Here I could, but won’t, mention professional high points of my son (Haverford, Stanford) and daughter (Middlebury, Baylor). But, at my present age, the town itself seems a fraternal order I’m proudest of. Since I’d stayed here, Falls naturally stays central in me. This age, I set less store by my particular role in this madhouse beehive. We’re all in it together. The law of averages throws us some geniuses, some psychos. But one stabilizing force shepherds us in-betweens, us souls born to stay local.
In the end so much comfort rises from our river. Whenever I get jangled, I just step out onto our deck. I’ll inhale whatever lithium haunts the mists. I note today’s water level crossing our six flat giant rocks: I listen to what today’s major note is. Often a G. I swear this little river’s become my nitro and my prayer.
Out here, I ask myself if Red did not die a disappointed man; moving Heaven and Hell just to get us into Falls, only to find his son an insurance peddler. But why beat myself up? I did my best with those cards palmed my way. And now? I’ve retired for exactly this purpose: to meditate not medicate.
We often eat lunch at this table Jan keeps draped in oilcloth. She says the maple’s droppings stain her better inherited linen. Sitting here I at times imagine this same musical tone after me, post-Bill. Like that rock ballad about life’s “running on within me and without me.” Will always be. Our standing houses still looking beautiful for our genius grandkids.
Sometimes I wonder if people’s final seconds alive do bring that fabled highlight-reel. The life-flashes-before-your-eyes-type thing? Hope so.
That in itself must feel like an accomplishment.
15
IN MY EARLY twenties, I got dibs on Roper’s first Monday office slot 6:45 a.m. I held it too, even skimping on vacations certain years. I’d leave Janet at the beach with Lottie and our two, after driving them to Wrightsville the Thursday before. But my Mondays were essential. Doc’s nurses treated me to my own coffee mug, filling it, black; even as Roper warned again that I should skip caffeine. “Then how will I know I’m alive?” I said the same thing almost weekly. But by now it’d become liturgy.
“Well, Bill.” He shook his head to one side. “You’ve got a hard choice ahead, looks like: quitting either the excitement of coffee or . . . Janet.”
“One lump or two?” (My stabs at Doc’s dry humor never quite made sense but we laughed anyway.) Bad health was good for at least one Monday cackle, a quick visit regarding something irrevocable. In sickness and more sickness. It ran on like this for decades, our ritual. And, between us—to me at least—it all seemed, life and death, charged up, so personal.
Before his long hands cupped the stethoscope to my front then back then front again, Roper would huff across its stainless steel (which clouded at once). His spare heat weekly took the edge off a natural chill. And soon, me seated bared to the waist, he standing fully-dressed in whites, we’d just be catching up. Between certain needed vital-signs-listening silences, Doc was quick to offer the mild neighborhood lore I loved.
Me, I never could gather much on my own. I’ve heard far less since he quit us.
Stated like this, our lifelong office visits sound routine. But, maybe their coming at a week’s start and just past dawn, maybe that let every visit seem an extension of yesterday’s All Saints eight a.m. service. A Sabbath-annex gave my week’s one basic warrantee—his genius tinkering on me. He kept making little shifts in my meds. Placebos, busywork maybe. “Better, worse?” he’d start some mornings.
And what could I offer in exchange? I had little past my job-slot, insurance, group life. I had my goodwill, toward him at least. I’d gladly shared my father with him, right? For that he thanked me with my life. Doc seemed at one with all he did. With none of the levels of qualms and exemption I seemed to always bring. Roper’d just scribble out the new prescription, more as subject matter than any real cause for hope. Then he’d pat me on the bare back, also a sign for me to get dressed; he’d send me forth: “Steady and holding, pal. I’m liking the sound of the ole Evinrude inboard this week.”
I mean, it meant something, you know?
THE ARTICLE IN our latest AARP bulletin was titled “At Last Un-mortgaged, Second-Chance Lives Newly Afloat.” Big as life, there Doc and Margie were on record, page 96, photographed in his retrofitted Riverside studio. White interior walls surrounded his workstation, a world mostly glass. The Swedish-modern shelves showed—in curly-tailed profile—his past four years of daily work. Quote:
“I do try keeping my best ones held back for myself,” a lean Roper admitted. “I find I like being around them daily. My quorum. As with family, you hope to learn from living close-by your finest early mistakes!”
Bet that made his absentee kids real happy.
STILL, YOU WERE mainly glad for him as yet. Maybe it was one use for his intuition. But, if your hands contain the power of life, wouldn’t it seem a demotion, to have all that wasted on wood? Sure, wood lasts. But to what end?
And yet, I figured, even now, with him retired, even with his taxi meter set to “off-duty,” if worse came to worst, my Janet could always run find him. And if she had to interrupt close-focus bird-carving? I wouldn’t mind.
Magazines spoke of his being belatedly “discovered.” But hadn’t we known Roper all these decades now? Even so, must be wonderful for him. I’d chanced to see his studio light burning, lately past three a.m. Of course Doc’s art must’ve been some true form of work. But somehow, to me, it felt like slacking. Roper, as usual, seemed to have gotten away with everything.
Invited to exhibit new birds at the British Decoy and Wildfowl Carving Championships, he and Marge got flown to London. Only during his third local show did I see how much he’d grown. Imagine, older than I and still getting daily better at something! A display case off to one side was labeled MY LITTLE EXPERIMENTS. —Pretentious?
This material seemed far more private than his finished projects. You felt you got to scan some Nobel scientist’s lab notebooks. Onto wooden wings and tail feathers, Roper kept trying to shape believable water beads, see.
If you borrowed Janet’s 3.0 bifocals and bent close, you’d note convincing pearls of water. He had coaxed these up from the same hardwood that’d formed the feathers damp beneath them. Doc then saturated the droplet with a glowing sheeny gray-blue. We heard he’d figured out this paint formula in his see-through studio no home-towner ever got to visit. Parked across its lot now, we now noticed high-end Lexuses (turquoise) with New Mexico tags. You saw the yellow Hummers of photographers from big-time magazines.
Folks made corny local jokes about how “people living in glass houses shouldn’t stow loons.” There he kept the best of his best and we learned he’d had a killer burglar-alarm installed. You knew why—once you stooped before this glass case, once you studied Roper’s carved water. You almost wanted to break through glass yourself. You’d risk the cuts. If only you could touch the outfanned wing and its spray of river water.
Wet would probably come off between your thumb and forefinger. Odd, but this liquid seemed legally our community’s. Didn’t it truly hail from our local river? And, though you knew the big droplet was just wood, gesso, silver metallic paint, it’d surely feel oily with Doc’s essence, some luxury hard-earned, it’d come off slick between your fingers, pure native DNA.
16
SINCE GRADE SCHOOL I carried in my back jean pocket (1) the all-important comb, and (2) a doctor’s excuse: “Bill here must take Study Hall not Phys. Ed.” True, the note bought me many happy library hours. It also forced a kid to imagine the circumstances of his death. All before he’s quite plotted out his life. True for Dad, too.
But he’d long ago adjusted. Even as an honorary town person he rose before first light. Showering with off-key show tunes, he was like the rooster who thinks his rusty song alone orders the sun into place. Though Dad no longer needed to work hard, he kept taking odd jobs. “For fun,” Red shrugged. He admitted with a droopy half smile, it was also one way of getting int
o those giant homes where we’d not otherwise be welcomed.
To repair such piles, he hired the few Falls plumber-electricians he’d judged trustworthy. Dad stayed loyal to his country crew but their trucks seldom seemed operational; that made their even getting to town strangely hard. Red guessed the Primitive Baptists felt uneasy among the fourteen-inch crown moldings and orgy photos of the Fallen.
Dad had helped Doc Roper build his own home dock. Dad could walk from our place to this split-level Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff being remodeled. Marge Roper said, “We were told it’s based on Fallingwater.” But the Lithium ran outside their house not through it.
Doc and Red had taken to each other at once. Roper was just then opening his practice here. He and Marge had bought the big river place. It was a financial stretch for young marrieds but I guess that, like Jan, Marge had some old-family money. Rumors varied quite how much. Starting out in practice then, Doc still traded his services for others’. He’d accepted one man’s lifetime house-painting in exchange for family office visits. I wonder now if my father didn’t do Doc’s jobber-overseeing as a swap for more frequent family cardiac checkups.
Red’s specific case (and mine) seemed to at once engage our young GP as a scientist. This disease, passed from father to son, was just beginning to get some of the research Dad and I felt sure it deserved. Not long after I moved back home as a graduate of Chapel Hill, Roper invited Dad and me in for our joint monthly consultation.
Only then did I finally ask Roper how he’d been so quick to recognize our obscure condition. He pointed to Red’s eyelids. Flecked skin under either brow had always been slightly alligatored. Doc explained these pocket-bumps were stored cholesterol. The body couldn’t deploy its horded lipids fast enough. So the organism stashed such gunk at outer edges only. Mabry bodies were laboring to keep at least hearts’ arteries clear.
“In worst cases, you’ll see a circle of cholesterol rising up from within the eyeball itself, a perfect ridge around the iris. But on that count? you both look free and clear. Eyes good as new.”
After a final pressing of his warmed stethoscope to our fronts-backs, Doc stood directly before my shirtless father, “Say your own dad died young, Red? Remind me, what age exactly?”
“Well, sir, let me see here. He’d of been right at thirty-six, yeah. Sure was.”
“And, just beforehand? had he been particularly stressed? I mean, what was your dad doing when he died?”
“Stressed? Daddy was plowing. It was ’34.”
“Aha. Makes sense. —Well, I don’t want either of you going anywhere near a mule, hear? Even if a nice one keeps bringing its bit and harness up to you. That clear, guys?”
Dressing, shy, we thanked Roper. He’d given our problem complete attention. I searched his face and manner for just how dire it was, our disease. Did he admire us less now? Still, we Mabrys sure felt singled out. Later, I’d worry that Doc treated everyone this way. Of course I knew that was a merit. Should be. Even so . . .
“OUR” DOCTOR, ROPER forever put my dad at ease in ways Red rarely guessed were planned. Roper combined the strangest quality of being both an ordinary-sounding guy and our truest local aristocrat. Some saving coolness always pressed right up against his warmed front surface. Some short-term joke hid his long-range plan for you.
Maybe old Paxton had enjoyed the actual pedigree stretching back before this wilderness got itself up as a republic. And Colonel Paxton might’ve finally become a true philanthropist by rewarding my father’s innocent faith in beauty and a good address. But, it was Roper’s calm that eased our country tribe into feeling half-secure with its strange new life. Doc’s own gambling father, his mother musical with sighs, they’d at least taught him the sort of manners that never seem just manners. He let the Mabrys’ being healthy appear someday possible. Roper made even our sudden club membership feel, if sudden, somewhat natural. Was this just part of his doctoring? Or did he truly mean it? Or was it maybe likely some of both?
I WAS FRESH home from our excellent state university (nation’s oldest, chartered 1789). Red had wanted me to join some fraternity or at least get into a fine new dorm. I found myself happiest renting in the small mill village beyond the university train tracks. There I noted a FOR RENT sign hand-lettered on a worker’s whitewashed cottage. It seemed brother to the one Paxton had sprung us from.
Janet attended the Women’s College in Greensboro and some weekends I’d hitchhike the fifty miles to her campus. She was studying art history and her student art show painting (of the Lithium) won Honorable Mention. It was not abstract but I thought it was the best. Thumb out, headed toward her, I always felt a little wild, and closer to my dad.
UNC professors knew nothing of The River Road. Its codes and demands would sound laughable to such Harvard, Princeton men. “Parochial” was their own fond word for this beautiful state that underpaid them.
I worked hard there, wonderfully anonymous by choice. Teachers soon seemed to respect my mind, even some of my writing. I got to study Homer, a bit of Latin, European history alongside advanced math. I came home to find myself both over- and underqualified. Finally I turned up a temp job at Riverside’s best insurance agency. The boss needed a salesman Boy Friday with a club membership, someone from our water’s-edge neighborhood. I guess I was the only Riverside college grad adrift enough to consider taking such a position. Sure I belonged to Broken Heart, but I stood to inherit little more than my father’s name and house.
The insurance mogul was a golfing bachelor and, after six months of my being punctual and somber and concerned, he told me he sure liked my clear blank style. “But I have to say you give new meaning, Bill, to the words ‘silent partner.’ Still, I prob’ly talk enough for four, and your sales’re solid. People trust you. Widows especially. Some guys just have that. Can’t be bought.” Two years later he said he’d someday pass the firm along to me. If, that is, I didn’t find such work too painfully dull. He’d long ago confessed: His well-paid secretary ran all the triplicate paperwork. Adjustors working for our national firm assessed the actual damage. I would sell people on protecting their lives and property. How hard could it be?
The boss managed to stay out most days glad-handing new clients on the links of Broken Heart. He was obliged to drink with others after hitting around a few balls, all a write-off and a lark.
At his office Roper explained to Dad and me how, given our disease, insurance would prove a great choice for my talents. It’d prolong my life. “If dealing with people’s crazy made-up claims doesn’t leave you barking-mad. But deskwork, that’s the ticket, Bill. Let people come to you. You have a face they’ll like then start to count on. Just don’t go climbing rooflines like your mountain-goat poppa here. Oh, I saw you up checking slates on the Blanchards’ roof. —But Red, I’m like you, hate sitting. Far as that, here’s my latest advice for you: Quit your playing all eighteen holes. Nine’s plenty. And, for now, just once a week, hear? Clock more time on that putting green. You need it almost as bad as me. Oh, I’ve seen those big swings of yours windmilling up and down the fairway. With that much upper-body work, Arnold Palmer, you might be taking risks.”
“I do put ever’thing into it, Doc, sir.”
“Yeah, I see that. And there’s your trouble, pal. You heard of ‘heart trouble’? Well, steer clear of giving your grade of slippage a bit more trouble than what it’s got. So let me slip you one last tip, Mabry Senior . . . Hell-for-leather as you’re working those links, don’t hire any of our young hotshot caddies. They’re in such an almighty rush to wedge in one more round a day. Just make you anxious, their advice. No, you’ll want to ask for old Maitland Miller. You’ve seen him, tall, white-haired fellow, keeps to himself? Tell Mait I sent you. He’s been out there since that course was still fine Paxton tobacco. Mait, now, he’s older than you by ’round twenty years. He’s not going to rush you. Be good medicine, letting him pace you. But, even better, Red, I’m told there’s great sport in contract bridge, one mighty fun game
. . .” And you could see Doc bank a smile. He knew he’d set Dad off and now leaned back to enjoy it.
17
JANET AND I had known Doc and Marge since forever. But despite my feeling free to see Doc at his office pretty much anytime, invitations to the Marion Ropers’ home became less forthcoming. We had all been young marrieds together. Then we’d enjoyed two full seasons of their direct social grace. Who knows why they’d taken us up, then set us down again?
Was it something I said? Did I agree with Doc too soon? Or stare at him too long as he stood showing how he made his potent unbruised James Bond martinis? Maybe I forgot to thank Marge as I was leaving once?
“We were too close already, living right here,” Janet shrugged. “Those two can’t turn over in bed without our hearing.” I gave her a look. “Well, you know what I mean.”
But it felt painful. With them so busy and so near us on the river. It’s not like they threw massive parties and cut us out. But we couldn’t help noting which three couples the Ropers preferred this year (ones way younger than us, of course). And every five to seven weeks, here those beauties all came, carrying champagne and flowers, hollering indoors ridiculous new nicknames. We ourselves felt equally “attractive,” “up-to-date.” Jan and I read certain articles in the library’s New York Review; we’d forever subscribed to two newsweeklies. But I reckon old friends like us are often the last to know. Was it my sickness? Was it our son’s being Haverford and his at Harvard? He could have told me. I would’ve accepted it.
And yet we still loyally waved to him reading on his brand-new redwood deck. “It’s too red,” Janet said (to please me).
“Oh, honey, it’ll fade soon enough,” I called, as if taking Doc’s part, only not.
Then Roper would be out there shirtless, strapped into bandolier binoculars; he’d become a crazed birder.
Not two years ago, this guy had been considered one crack duck hunter. His office watercolors had shown dawn-silhouetted boaters, guns aimed at chevrons of doomed incoming geese. Now, he acted grateful only for those bagged birds pals brought from the coast. These were handed over for Doc to study. Roper had gone passive-pacifist thanks to retirement and to art. He now stored his specimen-waterfowl in a huge Kenmore freezer bought just to keep these fresh. We heard how Doc had given away his excellent inherited Browning (to their help’s rambunctious teenage sons!). People said he lived almost as a vegetarian, so reverent had he become after daily meditating on his flying-swimming creatures.
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