I imagined my classmates reading the list, seeing my address, and thinking to themselves, Northaven. Northaven. I wonder if that’s one of those toney suburbs west of the Twin Cities. Then I imagined them getting out their Rand McNally Road Atlases and looking up Northaven to see just where I’d ended up. First they’d see that the reunion committee had spelled it wrong. It would say, “North Haven, pop. 1,820, F-4.” Then they would think to themselves, Whoa! Eighteen hundred people—EXCLUSIVE suburban enclave. Then they’d look back on page 43– 4 of the atlas, find the little “F” and the little “4,” and discover that the “F” and “4” intersect somewhere in the middle of nowhere to the west of Mankato. Big grins would wash over their faces, and they would make little “hmm, hmm, hmm” noises and maybe mumble something like “Well, well, well, how about Davy Battles preaching to the farmers out in the sticks.”
“I’m not going to go,” I told Annie. “No way. They’re all going to ask, ‘When did you decide to enter the ministry, Dave?’ And they’re going to expect some sort of Peter Marshall answer about almost falling over a cliff in the fog. Then they’re going to talk about the arts in southwestern Connecticut and the housing prices in Chicago. I can’t do it, Annie. I won’t go.”
The theory is that class reunions are guileless celebrations of the halcyon days of high school. But I knew better; in fact, everybody knows better. High school reunions are inspections, examinations, tests. Everybody sees what everybody else has or has not made of themselves. It’s all closely graded and clearly understood but unspoken: attractiveness of wives/ handsomeness of husbands, cleverness of children, weight gained/hair lost, address/size of home, the potent/impotent ring of your job title. This reunion was a midterm. Everybody was forty or so—halfway through the Big Term. “No,” I said, “I won’t go.”
It was Annie who changed my mind. She said she would go with me and would never leave my side. And she pointed out that I would be graded high in the “attractiveness of wife” area. She also noted that one-third of the class of ’68 had never left Peeksborough, and then she made her power play: “Dave, wouldn’t it be great to see Darleen MacClean again? I see she’s on the reunion committee.”
In high school, Darleen and I had been a four-year item. All through high school we “went steady,” as it was put then. We got pinned in our senior year, and she wore my class ring on a chain around her neck. Locally, Darleen had been considered quite a catch: oval-faced, blue-eyed, and full-figured. She was no student, but a shoe-in for homecoming queen. In the eyes of the world, or at least in the eyes of my male classmates, keeping my hands on Darleen for four years may well have been my greatest conspicuous achievement.
Our relationship was revealed for what it was in my freshman year of college. After about three months apart, I realized I neither liked nor disliked Darleen MacClean; the fact was, I didn’t know her. What I had liked was local notoriety and social stability.
But she was not forgotten. Annie had never met Darleen, who had with the years metamorphosed in my wife’s mind into a sort of eastern Pennsylvania Bo Derek. In the course of our marriage, I have fallen into the perverse habit of negotiating Darleen into conversations with my wife at strategic moments. I do this half consciously, half deliberately, a little teasingly. When I say “Darleen MacClean, the Homecoming Queen,” it always carries the same unspoken message: “Dear wife, I once dated a beauty queen, but I chose you.”
We walked into the old high school in Peeksborough, and my first impression was the familiar smell of the floor wax. It carried me back twenty years. They say that of the five senses, smell and taste remain in memory the best. Annie and I walked together down the long hall toward the gym. It was like a tunnel through time conjuring up not so much specific memories of events or people, but the vaguer memories of emotions, especially the insecurity and anxiety of adolescence. Above the door of the gymnasium was a big sign—poster paint on white butcher paper—reading “Welcome, Class of ’68!” Underneath the sign was Darleen MacClean sitting next to a card table labeled “Registration.”
The years had not been kind. Her hairstyle, a beehive, had not changed. But round-faced and full-figured had become just round and full. She was wearing too much makeup and a dress too young for her years, inappropriate to her age, and too tight for her shape. The effect was not Bo Derek. She and I squealed our greetings, embraced, and I said, “This is Annie, my wife.”
Annie, God bless her gracious soul, greeted Darleen like a peasant presented to royalty. “I’ve heard so much about you from David. What a pleasure it is to finally meet you in person.” We exchanged smiles and nostalgic sighs and the names and ages of our kids. Then we registered and moved toward the gym. I didn’t even dare look at Annie. I expected at least a playful look or an elbow in my ribs, or maybe, at worst, a “Darleen, the Homecoming Queen.” But I got nothing, not a word from her, and it’s been over a week now.
The reunion committee had chosen the South Seas as the theme, Polynesia as Pennsylvania imagines it to be. We meandered over to a table on which were set two huge punch bowls. One was labeled “Bali-High Punch (alcoholic),” and the other “Bali-High Punch (nonalcoholic).” Gathered there, with clear plastic glasses filled with one or the other variation, were two former classmates. I remembered both of them right off, though I’d thought of neither for twenty years. John (“call me Jack”) Arnold had been voted “most likely to succeed” by the class of ’68. Jack was born smooth, one of those souls who slide through life with everything moving into place or out of their way. He had been popular, a jock who had graduated near the top of the class. He had gone to Temple on scholarship and ended up, I’d heard, with an M.B.A.
The other person at the Bali-High Punch table was Andy Starrett, who graduated as one of the eighty-three members of our class but whom almost nobody seemed to know. He grew up in a neighborhood of mobile homes on the edge of town. His family kept to themselves. His mother did cleaning work and his father drank. Andy was quiet and eclectically bookish—I remembered him always reading sci-fi paperbacks. He never missed school and always missed extracurricular activities.
But he didn’t miss the senior prom. Against his better judgment, somebody had bamboozled him into a double date. I can still see him: white renta-tux, Beatles haircut, and a lost, overawed look on his face. The theme had been Polynesia that time as well. Halfway through the evening, Andy’s old man burst into the decorated gym filthy drunk and yelling his head off about “the car.” He knocked over a papier-mâché palm tree and dragged his son out into the parking lot, where he beat him silly, probably because he was young and had a tux on.
There could not have been a more unlikely pair in conversation at the Bali-High Punch table than these two. Jack was showing Andy pictures of his lovely kids and lovely second wife. At least the kids and the second wife were in the foreground of all the pictures. But the photos were really pictures of the backgrounds: there was the wife in front of the Mercedes, with just enough of the front fender revealed so that you knew what it was. There was a snowy shot of the kids in ski jackets squinting at the camera in front of the five-bedroom colonial in Short Hills. There was the whole family on a rustic front porch—“the place up in Maine.” Finally, there were the kids in life-jackets on the boat.
After the pictures were over, Jack talked about his mortgage insurance business in the Cleveland suburbs. Andy asked an appropriate question about softness in the real estate market and then about how his company handled foreclosures. Jack rambled on about “the S-and-L thing” and ended the conversation tapping Andy’s lapel with the index finger of the same hand that was holding his half-filled plastic glass. A little Bali-High Punch sloshed on Andy’s jacket. “You know what keeps me on top,” he was saying, “know-how, know-how keeps me on top. Tell me, what are you up to?” Andy got two sentences out before Jack’s eye caught sight of another subject. “Jimmy, ol’ buddy!” he called out, raising his drink in the air. Over his shoulder he said, “Good to talk,”
and was off. We watched him hustle over to Jimmy. Out came the pictures and I caught the words, “growing mortgage insurance firm.…”
I looked at Andy. He looked at me and smiled. I said, “I really would like to know what you’re doing.” He had gone to a state school and majored in psychology. He specialized in alcohol treatment and now was the director of a small treatment facility in Pittsburgh. He saw a few successes, he said, and he and his teenage sons did a lot of bicycling together. He liked to read and had written a science fiction novel that he couldn’t get published. He smiled and raised his glass of Bali-High Punch and said, “Good life, how about you?”
He listened to me, nodding and smiling like a seasoned counselor. He asked questions that showed he heard what I had said. We talked for a good forty minutes, me and the kid nobody noticed. His wife came by and slipped an arm around his waist. Jack was across the gym and still dealing his photos to all who would give him a chance. We caught each other’s eyes, and Andy said, with more mischief than guile: “He reminds me of a story, the old chestnut about the two Indian gurus sitting in front of their cave meditating. A jetliner flies over and the one guru says, ‘They have the know-how.’ And the other one answers, ‘Yes, but do they have the know-why?’ ”
The drive home took two days. Mile after mile of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin slipped by, giving me time to think. What I thought was that I was glad Annie talked me into the trip. I thought of the kid nobody had ever noticed and the kid everybody had always noticed and how their lives had taken shape. Maybe Jack had just grown into our expectations of him. He was indeed “most likely to succeed,” and I suppose everybody at the reunion thought him a success, even if they were dodging him and his pictures by eleven. Nobody had had any expectations for Andy Starrett to grow into, so I guess he made up his own.
A few weeks later, it fell to me to preach the baccalaureate sermon to the seniors of North Haven High. It’s one of those clergy jobs that, in a small town, gets rotated among the pastors each year. I preached briefly (although I’m sure they didn’t think so) on a passage from Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” I looked at these babies, all lined up in rows, sweating miserably in their rented acrylic robes, mortarboards perched unnaturally on their heads. Who would they be in twenty years? How would they come back to their reunion in the year 2010? Would they be conformed—and if so, conformed to what? Would they be transformed—and if so, transformed by what power? Only time will tell, time and grace.
– 10 –
Lamont Wilcox’s Boat
There really is no such thing as privacy in a town like this. As in all the villages that ever were, people pretty much know and have always known each other’s business. Current notions of privacy and anonymity are urban luxuries. The anonymity of city apartment blocks and the privacy of detached suburban ranch homes do offer a certain liberation. They also offer danger. Since the dawn of time, the question “But what will people think?” has put a fence around even vaguely aberrant behavior. If nobody knows or cares, the fence is gone. Terrible things can happen. Wonderful things, too.
People who want to be different, or simply are different, have three choices in a place like this. First, they can leave. A lot of them do, which is why places like Mankato and New York City are full of strange and creative people. These people mostly came from someplace else, often someplace small, where life would have been uphill had they stayed.
The second choice for people who are different is to stay and try to be extraordinarily discreet. This seldom works for long. The third alternative for different people is to stay and become a local character. Every town has a few. Often, such local characters are, in time, not just tolerated, but veritably celebrated with the knowing smiles of a resigned acceptance. A lot of small towns even take a certain pride in their characters. But they are talked about. To stay is a brave choice.
Larry Wilcox’s older brother, Lamont, chose to stay. That is, he chose to stay until three years ago last spring. Lamont left town when he was forty-eight. His manner of leaving was the most dramatic exit anybody in North Haven remembers. (Second place in dramatic exits is usually assigned to my predecessor, the Reverend Mr. Paulsen, whose story I have already told you.)
People talked about Lamont on a number of counts. Most conspicuously, he didn’t work. More precisely, he didn’t work at anything that earned money to support himself and his family. He had inherited the farm, such as it was, leased out the tillable acreage, and lived in the farmhouse. The white paint has been peeling off the house for as long as anybody can remember. Bales of hay are stacked around the foundation to keep the cold out.
People also talked about Lamont because “he drank.” In local parlance, “to drink” means to drink to excess and implies alcoholism. This was clearly the case with Lamont, who “drank” since he was in high school. There are any number of private alcoholics in town, but Lamont was thoroughly public in his insobriety. All his drinking was done at the Blue Spruce Bar and Grille. But he only drank in the evening, which began about three-thirty.
What people mostly talked about, however, was the boat Lamont was building in the barn next to the farmhouse. He had started work on the boat in the summer of 1959 after finishing the last of C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels. The first of that series of hearty nautical adventures had been assigned by the late Miss Pratt to her Junior English Lit. class at North Haven High. Later, she often confessed that she regretted having ever exposed young Lamont to such fancies. It would have been better, she said, to have assigned Lamont Ole Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth. But the sea had captured Lamont. He closed the last page of the Hornblower series and announced to his mother that he was going to build a boat in the barn, and that when the boat was finished, he was going to sail to the Caribbean.
People talked about “the boat” because Lamont kept feeding the town conversational material. At the Blue Spruce, he would announce something like “I got that starboard chain plate bolted to the bulkhead this morning.” Such an announcement might as well have been made in Swahili. It required translation, which Lamont was pleased to offer over “a few beers,” and technical diagrams, which he drew on bar napkins. This kept “the boat” a lively topic of gossip and, of course, scorn. Critics noted that Lamont had never even seen the ocean. To this he would reply, “That’s why I’m building a boat.” Others noted that thirty years was a long time to be working on a single vessel, whatever the size. To this Lamont would answer, “A vessel to sail open waters needs to be well and fully founded.” True, of course, but Lamont’s workdays started late and ended early.
But most every conversation about Lamont’s boat concluded with an almost liturgical repetition of two points, both ancient and true. First, the nearest navigable water to Lamont’s barn was a good 140 miles away at Lake Pepin on the Mississippi River. Second, nobody in town had ever seen “the boat.” Lamont kept the barn locked and refused to show anybody his project. He said they would see it only when it was done. Nobody was foolish enough to think that this day would ever come. Some radical skeptics doubted the very existence of “the boat.”
Lamont’s wife, Annette, is a teller in the Farmers & Merchants Bank. She always talked freely about Lamont’s foolishness and made it clear that she had no interest at all in boats. Both the kids are grown and gone to Minneapolis. To say that Annette was pitied would not be quite accurate. She bore the burden of Lamont Wilcox as a martyr wears a crown. She often picked him up at the Blue Spruce when it was too cold to walk home. “Drunks can freeze to death in the winter,” she would say. She alternatively defended and scolded him in public. Over twenty-five years of marriage, a certain symbiosis had developed between the drunken dreamer and the stalwart wife. Both seemed comfortable with their roles. If one of Annette’s friends said over coffee, “Annette, I just don’t know how you put up with it,” Annette would lift her chin, purse her lips, and nod ever so slightly. “A woman
of steel, I am,” those movements said, “a giant of the earth.”
If Annette was surprised when Lamont announced that “the boat” was finished and that he would be leaving at the end of June, she didn’t show it. Stoicism was her adopted style. The town, however, could speak of nothing else. It was as though we were about to hear the punch line of a joke that had been three decades in the telling.
Bud Jennerson made “the boat” the lead story in that week’s issue of the Herald: LOCAL MAN TO EMBARK ON SOLO VOYAGE ABOARD HOME-MADE VESSEL. The “home-made vessel” was, Bud reported, a twenty-nine-foot sailboat made of plywood and fiberglass “from plans purchased by Mr. Wilcox from the Glen-L Marine Company of Tonawanda, New York, in 1959.” She was named Lady Barbara (after the second wife of Horatio Hornblower). The story concluded: “On Thursday, the 21st of June, a flatbed tractor trailer from the Sorensen Trucking Corp. in Mankato will haul the Lady Barbara to Winona, where she will be launched in the Mississippi River. From thence Mr. Wilcox will begin a voyage down that River to the Gulf of Mexico, then on to Florida, and finally to the Caribbean Islands.”
Thursday, the twenty-first of June, is a day that will live long in the town’s memory. By nine o’clock, the Wilcox driveway and the road in front of their place was lined with parked cars. The tractor part of the flatbed tractor trailer from Sorensen Trucking was protruding from the Wilcox’s unpainted barn. The trailer part, onto which the Lady Barbara had been moved the night before by a system of jacks, was hidden in the barn’s darkness. At about ten o’clock, the driver climbed into the cab, started the engine, and began to inch forward. The Lady Barbara emerged into the morning light to the cheers of former skeptics.
Lamont was standing in her cockpit, one hand on the tiller and the other waving to the crowd with the figure-8 wave of a beauty queen on the trunk of a convertible. On his head was a dark blue captain’s hat with gold embroidery on the brim. Annette was standing by the kitchen door with her arms folded in front of her.
Good News from North Haven Page 7