Local Souls

by Allan Gurganus

  Paxton’s kin lived widely scattered. Most sane people, with that kind of money, depart Falls first thing. They’d had no news from this family grouch in decades. Two California nephews threatened to sue. Who ever heard of a handyman inheriting so big a settlement? But, arriving at the improved mansion, finding it habitable, despite old neighbors’ horror tales, Paxton’s nephews piped down. In the end they let one little miracle-working contractor keep his nest egg. Hell, hadn’t he earned each cent? Imagine nodding through their shell-shocked horndog uncle’s latest tale of one brilliant Verdun trench maneuver leading—as if underground—to a particular bawdy postwar Charleston pool party!

  Dad at once made down payment on a cottage just big enough for us but with a River Road address. It was not, he admitted, at the best end, “Still, it’ll be our foot in their door.” Mom and I stared at each other, purest dread.

  9

  JANET, NEVER ONE to wait, got my attention that first week among the Fallen. I sat enduring third-grade, feeling too new here, wearing unfamiliar Keds that pinched in back. I just occupied my desk, staring shamefaced no place. Today’s topic was the Panama Canal. I felt somebody look directly at me from the left. I glanced up and over and there she sat in rubber-banded pigtails, nearest the window, staring.

  My eyebrows lifted to ask, “Well, what?” But she simply nodded back. She did this as old farmers nod to other fellows their age—strangers met by chance downtown. Fellow sufferers. I found I could meet her gaze, could true-enough hold it. I looked away but guessed I hadn’t really needed to. So I glanced again, just checking. And since that second, little has changed in her being there—wry, curious, direct—always able to respond, unblinking.

  And on day one, age eight, she did something odd. She placed one index finger to her lips, forming the Shhh of secrecy. Next, this Riverside banker’s daughter pointed my way while indicating some crook-fingered angle. She seemed hinting I should look into my lap. Foolish, I did so. Zipper fully down, pouched jockey shorts showing like opening day of the Panama Canal. I closed my eyes but did fumble, did manage to fasten things, without another soul’s noticing.

  When finally I found nerve to scan her way again, that girl sat focused only on a very distant Panama and our real local teacher. Hmnnn.

  BEFORE THINGS CHANGED, Falls felt like a waterside retreat from foreign riots, congressional morals that’d coarsened. It was particularly sweet for those of us adults holding a certain amount (and kind) of money. After sadness hit us hard, you started hearing charges against longtime elitism.

  The River Lithium’s current encouraged for short stretches white kids’ sailboats. It busied the bamboo fishing poles along the waterfront of “Baby Africa.” That neighborhood’s name lived on from just after slave days. It had been proudly picked by freed black settlers. More recently, sensitized Riverside liberals like Jan and me, we’ve gingerly abbreviated Baby Africa to B.A.—Like L.A., or like shorthand for a baccalaureate degree. For decades Jan and I had daily fetched and returned from there. We were transporting our coconspirator, Lottie Clemens. She’s the long-suffering woman who helped us rear our Jill and Billy, helped keep our home decent. B.A. also provided all the caddies and wait-staff for our Broken Heart Country Club.

  —Disaster makes you doubt every decent thing that stretched back safe before it. Till then, I swear, Falls mostly kept busy amusing the rest of Falls. Each according to the jokes and styles of his-her own neighborhoods, naturally. Our town sat isolated amid square miles of growing tobacco. Out this far from the next village, we gave our kids piano lessons because Sunday afternoons we still wanted to hear our children really play. We had to entertain, inspire, and, where possible, worship one another. Who else?

  And it was in this loyal spirit—only when we turned up en masse to support Doc’s “art” show—that we saw how pretty good he’d started getting. Everyone was there. The Bixby twins lunged in, half-grown, hair slicked back and always looking like they’d swum in, sleek dark boys. They stayed understandable fans of Doc. Though they were named Timothy and Thomas, our town had changed this thanks to pure musical affection. “Where are Timothy and Tomothy?” people had slipped and said from the start, and it stuck. That was how we greeted them today.

  Gita waited just inside the door. Even her sunflower-yellow sari could not upstage our beloved ole bone-saw. There were just eleven wooden birds displayed. They floated in mirrored glass cases fitted with clear shelves so’s you could see how, even underneath, Doc had got each one’s proper little rubberized feet tucked up golden underneath.

  That these blocks looked just like ducks was a given. Doc, in everything, never fell below a certain level of finish. But past that, these seemed separate spatial puzzles, perfectly solved, each completed, elegant as algebra. Is Authority something native to certain hands? Where do you either learn or—likely failing that—buy it?

  Our Herald-Traveler (atypically accurate) mentioned in its next week’s issue:

  Doc Roper has shown another side to admire. He caught the personality of certain ducks. Here a joker, there a beautiful young mother, next “some bachelor drake on the make.” Marion Roper offers his viewers more than Field and Stream craftsmanship. Though anatomical care is surely evidenced. Our ex-doctor’s finest work gives us, you might say, duck-portraits. Who knows, folks? these could even be “featherier” versions of our much-missed GP’s beloved familiar patients.

  And we, at the Falls Arts Center, buzzed on the good Napa champagne that Doc must’ve subsidized, stood around . . . feeling glad for him, if a little landlocked. “Familiar patients”? heck yes. —“Beloved”? Given who Roper was, that would always be harder to prove.

  We were . . . not jealous of the skill exactly, just made a tad jumpy by it. (Folks untrained in art tended to call one carving “good” and the duck beside it “really super-good.”) Admirers grilled Roper—had it not been hard to actually begin again? A whole new field, or stream? Must be. The start right when you turn seventy, are you kidding?

  Art lovers asked Roper: How much previous experience had Doc sneaked in, carving? Hadn’t our Marion cheated, getting so good so fast?

  “As to my ‘practicing,’ before? I’ll tell you, friends,” Doc confided, scratching the back of his white head. “Marge always made me carve her a whole turkey . . . most Thanksgivings.”

  Diana de Pres, still our greatest beauty despite ugly jagged lifetime binges, cozied up against one whole side of him. Janet rolled her eyes at me as our beauty insisted, “Immortalize me. Do one of me, top to bottom, Doc!”

  “You wanting a portrait-carving or your final physical, Diana?”

  Hoots of laughter. This is the kind of cornball line that everybody loves and re-quotes in our sidelined self-amusing Falls. Pathetic what we sometimes settle for.

  10

  I WAS EIGHT when, the Paxton legacy deposited, Red shifted our church affiliation accordingly. He transferred membership from Second Methodist clear up to First Presbyterian. “Growth pains already,” Mom said under a sigh pancake-sized. For years we’d commuted Sundays, ping-ponging between denominations. I’d once called it “stained-glass window-shopping” and Dad acted as pleased with my term as Mother found it troubling. Red immediately asked me which church window, in all of Falls, I’d like best to wake up looking at. I answered, “The rose window at First Presby. Because . . . if God was candy? that’s just how He’d look.”

  My father slowed the car. “This boy . . . I swear, this boy will, no telling, this boy . . .” Dad bragged to our Lord and to his rearview mirror.

  His standards for church music also remained very high. He felt that Second Presbyterian’s able choir stopped itself just short of becoming loud or overly-melodic. Their plain white sanctuary seemed both a kind of IOU to the next world and a tasteful apology for this one. See, Red Mabry was edging us ever closer to full-blown watered-silk Episcopalianism. I think he believed that the air in All Saints’ stained-glass sanctuary must be so rarefied—with its incense, 1820
German pipe organ, founder-families’ names spelled out in wine-dark stained-glass—that, simply on entering, all our country noses would bleed.

  But, arrived to live along The River Road, Red finally started admitting certain long-held snobberies. Against some new neighbors. Dad confessed he just didn’t respect, not next-to-nothing, Riverside’s tobacco bosses. Cigs were even then called “coffin nails” and got instinctively dodged by anyone with tickers weak as ours.

  But furniture manufacturers? Now, those Dad rightly admired: “A chair is something you can point to.”

  And he mentioned a big Queen Anne townhome that had been fully funded by one family’s brewing-distributing nonrevenue moonshine during Prohibition. “Still, it’s the same type-a-money as these up-and-coming Kennedys’.” Red did yield a bit. He had the absolute standards of the absolutely powerless. But how he enjoyed them.

  TOO VISIBLE AMONG the Fallen he embarrassed Mom and me with his color-blindness. He stood enameling our sweet Cape Cod cottage’s front door and its every shutter a tomato-red high-gloss. “I’m sorry,” Dad stood back, squinting. “But, that? Now, that there is class.” Grinning, still countrified as salt-cured ham, he’d pronounced the word, “clice.”

  Mom later guessed that, with people forever calling him “Red,” he maybe over-favored that shade? The color looked mighty bold in a neighborhood that still considered forest green a wee bit racy. Then Dad went and named our simple house. He awarded it a historic distinction somewhat at odds with its being a Cape Cod two-bedroom thirty years old.

  “Shadowlawn” was the title he invented during one dreamy weekend spent striding around our half-furnished home in his boxer shorts. He kept muttering words that bore no relation to each other, except in his surging visions of family crests, his hope of finding one drop of blue blood among our hearty, if thinned, red.

  “Glade . . . Rock . . . no, Cliff . . . Scarlett . . . Castle . . . something. ‘Fern-leaf.’ Nope, I reckon a Fern IS a Leaf, mainly.” Mother and I tried not laughing. But he remained in a trance like some bright ten-year-old girl the day she discovers Poetry and runs around quoting reams of it at her older brothers then finally the canary.

  Red next commissioned a sign. It would rest, explanatory, on our extremely unhistoric lawn. First he had woodworkers strip a pine log of its bark. Then he ordered the word SHADOWLAWN carved in relief big and deep. Letters’ fronts were paint-rolled lipstick-red to match our cottage trim. The final product looked like something you’d see for sale at a roadside stand near the Everglades.

  This item did not stay on-duty long.

  WITH MOTHER’S BLESSING, with her actual bribe of a soda-shop trip for me and my new steady girl, Miss Janet Beckham, I sneaked out front after midnight. I yanked Red’s sign from our newly-seeded yard. The marker had scarcely lasted halfway through its first duty-night, explaining us. Overexplaining us to a Riverside already too amused at our lottery-like arrival. Into one docile river, I heaved the non-word Shadowlawn. Lettering upward, cheerful as a duck, the log did not sink but happily bobbed elsewhere as if seeking finer property to describe.

  By breakfast Dad found the thing missing and, boy, was there Hell to pay! Red pressed short hands over his face going redder. “Don’t let me get wound up here. You know what Doc says. They come like a thief in the night. More jealous out-of-towners! Thrill-seeking souvenir-hunters. Low. And I bet you anything, by now it’s up over their damn mantel. If the poor devils even have one! I always do say I just hate when criminal-type-a-vandals can’t help a-preying on such gentle homes as ourn. But still, you know? At least they’re history-minded. Looked at one way, why, it’s a compli-ment!”

  I SAT UNDER a terrace umbrella at the club alongside Janet, my demure teen date. She wore a sort of sailor shirt, pigtails unified now in a single brown braid clear down her back. This would be one of our earliest public outings and Mom had made the reservation. Jan and I, too young to drive yet, had walked here, a shorter hike than going clear downtown. We decided, like bohemians, to have dessert for lunch. When, thrilled, I told Mom this, she said, “Go ahead. Don’t guess it’ll kill you.”

  Waiting for our treat, I found I had too little ready conversation. But with so many classmates in common, I pictured walking from desk to desk for topics. And I had just started a not-too-fascinating alphabetical roll call. “I see where Bobby Blanchard knocked his front-tooth out skating . . .” When we both overheard a high-pitched country voice from just inside. Red, not knowing we were here, had arrived at lunch to meet his afternoon foursome. Janet and I, pretending to act unparented and if possible Parisian, we just drank more from water glasses. We soon endured having to hear Dad. He got introduced to a bank manager new to Falls. “Welcome, welcome.” Pop sounded like anything but a quite-recent newcomer. First, Red determined where exactly along the social-tape-measure of The River Road this fellow lived. “Aha,” he said. Then, satisfied, Dad asked his usual tie-breaker.

  “I guess you-all’s new doctor has got to be Roper, right?” The stranger explained that, being so new here, he hadn’t needed medical help quite yet; but folks did say that it quickly narrowed down to a choice between Roper and this young . . . Dennis, was it?

  “Let me save you a peck of trouble, fella. You seem like a nice man. It’s not no contest to it. See, my family, we’ve always just thought the absolute world of Roper. Why, when he takes you on he takes you on. And Doc, see—it’s a long story—but he is doing . . . Well, he’s flat keeping me and my precious boy alive, is all.”

  Silence fell at about seven tables. Ours had been hushed all along.

  I myself went very still, my top lip feeling numb. Janet claimed to have been listening all this while to a woman across the terrace. Seems the gal had recently accused her ex-best-friend of being a kleptomaniac, see. Of having stolen one entire bathroom scale from this first lady’s home during Bridge and then carrying it off in a huge handbag brought-special. Took it right next door where anyone could see that missing scale on display in the guest bath beside her first one. I faked interest but saw Janet was protecting me. She did that. I’m still not sure why. She swore she found me nice-looking and way smarter than I credited myself. Who could not be grateful?

  This had been about my first try at it: taking a girl out on something planned. And it’d been going just excellent, too. Then we had to sit upwind of my old man, with Red blasting our private news to one and all. You think I wanted my girl to know how sick I was?

  Though our banana splits arrived, I could not quite enter in. Before lifting the cherry off-top hers, before enjoying that at once, Jan touched the back of my hand. Said just, “Every family’s embarrassing, Bill. —Now look what-all we have here. These walnuts, you think?” and lifted her long spoon.

  Why had it felt so shaming? To hear poor Dad promote our Roper tie? And for some total Yankee stranger. Why was his testimonial this painful, Red’s country overtrust? For one thing, I decided, eating, it’d sounded like some sharecropper’s loyalty to his contracted landowner. That seemed not quite manly. More a slave’s allegiance. Sounded kind of clingy and reminded me of something, but what? something very unpleasant.

  Oh, yes, this: My father had just said out loud, before fifty people, exactly what his quiet son too often thought when safe in his own silence.

  “Kept alive” by Roper? Well, no. But yes.

  Still, who needs to hear that while you’re out in public and with such a nice girl?

  MY FAMILY’S BEING new to town, with neighbors peeking through venetian blinds, with me in need of buddies, us Mabrys mostly kept to ourselves. Farm-trained, we were used to it.

  Humoring Red, Mother stayed more mindful of his heart than he could bear to be. Some nights Dad swore that all those doctors, even a wizard like Roper, had been flat-wrong. Accusing him of heart disease? Hell, that was just their way of keeping a good man down. But, even as he said so, you could hear he didn’t believe it. The very tiredness making him complain was itself our diagnosis. I listened hard, al
ready knowing that his fate was mine. Surely my folks had meant well; but I wish they’d not explained my heart disease to me my very first day of county school.

  Dad had inherited this weakness from his sharecropper father. That young man, William R. Mabry the First, also worked as a tenant farmer despite his constitution’s failings. While pitching hay he was known to black out, topple right over. His loving wife, always on guard for him, rushed forward to tell other hirelings, “Just leave him be. My Will, he’ll get his wind back. Just do what I do. Work around him. Oh, he’ll spring up.” One day Will did not.

  Some people receive birthright property. My chances had been fifty-fifty and I’d lost. From my warmhearted dad I had drawn a lipid-squirreling impulse that no known antidote could lower. Before we found Roper, less good doctors had spoken of our condition only by its hurtful initials. They called what we had “Coronary Artery Disease.” Then they cruelly shortened even that to “C.A.D.”

  WE WERE SHAKY if grateful the day Doc Roper straight-out admitted our poor chances. Country doctors’ summations had usually run: “You two? Got you two bad hearts, is what you got. You should hear yours! What to do? Well, sirs, slow down some. The second it gets to hurting you, I mean right when you feel ‘full’ across in-here, well, there’s your sign to rein in that particular activity. Oh, you’ll get the hang of it. Just can’t do everything. It’s pretty much going to be like this. —Anything else?”

  Roper instantly had the name and numbers; it made me know that a grand education is one that leads you to specifics fastest. He stated how some people simply cannot “process” cholesterol, good or bad. The body holds all of it. Soon that same flawed body begins to farm its own stashed lipids out to its extremities. Lipids will soon coat the linings of basic plumbing. Then they’ll clog the free-flow that living requires. “A slight genetic twitch,” passed from father to son, leads to numbness in the hands and feet, to living tired then fully-winded, early endings guaranteed. Roper admitted right off: this meant that my own son, if Janet and I had one up ahead, he’d get the same fifty percent chance of being a carrier. I loved Doc’s honesty but feared he told the truth. That meant, while still a relatively young man, I already lived around the crusty pump of some guy pretty-old.