Maggie Darling

by James Howard Kunstler

  “Who the hell are these people?” Maggie said.

  “They’re a group. Well, I mean, like, a band. They’re rap artists.”

  “You know marijuana is still illegal in the state of Connecticut.”

  The rappers laughed and slapped one another’s hands.

  “This is not a drug den. Out. Out! Get up and get out!”

  They continued to share bewildered glances. Hooper, too, made faces of a helpless sort. When the quartet failed to move, Maggie stepped up to the huge one and kicked him on the shin.

  “Yeow!”

  “Out!”

  “Uh, Mom—”

  “All of you. Out of this house.”

  “Uh, maybe you fellas could go back into the city,” Hooper suggested.

  “I can’t believe dis yo’ moms, Hoop. I thought you said she down?”

  “Oh, I’m down,” Maggie retorted.

  “Hey, you s’posed to be the boss party bitch,” Huge said, making huge childlike hand gestures of disbelief.

  “What’d you call me?” Maggie said.

  “Boss party bitch,” Huge said, shrugging cartoonishly in his oversize NY Jets jersey and looking to his associates and Hooper for affirmation. “Ain’t that right?”

  “Uh, Mom, that’s just a kind of jargon. It doesn’t mean—”

  “Out. Out! Out!!” Maggie shrieked, her cries transforming her into something like a furious predatory bird, all beak and talons.

  “It’s okay, fellas. I’ll see you in studio C tomorrow, three o’clock. Ain’t no bullshit—”

  Maggie’s head seemed to revolve on steel bearings until she fastened Hooper in her gaze. “What did you say?” she asked.

  “Just keepin’ it real,” he explained to his mother. “Representing.”

  “Representing … what?”

  “My peeps,” Hooper said timidly. The others cracked up.

  “Do I have to call the troopers?” Maggie yelled.

  “You’s a muthafuckin’ lousy host-tess, know dat?” No-shirt remarked from his place on the sofa.

  “You got dat shit right,” Huge muttered.

  For an exceedingly painful and elongated moment nobody spoke or moved. Faraway in the house, a thermostat tripped a motor in a refrigerator. An old clock ticked in a hallway.

  “Dis place is boring as shit,” Huge finally declared. “’Mawn, le’s book.”

  Sideways hat got up first, swept a giant baggie of weed off the coffee table, and stuffed it into the pocket of his unbelievably strange pants—which hung so low that most of his boxer shorts were visible. Red Eyeglasses stuffed two Heinekens in the cargo pockets of his camouflage pants. No-shirt popped up from the sofa as though elasticized.

  “Remember, studio C. Forty-ninth Street entrance. Lots of booty-hooty!” Hooper called cheerfully after Chill Az Def as they swaggered out of the room. Last out of the room, Huge snatched up the cognac bottle by its neck.

  “That better not be one of my bottles, pal,” Maggie shouted after him.

  “Yeah, yeah,” was all Huge said.

  “It’s okay, Mom. They brought their own refreshments,” Hooper said. “This’ll probably come as a shock to you, but they have the number one single and number one album in America right now. Those guys are all millionaires.”

  “This might come as a shock to you, Hooper, but I don’t ever want to come home to a scene like this again.”

  “It’s because their black, right?”

  “No. It’s because they’re goons, they’re answering the goddamned telephone instead of you, they’re stinking up my house with dope, dropping pizza on the rug”—her voice climbed back into shrieking range—“and because Bob DiPietro was shot on the Merritt Parkway three days ago and he’s dead … he’s DEAD!” She dissolved into tears, shaking, and slumped against the wall with her face in her hands.

  The luxury cars could be heard firing up outside and pulling out with as much gunning of engines as possible.

  The Sikh limo driver suddenly emerged from the shadowy hallway around a corner, his grave face showing complete self-possession. Both Maggie and Hooper flinched to see him.

  “You are a very brave lady,” he said. “Yet, I observe all these goings-on with preparedness,” he added in the stiffly formal parlance of the eternal foreigner, hoisting an impressive chrome Colt .45 automatic pistol out of his Gore-Tex windbreaker.

  “Yikes!” Hooper recoiled further.

  “Why you make so much monkey business in your mother’s house?” the Sikh asked Hooper.

  “It’s just … entertainment,” he said.

  “To you Americans everything is entertainment now. Even the end of your world.”

  “Thank you … for protecting us,” Maggie said.

  The Sikh replaced the large gun in his waistband.

  “No problem,” he said. “You pay now? Two hundred.”

  “Yes. Sure.” Maggie collected herself sufficiently to rummage through her shoulder bag and handed him some crumpled fifties, including an extra one as a gratuity. He gave her his card in exchange. “Upwardly Mobile Limousine, Prandath Singh, prop.,” it read.

  “Whosoever would anger the gods, they shall have their fannies kicked,” he remarked obliquely, and a moment later he was gone too, just like that.

  “Bob’s dead?” Hooper ventured after the front door shut distantly. Bob DiPietro had been almost an uncle to Hooper over the years.

  “What the hell planet do you live on?”

  “I’m at work all the time. It’s so weird you should come home the one time all week I’m actually here.”

  “Where’s Alison?”

  “In the city. She’s going round the clock, too. We’re, like, workaholics.”

  “Where’s Aunt Lindy?”

  “I don’t know. Out. I heard about the sniper. But I had no idea Bob was the one that got shot.”

  “What’s this world coming to?” Maggie said, collapsing in her son’s surprisingly strong arms.

  “I don’t know, Mom. Maybe things have to kind of fall apart before they can come together again.”

  “Your hair is disgusting.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just a fashion experiment. You’re back early from Venice.”

  “Didn’t work out,” she sobbed some more.

  “I heard you were with Frederick Swann.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Down at MTV. I work there now.”

  “Oh … ?”

  “There’s this show, Gossip Nation. You and him were on it. Still photos from some airport in Italy.”

  “Oh, God …”

  “You looked okay, Mom. Don’t worry. But I don’t think the two of you are right for each other.”

  Maggie surprised herself by laughing, her head a dripping cavern of acid and rue.

  “Do you know how absurd life is becoming?” she moaned.

  “Oh, Mom, it’s always been completely absurd to me.”

  “What … ? I tried so hard to make things normal for you.”

  Hooper stroked her hair.

  “Maybe things were a little too normal. Mom, what were you doing with Frederick Swann in Italy, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” Maggie resumed bawling. “I have to go collapse right now before I have a nervous breakdown. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  “Hey, I’m glad you’re back, Mom. Sorry about the … uh—”

  She held up a hand signaling that she could not endure another word of explanation.

  “This place misses you when you’re not around,” Hooper could not help saying.

  2

  Normality Please

  She almost missed the funeral. A DiPietro family friend answered the phone the next morning and directed her to Our Lady of the Holy Vessel in Danbury. She arrived only in time to join the motor procession to the Holy Names Cemetery. Bob’s widow, Emily, a surgical nurse, who worked up to her elbows in gore every day at Danbury General, was in such a state of shock she had to be supported by her
son Gene and a cousin. Maggie had resolved to continue Bob’s salary a full year, and she asked the priest to find a way to let Emily know, so at least they wouldn’t feel financially devastated. There was an insurance policy, the priest said, but the salary would be a great comfort in the meantime, he assured Maggie. Then they left Bob under the earth that he had so lovingly cultivated over the years.

  After that, anything for normality, Maggie thought. Anything! She returned from the funeral to find Nina in the house’s nerve center preparing cherry tomatoes stuffed with a caper tapenade for a board luncheon at Yale’s Medievalists Society the next day. Maggie begged to be put to work at the most mind-numbing chores, and Nina’s superlative antennae sensed Maggie’s state of mind precisely. She instructed Maggie to pipe pastry puffs full of cream cheese flavored with curried crabmeat, and for an hour not another word passed between them. They were merely listening to the radio when, of all things, Swann’s angelic tenor floated over the airwaves doing one of his preposterous pseudobaroque rock arias. Maggie crumpled into both tears and laughter—tears over her broken heart and laughter over the object of her broken heart. Then she was finally ready to sit down over coffee and tell Nina all about it. Nina had been married to a member of a folk-rock band in the seventies—she understood the species and the lifestyle. (Her ex now ran a whale-watching boat out of South Wellfleet on Cape Cod.) Maggie spared her no details of the fiasco in Venice, not even the humiliating denouement.

  “I think Miss Regina did you a favor,” Nina said.

  “I had the weird feeling that she was giving me an out. On a silver platter, so to speak. All brisked and garnished.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And what’s even odder is that I was absolutely elated to catch them together, as though, my God, what a lucky break!”

  “You didn’t have to worry about his feelings afterward.”

  “Well, he’d seemed so devoted.”

  “Poor puppy.”

  “I was both thrilled and crushed. Strange, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s normal under the circumstances. Just say to yourself, Thank God I’m normal.”

  “You know, after Kenneth … left, I didn’t think there would ever be another man—”

  “How absurd.”

  “No, really. And then Swann swept into my life like … like a force of nature. He activated something in me, something I barely remembered about … about desire. I don’t regret a moment of it. If I’d stayed in Venice another day, I might have regretted the whole sordid affair. Do you think I’ve made myself ridiculous?”

  “You’ve had a Maggie Darling Romance. If you don’t mind my saying so, after twenty-odd years of Kenneth, I think you deserved a fling. Despite People magazine, the world will forget it a month from—”

  “Oh no! It was in People?!”

  “Just a little squib on a back page. Not even a picture.”

  “Well goddamn that Connie McQuillan after all.”

  “You can’t hide these things, Maggie.”

  “Nina, are there any normal men left in the world?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve about given up looking.”

  “Oh, God. And you’re, what, seven years younger than me?”

  “Yeah, but I’ve been married twice, plus, let’s see, four very serious live-in lovers over the years, plus fill-ins between. I’ve been man-free almost two years now, and you know something? I like it very very much. No caretaking, no nurturing, and no goddamned sharing—oh, that’s the best part. Of course, I’d give it up in a second if the right one came along.”

  “The right one,” Maggie echoed her and moved on to stringing sugar snap peas. “The right one.”

  “Isn’t human nature pitiful?” Nina said.

  3

  Job Interview

  The gardens were a wreck. Winter had taken its usual toll in snapped limbs and murdered roses, and during the spring, with Maggie so distracted and often absent, the little inhabitants of the many beds, groves, arbors, and nooks had risen and run riot like peasant rabble under a neglectful queen. Strolling through the wreckage made her weep again as she noticed all the personal touches left by Bob DiPietro over the years and the memories they stirred: the espaliered pears against the sunny south-facing wall; the water lily garden in the north pond; the granite curbs around the herb beds in the medicinal garden; the four-hundred-year-old oak that Bob had saved through skillful tree surgery; the purple martin mansion he had crafted the first winter he worked for them. Little emotional snapshots of the years came with each memory, mainly of Hooper as a little boy carrying on his perpetual play war against Bob and the crew—they were Indians, Romans, Nazis, or Russians depending on what movie Hooper had seen that week. Bob had been a wonderful cook in his own right, renowned for his rosemary lemon pound cake. “Oh, Bob,” she murmured with a catch in her throat, “how will I ever replace you?”

  The question assumed practical urgency very shortly, for Maggie soon realized that she didn’t even have surnames for the guys on Bob’s crew, an ever changing cast of casual laborers she knew only as Spud, Rory, Jose, Leroy, Theron, Moose, Big Eddie, Tom-o, Vidge, Mickey, Duane, and, no joke, Dummy, among others over the years; she had no means of contacting them directly. Bob had acted as a subcontractor, paying the crew himself, and Maggie did not want to bother his widow with such trivia.

  Rather than advertise in the newspapers, she simply put out the word through her extensive personal grapevine that an excellent position as chief gardener at Kettle Hill Farm was available. It was testimony to that grapevine’s efficiency that calls began coming in within a couple of hours. In the three days following her return, Maggie personally interviewed a dozen candidates. It was exhausting. They ranged from the clearly unqualified—a landscaper who installed bark mulch and junipers on suburban corporate “campuses”—to the unpleasant— a diesel dyke named “Jinx” who smoked small black cheroots and spat in the primroses. The rest were in between but not really suitable. She didn’t want to hire someone merely temporarily, either, or train anybody from scratch or even halfway from scratch. Then, along came the final candidate in the batch, one Walter Fayerwether.

  Something about him seemed not quite right at first: perhaps the fact that he seemed too right, the very picture of a sturdy Connecticut yeoman, six foot one in faded khakis, rubber L. L. Bean moccasins, a frayed blue button-down shirt that matched his eyes, blond hair gone mostly gray yet worn in a kind of youthful 1965 collegiate brush cut, steel-rimmed glasses that gave him a bookish air, and extraordinarily graceful long-fingered hands with fingernails so clean they looked as though they’d never touched raw earth. He’d pulled up in a gray Volvo at least ten years old. Aside from the paint having lost its lustre, it seemed immaculately cared for. When she introduced herself, he gave no sign of recognizing her famous name—neither, for that matter, had most of the others, but they’d been so obviously … well, blue-collar. This one seemed different.

  “Let’s walk the gardens,” she suggested, and they headed down the brick path that led through the pear orchard. “How do you keep your hands so immaculate, Mr. Fayerwether?” Maggie asked directly. She surprised herself by having automatically addressed him so formally. There was something about him that seemed to require it, even though, these days, everyone from janitor to president called one another by first names.

  “I soak them in a mixture of warmed beeswax and lanolin twice a week,” he said. His voice had a rustic creak to it, like the door of an old barn opening.

  “Really. I’ll have to try that.”

  “Works real well.”

  “Ah, my favorites,” Maggie said, stooping to inspect a white cottage tulip streaked with red. “Union Jacks!”

  “Uh, Mrs. Darling.”

  “Mr. Fayerwether?”

  “This specimen is a Sanguine Earl of Blowditch.”

  “I really ought to know my own tulips.”

  “Of course. I don’t mean to be argumentative.”


  She regarded the bloom and then regarded Fayerwether looming just to the side of a rather harsh spring sun.

  “All right. What makes you so sure?”

  “The Sanguine Earl has yellow stamens. In the Jacks they’re red.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I understand you’re looking for a knowledgeable gardener?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s knowledge.”

  Maggie stood up abruptly. Fayerwether seemed a little flustered. They walked on.

  “Place is a terrible mess,” Maggie said as they strolled past the antique rose beds. “Just look at all these fractured canes.”

  “We had a rough winter.”

  “You can say that again,” she muttered. “How’re you on vegetables?”

  “Pretty adequate.”

  “Herbs?”

  “Same.”

  “I grow twenty-three varieties of basil alone.”

  “I can handle the pressure,” he said, and she wondered if he was patronizing her.

  “You sound mighty sure of yourself.”

  “I know my way around a garden, Mrs. Darling.”

  “Hmmmph.”

  They continued past the still mostly dormant perennial beds.

  “You know my previous gardener was shot on the parkway.”

  “I heard. Tragic. Terrible. I wouldn’t be using the parkway, though.”

  “I don’t know what made me say that. It was quite a blow.”

  “All this mindless violence can make a person pretty angry,” Fayerwether said. “Especially when it touches us directly.”

  “You sound like a psychologist, Mr. Fayerwether.”

  “I’m an art historian, actually.”

  “You mean, like freelance?”

  “No. I taught at Yale.”

  Taken aback, Maggie reflected a moment. There had been something a little off about him.

  “My my,” she said. “I take it you’re … no longer there.”

  “About five years ago I had to find something else.”

  “May I ask what happened?”

  “I left a tenured job at a college in Illinois in ’85 for the position at Yale. It was tenure-track and I was given assurances. Then along came political correctness. It was my misfortune to be a middle-aged white male at absolutely the wrong time and the wrong place,” he said with chuckle.