinginess and meanness, feeling weird and dead—it wasn’t me who was crazy!”

  “No. It’s always been a pretty mean and crazy town.”

  But then Orville understood what he was saying, and it suddenly seemed more serious, more like that sense of waste he’d felt when he’d seen his cleaned-out bedroom that first night back in town, when he leaned his back against the wall and slid down to sit splay-legged on the hardwood floor. He recalled the deadness, the expense of spirit, the just plain waste of life. Linked, always, to his mother. His mother alive, his mother dead. He sat there in silence for a few moments.

  “You have to understand,” he said, quietly. “I mean . . . um . . . growing up here, you know, I always felt, deep down, that there was something really wrong with me.”

  Miranda thought of her own son, of his exquisite sensitivity to her and others, of how easily he could be hurt and how, lately now, he was resisting her reaching out to him whenever she tried to help him, even show her love for him. She felt a wave of sadness. She turned to Orville.

  “A sensitive kid like you, here? How could you feel anything else?”

  Understanding shared. They sat together in the tiny room cluttered with a historian’s attempt to understand and a native’s relief at being understood, sat in the stone-walled room that had been a cell for a pauper or ten and then for a lunatic or five and then for a young lady learning to paint and then for an abandoned baby or child and now for books telling it all. They sat with the frail winter sunlight hobbling around the jumbles of papers and then lying quite still on the old tabletop of Becraft Quarry limestone pocked with trilobites from a time when Columbia was a tropical lagoon like Orlando. Each sensed their shared sorrow, and without knowing it understood how close sorrow is to love.

  “And it’s still happening,” Miranda said at last. “Milt and Henry are being so stupid! They’re just the latest in a long line of idiots destroying the town and themselves for short money. The only thing that’ll work here is to restore the town. Turn it into Antique Heaven, a mecca for interior decorators. Antique shops bring in rich people, spawn neat little places to buy a cappuccino, to order pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and a glass of Chardonnay. Second homes for TV stars. Then, tourists gawking at the TV stars. Get it known for being known. Plotkin and Schooner think they’re acting rationally of their own free will. They don’t realize that they’re being pushed along by hidden forces, historical forces, the old secret spirit of the town.”

  “Are we being pushed along, too? You and me?”

  “Of course.” She put her papers in order. “I’ve got to pick up Cray.”

  “When do I get to meet Cray?”

  “Maybe next Sunday? After soccer?”

  “Great.”

  “One more thing,” she said, reaching for a drawer. She pulled. Nothing. Pulled harder. More nothing. Orville reached over and helped her. The knob broke off and the drawer jumped out spilling papers all over the floor. They looked at each other and laughed. She picked up a document, a color photo. “I wanted you to see this. It’s the Town Seal of Columbia. Eighteenth century, in fact.”

  They looked, together, heads close. The seal was circular, like a porthole view of the ocean. Neptune, holding a trident, sat astride a spouting whale facing backwards. In the background a woman was doing something to a bird. Orville asked what that was.

  “Officially, it’s said to be a mermaid caressing a dove.”

  A scroll, scalloped like a fancy ribbon on a gift, made an arc over this peaceful aquatic scene. On it was inscribed the town motto: Et decus et pretium recti. Orville asked what it meant.

  “The Glory and Reward of Virtue.”

  Again they laughed and walked downstairs past the main borrowing desk and then out onto the front steps flanked by the cat-sized lions. They braced against the astonishing cold that now seemed more crisp and lively than ominous, so that they felt less chilled by the rawness than snug in the bundling up against it. As they walked to her car, Miranda’s hand on Orville’s arm felt newly familiar to both. She got in and rolled down the window, looking up at him.

  “And do you know,” she asked him, “who it is, in 1960, who finally leads the fight to create this library?”

  “No, who?”

  “A Columbian named Selma Rose.”

  “What?” he cried out, stunned, feeling a kind of slippage in his brain. “Selma Rose? Not my Selma Rose, no way. Must be another Selma Rose?”

  “Nope. Your mom. A long hard fight, and against all the odds she won it.”

  Reeling, Orville tried to reconcile this clear evidence of Selma’s altruism with all the evidence in his life w
ith her and in her letters of her ruthless self-focus. He failed. He stood there in the cold, suddenly feeling like a few convolutions of his brain were being unrolled. He might have laughed but for the letter in his pocket. A cloud crossed his face. He wanted to let it keep passing across, and tried hard.

  “Your mom, yes,” she said again. She was looking up at him expectantly.

  “My mom,” he said finally, failing to hide his bitterness. “I’ll tell you about my mom. I got a letter from my mom last night.”

  “A letter?”

  ”You haven’t lived ’til you’ve gotten a letter from your dead mother.” He took off his gloves, fumbling in his pockets with freezing fingers. “She wrote a whole series to me, to be mailed after her death. They’re postmarked ‘Columbia’—someone around here has them and is mailing them, but I don’t know who. Listen to this.”

  He started to scan it, searching for a piece that he could read without shame. The beginning, as usual, wasn’t too bad. He read to her.

  Hi honey-bunny!

  He glanced at Miranda. She was smiling. He read on.

  Were your ears burning? I was bragging about you. I never tell anyone anything bad about you—though as you know, there is lots!

  “‘Lots,’” he said to Miranda, barely hiding his contempt, “is underlined.”

  His harshness surprised her. To her it didn’t seem that bad, it just seemed like Selma. A little weird, sure, but weird-funny. “Go on.”

  By now you’ve been here almost five months. Fun, eh? I imagine that right now—whether I’m in Heaven or that hot other place—I’ll be feeling a sense of accomplishment. I figure you’re helping Bill out, as a dear and glorious physician for our little town. My philosophy in life can be summed up in two short Sayings To Live By:

  1) SO WHAT?

  and

  2) WHAT NEXT?

  The first is good for the past. The second is even better for the future. God knows you can’t do anything about the present. You were always stuck up in the mud of the present, which, if you think about it, and as opposed to dealing with the past and future, is very strange. One of the last letters you wrote me—and mind you there were not many—was all about your Buddhist Philosophy. I wrote back that it was wonderful. Now that I’m dead I can tell you the truth—

  Orville, realizing what followed, broke off reading. The sentence in fact ended with “—that it was just one more example of your total selfishness!”

  He said to Miranda, even more bitterly, “It gets worse.”

  “It’s a little weird, sure,” she said, “zany even, but do you really feel it’s that bad?”

  “Bad? I’ll give you bad! Try paragraph three!”

  “Okay. Let’s have paragraph three.”

  But Orville knew, from reading the letter late last night and feeling the knife twist in his gut, that what came next was too humiliating to read to anyone. He squatted down beside the car window and scanned it in silence.

  There’s something else I’ve always wanted to say. Your running away from me. The summer of ’61 when I came home from my brain surgery and could barely see or hear or walk or talk, that long summer when I kept asking you, begging you, to stay with me. And what did you do? You ran. You never stayed. You didn’t care and I’ll never forgive you. And that’s why my will, flyboy. My will is that this time you stay. To keep you from flying away, to make you for once in your life when you yourself don’t really want to, to stay. Like I did. If you run now—

  Miranda’s voice brought him back. He found himself on a level with two light-green eyes framed by red hair. Eyes the color of tropical water close in to shore, full of concern.

  He asked, “What’d you say?”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You can read it to me. I’d like to hear.”

  “No. It’s too goddamn humiliating.”

  Again, Miranda was startled by the depth of his reaction to what she—knowing how much Selma loved her son—heard as basically a caring, loving letter. But, she thought, mourning a loved one is hard. All kinds of unexpected feelings and thoughts come up at the strangest times, surprising you. God knows I went through it all, too, when Joe died and when my parents died, the anger, the bitterness. He’s having a hard time.

  She took off her glove and reached out through the open car window and put her palm to his cheek. It felt icy.

  Her touch on his cheek felt warm, even hot—less soothing than exciting. He asked, “Did you know her?”

  “No.”

  · 11 ·

  All that night Miranda tossed and turned, wondering why she had said No. Should she call him back and tell him?

  Two days before, she had gone up to her attic where the box marked Scomparza Moving and Funeral was hidden. She had taken out a sealed letter addressed to Orville, the next one on the pile. On it a yellow Post-it read, “To Be Mailed on the Third Week of the Third Month After He Arrives.” She drove into town and dropped it in a mailbox, ensuring that the letter would be postmarked Columbia. As she had done five times before. All in total secrecy. Carefully. Wearing gloves. Making sure the mailbox flapper didn’t stick, and flipped back, home.

  In the three months before she met Orville, she had felt a certain satisfaction with being the agent of Selma’s love, helping heal the rift between Selma and her son. She imagined the letters to be as Selma had described them, letters of a mother telling her absent son all the things she hadn’t been able to when they were together. The letters were meant to help her son feel closer to her, help him work through his pain.

  I wonder, Miranda asked herself in the middle of the night, if ever Cray goes off and I’m out of touch with him and I die, would there be someone I could ask to do that for me? It’s a wonderful thing to do, isn’t it?

  All that night her secret ate at her. Why hadn’t she said, “Yes, I met her. We were on committees together. But I didn’t know her, really.” Why couldn’t she just have said the sensible thing? Why so flustered?

  She knew, of course, that it was because of her secret, and that even to say Yes was dangerous—that’s how secrets are. But more, she realized that it was her sense of the precariousness of love in general, and of this new love between them now.

  Lying awake, she asked herself, “What was I going to say? That ‘I’m just falling in love with you and oh, by the way, I’m the one who’s been sending you your dead mother’s letters in secret’?”

  How can I tell him that, now? It’s all too fragile now, too new. Besides, I promised Selma. Took her money—$5,000! I swore on a rock by the river. A promise is a promise, a secret a secret. He’ll never find out. Let it go. Besides, I don’t want her in here, getting between him and me.

  But isn’t it cruel to keep this kind of secret from someone you love?

  Yes, it is. I’ll tell him. Now.

  She picked up the phone.

  Put it down.

  Picked it up again and dialed.

  Put it down.

  She picked it up again and dialed and let it ring until someone picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  It was him.

  She hung up.

  · 12 ·

  “Do you love Dr. Rose?”

  This question came out of the blue of the backseat of the station wagon as Miranda was driving Cray to his last soccer game of the season.

  Cray was six and several months. That Sunday morning Miranda had told him, with feigned casualness, that Dr. Rose would be meeting them at the game and that he would be coming back to the house with them for dinner. Cray picked up the feigned part and said nothing. He knew that something was up with his mother, and now it turned out that the something was this Dr. Rose and he didn’t like it one bit. In his four years growing up on the edge of Columbia, from time to time he’d seen men come through the house. Most seemed thumpy and loud and smelled of weird soap,
or beer. They always started with dinner. During dinner he always watched TV in the other room. Often they were still there when he went to bed. Seldom were they there in the morning when he’d awakened. None had lasted more than a few weekends. That was fine with him. It was hard enough having a hollow where a father should be. It was harder having a man who his mom’s attention would turn to even when he was there, too.

  “No, I don’t,” Miranda answered. Her hands clenched the wheel.

  “Good.”

  “Be nice to him anyway, okay?”

  Orville got there on doctor time—late, just before halftime. The early-December day was strangely warm. The field, set in a grassy bowl next to the gym entrance at Columbia High, had thawed enough to produce child-friendly mud. He stood on the rim looking down, spotting Miranda’s red hair on the sidelines. On the edge of the beehive of boys swarming after the ball—at this age they didn’t seem to have grasped the concept of “the pass”—was another redhead, who, he thought, must be Cray. Orville watched him.

  The boy was lanky and coordinated, a fast runner. As he chased the ball his straight hair flowed this way and that like a bowl of red water on his head. But he seemed reluctant to get into the pack and mix it up. He would kick at the ball only if it squirted free. Long ago, as manager of the Fish Hawk hoopsters, Orville had learned that you can tell just about everything about a person from the way they play a sport. Here was a boy who was timid.

  Orville walked on down the steep grassy slope to the sidelines. As he greeted Miranda, his heart did a little twist in his chest. For the first time, their greeting was more loving than apprehensive.

  The boys on Cray’s team all wore shirts for Schooner’s Spa. Henry was the coach. He waved gaily to Orville. The whistle blew, ending the first half. All the boys ran to the sidelines and clustered around Henry in a huddle close to Miranda and Orville. Cray ignored his mother and Orville. Schooner distributed quartered oranges, reminding Orville of himself, as manager, doing it at halftime for the Fish Hawks.