by Neil Plakcy
As June turned into July, it was clear Mrs. Woodruff wasn’t getting better. The radiation and the chemotherapy hadn’t shrunk the tumor as much as the doctors hoped, and it was still inoperable. She spent her days dozing lightly by the window that overlooked the shopping mall, or sitting up with her visitors, a sad sort of smile on her face.
Connie’s cousin Jenny Laroquette came one day, but couldn’t stay long. “I’m sorry,” she said to Connie and Charley, wiping away a tear. “It just brings back too many memories.”
“That’s all right,” Connie said. “We understand, don’t we, Charley?”
Every morning when Charley woke up and realized his mother was in the hospital, the whole day seemed sadder and grayer. He thought that when this duty was finished he would never want to see a hospital again.
One day Connie’s brother Richard and his wife came to visit while Charley and Connie were there. Charley and Richard stepped out to the hallway so Mrs. Woodruff wouldn’t feel too crowded. “How is she?” Richard asked.
Charley shrugged. “She’s got a strong constitution. The doctors say that counts for a lot. But I don’t think she has much time left.”
“It’s a shame,” Richard said. They walked down to the visitor’s lounge and stood in the corner. Family Feud was playing on the television, Richard Dawson kissing all the women and telling everyone what the survey said.
“I wonder if you could do me a favor,” Richard said after a while. “My boy Ricky has been working with me at the dealership, and he’s a born salesman, but my regular guys, they’re afraid he’s stealing all the good deals from them. And he’s going back to college in the fall, so I can’t let him scare away any of my consistent producers.”
“I don’t see what I can do,” Charley said.
“See, I was hoping he could help you out. Strictly commission basis, so there’s no out-of-pocket for you unless he gets you some work. I know you don’t like to have to sell yourself, and I thought maybe he could help.”
“That’s nice of you, Richard,” Charley said. “Of course, I haven’t been doing much work since Momma’s been sick.”
“Delegation,” Richard said. “That’s the key. You delegate the selling to Ricky, and once you get some work you bring in a couple of good carpenters and you supervise them. That’s how the dealership works when I’m not there to hold their hands. Delegation is the essence of management.”
“I’ll think about it,” Charley said.
Charley rarely got angry. It wasn’t in his nature. But that night at the dinner table he yelled at Connie about her brother’s interfering ways. “It’s not enough that your mother has organized the Garden Club and a brigade of ladies in hats to go visit the hospital. And that we have to spend every goddamned holiday with your family. They’re everywhere. Every time I turn around there’s another McNally somewhere. I see your cousin at the grocery store and pump my gas across from one of your sisters. And who asked goddamned Evan to cut my Momma’s grass anyway? Now your brother wants to come in and tell me how to run my business.”
Raymond, Jeffrey and Edward stared at their father. Connie started to clear away the dinner dishes. “Boys, it’s time for you to go upstairs and do your homework,” she said.
“I don’t have any homework,” Raymond said.
“Then help your brothers,” Connie said. “Now git.”
The boys backed away from the table, still staring at their father, who was looking down at the table by then. He always felt bad after exploding like that.
“They’re just trying to help,” Connie said, sitting down catty-cornered to Charley. “It’s what families do.”
“But they’re your family, not mine. Not my Momma’s.”
“How can you say that? When we’ve been married sixteen years? My parents took you in just like their own son. You’ve been to every wedding and funeral and sweet sixteen party. You’ve seen those children grow up, you’ve seen your own children play with their cousins. How can you say what’s my family and what’s yours?”
“To me, growing up, family was me, my Momma and my Daddy,” Charley said. “We didn’t have all these other people around.”
“But remember when your Daddy died? And all those folks came and helped bring the crop in? They were acting like your family then. And you let them, because you needed the help. And now you need them again, and you can’t just shut them out. People like to help. It makes them feel good. You can’t deny them that.”
“So you think I should let Ricky come work with me?”
“You have to make that decision yourself,” Connie said. “But you’d better make it soon, or you won’t have any business at all left.”
“Not much of a choice, is it?” Charley sat back in his chair and his shoulders slumped. “Fail on my own or let your family bail me out.”
Connie took Charley’s hands in hers. “There isn’t anybody in my family with hands like yours,” she said. “Hands that can make such beautiful things. You know when I first fell in love with you?” Connie blushed. “It was when you made that little doll house for me, when I was sixteen and you were seventeen. Why, I had never had anybody make me anything so beautiful.”
“It was a nice little thing, wasn’t it?”
“Let Ricky help you,” Connie said. “I want you to go on making those beautiful things. He can talk a blue streak. You let him, and you just concentrate on what you do best.”
Charley smiled. “It was the doll house that did it? I should have built that earlier.”
“Charley,” Connie said. She blushed again.
* * *
Within two weeks Ricky had lined up three cabinet-making jobs for Charley. He hired back his helpers and delegated out all the rough work. It felt good to be busy, to hear all the equipment caterwauling in the shop, to have big piles of sawdust to sweep away at the end of a long day.
His mother passed away late in August, just around the same time his father had. Charley liked to think he was up there waiting for her, holding his hand out to her through the big white airy space that separated heaven from earth. At Labor Day, everyone gathered at Richard’s house for a big picnic, and Charley felt strange, not having his mother to walk with after dinner. Instead he sat in the back yard with Ricky, who had mapped out a strategy Charley could use to generate more business.
It wasn’t too hard, just a matter of mailing postcards to buyers of new homes, of remembering to ask his clients to pass the word about him and his work. Ricky promised to come back at Christmas break and do some more canvassing.
People kept coming up to Charley to tell him they missed his mother, what a kind, sweet-tempered person she had been. A bunch of kids, eleven-year-old Edward among them, played Indians around the jungle gym, whooping and hollering. There was a lot of food, especially home baked pies. When it got dark, his children came and sat around him. Connie appeared out of the velvety gloom, carrying a bag full of leftovers.
He listened to the crickets chirp and watched an owl take off from the maple tree that towered over the yard. Then he gathered up his family and took them home.
* * *
1977 was a quiet year for the Outhouse Gang. They didn’t venture far from Stewart’s Crossing, and scouted the location carefully for dogs, guns, and other troublesome devices. The charges against Sandy Lord were still pending at Halloween, so there hadn’t been much cause to celebrate. They hadn’t been dropped until nearly Christmas, when his friend Arthur Winston had turned up in Costa Rica and had sent a long letter to the authorities exonerating Sandy. The U.S. Attorney’s office was negotiating Arthur’s extradition but not making much headway, and they’d decided to give up on Sandy to concentrate on him.
For 1978, the Outhouse Gang was having a lot of trouble finding an outhouse at all. It was as if, in the course of the last year, they’d all been bulldozed or torn down or relocated to places out of sight of the casual viewer.
Finally Nick Miller found one, at a farm nearly twenty miles from town,
heading north toward Doylestown. Chuck resisted at first, because it was so far away, and the chances were that much greater that they’d get caught. But there were no other choices.
There were three Woodruff boys going, and Andrew Laroquette, and Danny Lord, who was sixteen and thought he was beyond all this stuff. Harry Mosca swore it was going to be his last year, because his arthritis was acting up, and Tom Laroquette said it would have to be his last year, because his family was moving to Westchester county in November.
Charley felt sad that the Outhouse Gang was falling apart, just as he had the chance to share it with all three of his sons, but he understood that time passed and people changed, and it was useless to hang on to tradition. After all, in his case, things had worked out by going in new directions. He had a lot more work and his business was on firmer financial ground.
The trip up to the farm was long and slow, and so was the trip back. They left the outhouse in front of the new bank on the north end of Main Street and retreated back to Chuck’s parking lot.
“I guess this is the end of the Outhouse Gang,” Chuck said. He was standing next to his truck, smoking one of the few cigarettes he allowed himself each day. Charley’s boys still sat on the lip of the truck, their feet dangling down. Paul and Sandy and Harry and Nick had all gone away, leaving Tom and Charley behind with their sons.
“I guess we were always the youngest ones,” Charley said to Tom. “Figures it would wind down to just you and me.”
“Hey, don’t forget about me,” Chuck said. “I’m not exactly an old fogy, you know.”
“We’ll keep in touch,” Tom said. “If I know Jenny, she’ll still want to come back down here every time there’s a family party. We’ll see you guys a lot.”
“Once you get settled, we’ll come up and visit you,” Charley said. “Right, boys?”
“Right, Dad,” they chorused.
“I love it when they do that,” Charley said to Chuck and Tom. “Well, come on, let’s get home and prove to your mother nothing awful’s happened.”
There was some general activity as kids jumped down from the truck, men shook hands, Chuck stamped out his cigarette on the asphalt. Charley walked toward his car, surrounded by his sons. “God, when did you guys get so tall?” he asked. “Have we been putting pills in your food or something?”
Raymond said, “Last one to the car’s a rotten egg,” and took off. The other boys followed. And Charley brought up the rear, whistling a nameless song his father had whistled before him.
The Outhouse Gang: 1988
In most respects, Stewart’s Crossing was like every place else in America. As the eighties ripened, some people survived, prospered, and changed with the times. Some, unfortunately, did not.
When Nick Miller was killed in a car crash, it took his ex-wife Carol two days of phone calls to track down their son Fred, who was picking apples in Washington state. He had dropped out of four colleges, and worked his way around the country as a laborer, part-time dope dealer and occasional shoplifter. His mother tried not to think about him, because when she did it made her sad.
When she finally got Fred on the phone, she told him, in brief detail, about the drunk driver in the Chevy pickup who ended up going the wrong way on I-95. Nick was on his way home from visiting a client who had just taken out a big homeowner’s policy. The paperwork was towed away with the car and the policy holder had been calling the office frantically.
Because there was no one else to do it, because she had loved him once, Carol was making the funeral arrangements. She offered to pay for a ticket home for Fred. “He wasn’t there for me,” Fred said. “Why should I be there for him?”
Carol had no answer for that.
* * *
In the summer of 1986, a national hardware chain called ReadyMate offered to buy Chuck Ritter’s store on Main Street.
“We’re trying out a test policy of opening chain stores in small town locations, instead of at big suburban malls,” said the head negotiator, a man from the home office named Irv Waxroth. He and Chuck spent a couple of days hunched over the books, walking the store and looking at the inventory and the merchandising. Irv came equipped with demographics and traffic studies of Main Street and a pocketful of cash.
Chuck conferred with Susanna. “It was your father’s store,” Susanna said. “Do you think you could sell it?”
Chuck shrugged. “He made me work there. I didn’t know how to do anything else. If Bruce or Lisa wanted the store, I could see holding on, but I say, let’s take the money and run. There’s places in this world we’ve never even dreamed of.”
“I’ll settle for a nice little condo in Florida,” Susanna said. “What do you think about Tampa?”
“I think it sounds real nice.”
The experiment didn’t work; the store was closed within six months because it couldn’t meet corporate-mandated profit margins. But by then, Chuck and Susanna had retired to a condo on the west coast of Florida, near a tidal marsh filled with thousands of birds. Chuck bought binoculars and a couple of books, and started collecting what birders called his life list, all the birds he’d ever seen. Susanna had finished an associate’s degree at the community college and a bachelor’s degree from Trenton State. She was now working, one course at a time, on a master’s degree in education by correspondence, and teaching at a day care center near Sarasota.
Lisa had an MBA and worked for a computer company in Silicon Valley. She drove a BMW and wore business suits and high heels. Susanna sometimes looked at her and wondered how she had raised such a creature. Bruce was married and had two kids. He lived in Rochester and managed a sales division for Eastman Kodak. There were always plenty of cameras and lots of film when they had family reunions.
* * *
Tom and Jenny Laroquette moved to Westchester County, New York, where they settled into a house not far from Long Island Sound. Andrew went to the University of Colorado, where he majored, as his father put it, in skiing and girls. His parents flew out for his graduation in May of 1988.
It was still cool in Colorado in May. Tom wished he’d brought an overcoat to wear over his suits, but instead invested in a pair of kelly green corduroys and a blue and white fisherman’s sweater. Standing next to Andrew and posing for pictures in front of the Administration building, he found it hard to believe that this tall, blond, handsome boy in the crew-neck sweater was the same little boy he had taken for walks in the woods.
“What are you doing about your apartment?” Tom asked after Jenny clicked the picture. Andrew lived just off campus in a two-bedroom apartment he shared with three other guys, all of them as ski-crazy as he was.
“Our lease is up at the end of the month,” Andrew said. “But we’re all moving up to Aspen together.”
“Aspen,” Tom said.
“We can get waiter jobs there for the summer, and maybe get hired to teach at a ski school when the season starts.”
“It’s not exactly what we raised you to do. Or why we paid your tuition for four years in college.”
“But if that’s what you want, we’ll stand behind you,” Jenny said, finishing for Tom, in a way he had not intended at all.
Andrew did not notice Tom’s eyes flash at Jenny. “Thanks, guys, you’re terrific.” His smile was bright enough to melt a mountain of snow. “Listen, I’m supposed to be at the procession in like, fifteen minutes. I’ll catch you after the do.”
He ran off down the sidewalk, neatly slaloming around several happy families with cameras.
* * *
Most Stewart’s Crossing families did not remain together once the kids were grown. Unlike their parents, who had always lived near their relatives, the children of Stewart’s Crossing had a tendency to go away to college and never come home.
After he graduated from Columbia, Dennis Warner went to law school at Vanderbilt and dropped out after one semester. He worked as a salesman for Macy’s on Herald Square in Manhattan, and lived in an apartment in Brooklyn Heights wit
h four roommates. After a while, he went back to school for his master’s degree in political science, and then his doctorate. In 1987 he passed his orals and his thesis was accepted, and for the first time in years he had to face the job market.
He went home for a long weekend in May, shortly after getting his PhD. “I’m worried about you,” his father said. “You always read in the paper about PhDs driving cabs. What are you going to do?”
It was Saturday morning, and Paul was fixing Dennis a mushroom omelet. Saturday breakfasts were among the best items in Paul’s limited culinary repertoire, honed by years of getting up early with Dennis and letting Elaine sleep in.
“I went to a conference in March,” Dennis said as he set the table. “Where’s the salt shaker, Dad? It’s not on the counter.”
“We’re not using salt any more.” Paul brought the omelet to the table and flipped it neatly onto Dennis’s plate. “It’s your mother’s idea. Salt raises the blood pressure or something. Pretty soon she’ll take away everything that tastes good.”
“Anyway, I was telling you about this conference,” Dennis said. “I had a couple of interviews while I was there. And, actually, I got a job.”
“You did?” Paul turned from the stove, where he was fixing an omelet for himself. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I just found out a couple of days ago, and I thought I’d wait and tell you in person.”
“So where is it, this job? I assume it’s a teaching job.”