by Mel Bossa
Before I could say how familiar this looked to me, Karen had climbed the little stairway and managed to open one of the windows.
“You won’t believe this, Roger.”
I was at her side, on the windowsill in a second.
“You can see for miles, Roger. For miles!”
It was true. From this window we could see to the river, along its length down to the spit of land containing the shore houses along Twill Road. We went to the next window, opened it, and saw the entire front part of the house, along Atwood Avenue, right to the courthouse office. From a third window we could look north, far past the restored mill, right to the highest roofs of Scituate. We stood and leaned, looking for a long time, then went downstairs quietly and began to inspect the book bindings, afraid to touch them for fear they might crack and disintegrate under our touch. Then we went down to the bedroom and, still silent, down to the first floor. Without looking back, we stepped over the awry door and out onto the lawn.
Karen spun around then, looking back at the house, and again I could see her brows knit. Then she spoke: “We can’t. We just can’t!”
“Can’t what?” I asked.
“We can’t let them tear it down and make a ranch development out of it. We can’t, Roger. You know we can’t. Not now that we’ve seen it.”
“We won’t then. We’ll buy it.”
“All of it?”
“The whole damn thing. All thirteen acres. We’ll buy it and restore it and come stay here in the summer.”
“It’ll cost,” she warned. “Money and time.”
“Do you care?” I asked. I didn’t care about either the money or the time. I had both in abundance.
Karen didn’t answer, but her look said no, that she’d pay any price, no matter how high.
With the decision formed, we became suddenly serious, grave, silent as we walked back to the car. I stopped at the sign to see who the real estate agent was. It simply read, COUNTY ASSESSOR’S OFFICE. COURTHOUSE BUILDING.
The county assessor turned out to be the justice of the peace and the local sheriff: a little, balding middle-aged Italian-American with an operatic face and a bulbous nose.
“It’s been sold to the county,” he said. “That’s why we’re the ones handling it.”
“How much is it?” I asked.
“It’s thirteen acres, you know. Within five minutes’ walk to the beach. A large place. ’Course there’s an old house there too. But that can be taken down easily. Know of some folks in Scituate who’d do it for you cheap.”
“How much is it,” I repeated, “as it is?”
He stopped the sales talk then and looked at me. “You folks from Providence?”
“New York. But I’m not going to develop the land, if that’s what you’re really asking. I want to keep it in one piece and restore the Pritchard house.”
“How do you know it’s called that?”
“I just know.”
“Well, mister,” there was a pause, “a big contractor from Fall River came over here just a few days ago, looking at it. What did you say your name was?”
“Lynch. Roger Lynch.”
That stopped him. “Any relationship to Ralph Lynch?”
“He was my grandfather.”
He smiled. “The finest man I ever knew.”
“Even better than that!” I put in.
“You want to live up there?” he asked, unsure.
“Ever since I was a boy here,” I said. “I can’t live in Grandpa’s house.”
“No. No. That’s too bad.” He shook his head and looked down at the papers in his hand. “You know, Mr. Lynch, there are some people in this town who want it all to become like your grandpa’s place—guest motels and hamburger stands. But I don’t.”
“Then help me to stop it,” I said. “Sell the place to me instead of the builders from Fall River.”
“You’re almost a native too,” he said, as though looking for further reasons. “You’ll live up here?”
“In the summers. Once it’s all fixed up.”
“That’s going to cost.”
“We can’t live in it as it is.”
“No. You’re right.” He pulled the sheaf of papers out of a file and showed me the figures. “This was what the town paid the Todd heirs for the Pritchard property. This is what those people from Fall River quoted.”
“I can’t match that,” I said sincerely. “But I can give you double what the town paid the Todds for it. And I can give the town back its past too.”
“Sign here! It isn’t final, mind. But it’ll keep it out of those vultures’ hands until we can make the proper arrangements.”
I signed all the copies he shoved in front of me, then shook hands with him. He was smiling all over now, glad he had done it.
“And a Lynch too. Wait until Mama B. hears about this. They’ll be two of you Lynches in town now. Young and full of energy. Just like in the old days.”
“Two of us? How?”
“Chas Lynch. He still lives here, even though his mother died last year. He rents out one part of their house to another family.”
“Chas!” I said. “He’s my cousin,” I told Karen. “God, I wonder if he’s anything the way he used to be.”
She stared at me. Later on she told me she’d never heard me speak like that about anyone, vague as I was. We had stepped out of the office and were standing on the courthouse steps.
“And behind there,” I said, pointing to the other side of the building, “is where the town library is. I used to come here twice, three times a week. So, you see, you weren’t the first librarian I was sweet on. C’mon. Let’s go take a look.”
“Can’t!” the assessor said. “It’s closed. Been closed for more than two years. We can’t seem to find a librarian willing to live in a town like this. The last one came from Scituate. Then she moved up to Pawtucket, when her husband got a job there.”
The look that passed between Karen and me could have knocked a truck off the highway.
“Darling,” I began tentatively, “you don’t think…?”
Her hand went up to her mouth, her agate eyes almost glittering with surprise and pleasure at me. “I think you may have found yourself a new librarian,” I told the assessor.
“Part-time,” she put in.
“Hell! That’s better than nothing. Let me see if I can get the keys. I’ll show it to you.”
We went back to his office for the keys. It was only then that I noticed his name on the door: Harold Bianchi. Could he be Bud Bianchi? The kid who used to help Eileen’s mother?
I was almost afraid to ask. When I did, he responded with a laugh and another ten minutes of gossip about all of the folks I still remembered from the town.
“Hell!” he said finally. “I haven’t had a talk like that in years. You see! I was right to let you have it.”
Chapter 11
The plumbers and electricians and carpenters had been coming and going every day for the past four months—so I naturally assumed it was one of them returning for a last-minute consultation or piece of unfinished work when I heard the car pull into the driveway late that hazy spring afternoon.
Although I was in the upstairs turret library, close to a window giving a view of the area, I didn’t bother looking out to make certain. I was too immersed in my work, replacing sets of the old books into the newly polished mahogany shelving on the little balcony. I was following the plan that Karen and I had worked out a few weeks before, when we’d finally gotten all the volumes catalogued. Another morning’s work, and the library would be complete, restored to exactly the condition it had been in a hundred years before, save for such contemporary modifications as electric lighting, a telephone extension cord, and auxiliary speakers wired to the huge system two floors down in the music room. But these were barely noticeable when the room was seen. The library had been one of the most remarkable rooms in the place, a key to our deciding to take the house. There was a sense of real accomplishment
in its being almost done, which made up for the enormous expense and the multitude of problems we’d run into during the restoration.
Downstairs the kitchen, the breakfast room, the little connecting parlor, the music room, and the immense foyer were restored. The north side was still awaiting work. On the second floor only the two rooms beneath the library had been completed—a wall taken out to make them into one huge bedroom with a dozen windows, and the two dressing rooms combined into a modern bath and dressing room. The other three rooms on the north side remained empty, awaiting their turn. The house was so large, another family could have been living on the other side of the foyer and we’d only know about it by bumping into them coming or going, especially since the clever architect of the past century saw to it that several alternate staircases had been provided for—little twisting ones that opened up from what you might have thought was only another of many closets and went up to another dressing room or down to another part of the vast basement.
After dinner and whatever final night work we had to do, Karen and I would wander around the house. Down into the basement with flashlights and extension cords to find all the furniture that still hadn’t been restored—destined when done for the north side of the house. It sat dusted and brushed of cobwebs but still rather sad and dilapidated compared to what had already been repaired and polished to a high gleam with oils of clove and lemon and which now elegantly graced the furnished rooms. Or Karen and I would go to the north side of the house, sketchpads in hand, planning out various designs for how we would eventually fix up those rooms—for guests or children.
Often enough our wandering led us outside on balmy nights, or, when curtailed by weather or sheer fatigue or merely the need to be close together for a while, we’d jump into the big four-poster bed we’d found on the north side of the house, complete with various side curtains and half-dozen drawers of various sizes (and functions?) built in to the headboard and footboard. There we’d feel as though we’d stepped back into another time, and we’d approach each other with a cautious affection and reserved passion or simply lie in each other’s arms, me talking about almost anything, Karen occasionally commenting or often merely listening. Most of the time we would go right to sleep, exhausted. We worked awfully hard at the house, even with the half-dozen workmen always there, hammering or sawing or drilling away day after day. Besides working on the house, Karen had managed to get the library opened again and was now there five days a week from noon until six in the evening, making that part of the town’s past alive again. Although we’d thought we would remain in New York and only come up here summers, as soon as we’d obtained the house in late fall, we’d come up and begun working, and it was an unspoken agreement that we would continue living here, letting out my town house next year. And being at the house all winter and seeing the spring arrive, we knew it had been exactly the right thing. We’d gotten so much done already.
But handsome as the downstairs rooms were, the library in the turret was our real accomplishment. Especially once we’d discovered the books were in startlingly fine condition despite their age. Perhaps they’d been sealed off somehow, or neglect had been the best thing for them. No one and nothing had touched them for almost a century; no unfiltered sunlight had entered in to heat and dry and crack them; no rain or moisture had gotten through the heavily insulated wainscoting to eat them away by mold. Cataloguing them, seeing what they were, had been a joy for us—Karen had been high on it for weeks. Many, naturally, were of no value, except for their age. But many others seemed to be rare even for their own time. Sets of Voltaire, Hegel, and Plato in Greek and Latin sat alongside sets of Samuel Richardson, Smollett, Marivaux, and Fielding. But there were rarities too—an early translation into English of some Buddhist texts, a surprising set of Kierkegaard’s works in German. And with all this, children’s albums the Pritchards had put together as well as scores of bound volumes of the Reverend Calvin Pritchard’s tedious and tendentious treatises on the relationship of Man to his Providence and vice versa, ad nauseam.
Amity had inherited this semiliterary bent from her father, as another dozen vellum-bound volumes testified. I had laid these aside on the long oblong distressed-oak reading table in the center of the room and would occasionally skim through them at random when I needed a break: a cup of coffee, a cigarette, a little Brahms piano music.
Unsurprisingly, these attempts of hers were childish self-criticisms aimed at self-improvement—more than likely written under the Reverend’s example, if not actually under his eye. But the fact that they were hers made them fascinating to me. For I was living in her house, almost as it had been when she had lived in it, sitting here in the same room where she had written them, reading her words.
They absorbed me, as the library absorbed me, as the restoration of the house absorbed me—so that I was living in a state of suppressed excitement, of pleasure and anticipation of some discovery, and with a deeply increasing sense of how the past could be made part of the present—integral to it, if done with involvement and affection.
It was this absorption that kept me from noticing him in the open library doorway, from even hearing him climb the second-floor stairs to get up here, that kept me from seeing he was standing there looking at me for some time: He had to cough loudly to get my attention.
“I’d heard you’d come back to Nansquett. But I wouldn’t believe it until I laid eyes on you for myself.”
His voice was loud and deep in the reverberant room. I turned around looking for its source before I thought to look at the doorway. And then I faced him for a minute or so trying to snap back out of my daydreams about Amity and her time into the practical now. He wore a work shirt, jeans and mud-caked construction boots. My first impression was of a new man contracted to do something in the house, reporting for instructions. Then I thought perhaps this is someone who knew me from my visits to the town with my family and had come to say hello.
“I’d heard that my little cousin Roger had come back to Nansquett, rich as Rockefeller and crazy as a coot. But I had to see for myself.”
Now the figure of the man melted into a memory—yes! The same curly blond hair, darker now; the same fine facial features, covered with grime and a blond fuzz on his cheeks and chin; but especially the same mocking smile and the still astonishingly dark eyes.
“Chas?”
“Who the hell else? Amity Pritchard?” He laughed now. “C’mon down off there and greet me like I’m a white man.”
Marveling at how little he’d changed, I descended from the balcony and went to shake his hand. He’d grown. He was two or three inches taller than me, large, solid, muscular.
“Shit!” he said, scorning my extended hand and pulling me into a crushing embrace. He hugged me once or twice, murmuring something unintelligible, until I pulled away, trying to make a joke of it.
“Well, you haven’t changed,” I kidded him. “Still a ninety-pound weakling.”
He ignored that, saying “No, I haven’t changed. But you have. No more baby fat. You’re all trimmed down. Looking good. Looking younger than you ought to too. I guess it’s all that rich living.”
“I swim,” I said by way of explanation. “Ever since high school, I’ve been swimming.” The way his eyes were smoking at me from their deep sockets made me think he wanted something from me. And his reference to how rich I was suggested he would soon be hitting me up for a loan. I nerved myself for dealing with it.
“I know I should have gotten in touch with you, Chas,” I said in an attempt to forestall any such accusations from him, “but we’ve really been a little driven getting all this into shape.”
He frowned a little at that, then looked around at the library.
“Well you’re doing quite a job here. Quite a job! People in town are talking about it already. Wait until you’re done. It’ll really set them going.” He walked around the room a little, looking up and down, as though admiring details. “Jesus, I never knew this place was so big and
so, well, so big!”
“It’s a beautiful house, Chas. Really beautiful. As good as anything in Newport.”
He continued looking around, then suddenly turned to me. “I thought maybe you didn’t choose to look me up because, well, because you were still sore with me.”
“Sore?”
“You know. The last time we saw each other wasn’t under the most favorable circumstances.”
I felt the blood rush to my face. I tried making light of it. “We were just kids then, Chas.”
“I know. I know. But some people don’t forget anything. That’s why I didn’t come here sooner, even though I’ve known since last November that you were living here. Bud Bianchi told me as soon as your papers came through.” He went to the table and began looking at the volumes of Amity’s diaries, fingering their pages. My first instinct was to ask him to leave them alone.
“And I wouldn’t have come here today if your wife hadn’t told me I’d better.”
“Karen?”
“At the library,” Chas said. “I went there to get a book on electronics. That’s my hobby: electronics. Radios and televisions. I’m taking courses for it in a night school in Cranston two nights a week. Right now I’m an automobile mechanic. Partners in a big garage and triple gas pump up in Scituate. You ever have any problems with your car, bring it up to us. I’ll give you a discount.”
“Thanks, Chas.”
“Yeah, well, I knew she was your wife, everyone in town knows that much. And as I was checking out this book on electronics, I said, ‘Tell Roger his cousin Chas sends his regards.’ She took me aside and sort of yelled at me for not coming to see you. She said you’d mentioned me fondly at times and that by all rights you ought to have looked me up but that you were so busy up here that you didn’t have any time to go visiting. Well, I have plenty of time even with the garage and the night courses. So I came.”
“Well, Karen was right. As usual.”