Ducktown
"Do you ever think about why we're here?" Francis Mulberry said to his friend, Rod, who merely
raised his eyebrows. "I mean here on earth," Francis said, not here in the Beef." By which he meant the
Beef and Brew, on State Street in Ducktown, where they were sitting across form one another in one of
the row of booths that lined the window side. Across the aisle was the battered bar with its row of
stools, its beer ads, and its rows of glossy bottles.
After appearing to think for a moment, Rod said, "Not much." And that was more or less what
Francis had expected. He looked around, as if what he was seeing was unfamiliar. In fact, it was the
opposite. The Beef and Brew was a place where he and Rod had been meeting, even if somewhat
sporadically these days, for the twenty years and more.
They were at the Beef and Brew on State Street in Duyktown, a place where they were
accustomed to meeting. Sporadically now, but when they were younger, often; the Beef and Brew was
younger then too. It looked, superficially the same as it had in those early years – a long bar with a fake
brass railing, a set of booths along the opposite wall. A long building, with windows only in the front.
They were sitting across from one another at one of these booths, a thing they might never have done
when they were younger. And they were relatively dressed up for the Beef and Brew: Francis in a dark
suit and it, Rod in leathers, but spic and span. He had taken off his leather jacket and laid it across the
seat next to him and was revealed as wearing a long sleeved black shirt that buttoned to the neck. But
no necktie. It was possible Francis had never seen Rod wearing a necktie.
They were both middle aged men now, no matter how you measured it, even if fifty was the
new forty. They would never again, insofar as they ever had been, be innocent of the awareness of
mortality. They had, in fact, just come from a funeral, another friend of Rod's, a friend of Francis' older
brother Leo, himself deceased for many years..
"Come on, you going to tell me you never think about it? Like, why on earth are we born just to
die and so much sooner than we expect? And so much frustration and suffering in between?"
"I didn't say never." Rod, the older of the two, was also the larger. He looked a bit like a exfootball player, gone a little, but not too much, to seed – he was clearly well muscled, if indeed wider
across than he had been at twenty or even thirty. In fact, he had never played football or any other
sport and had left high school at his earliest convenience, those many years ago. His hair, once a dark
and shiny red-chestnut color was now streaked with gray, but he still wore it pulled back into a kind of
pony tail. He still had a profile like the Indian on an old buffalo nickel – and Francis was just old enough
to know what that looked like. Age had paradoxically sharpened the resemblance.
Although, if he thought about it, the Indian Francis though Rod most resembled was a statue in
the Fort Area Park. That Indian, a creature of carved stone, stood on a pedestal, one foot in front of the
other, his arms down at his sides. In one hand he was shown holding a bow and arrow, in the other, a
rather large key – which any child raised in Duyktown knew represented the key to the fort, presented
to him by the grateful settlers. Francis had once asked Rod if he was native American and Rod had said,
"Don't be ridiculous." Now he was taking a pull on his beer and seemed content to be just sitting.
"Well, what do you think?" Francis said.
"I think what I've always thought. Enjoy it if you can."
Francis shook his head. "Well, sure, but what about suffering?" Rod held his hands out in the
'what do I know?' gesture. What do you think happens after death?" Francis said. "Is that it, all over,
game called, nothing left?"
"I don't know," Rod said. "I thought you were the Catholic."
Francis was a thin man and the smile he was smiling now was just a bit lop-sided. His still dark
hair hung a little in his eyes and he brushed it back, absently. "I used to think I believed," he said. "I still
go to church, you know? But something happened to my belief. Maybe going to church is just a habit."
"A habit," Rod said. "I could tell you other things to do on a Sunday morning."
"The Nuns used to tell us in grade school, that it was because God loved us so much he wanted
us to have a taste of what it was like to be so powerful."
Rod shrugged. "But not too powerful."
"I guess not. Then, the Brothers at Saint Anselm said it was a test, that God put us on earth, with
just a taste of power, so we could prove we were worthy of being with God in the afterlife."
"I see," Rod said, smiling. "Like making the team."
"Well something like that. It was complicated. I don't think I ever fully got it. There was all that
stuff about not hiding your light under a basket, like everybody had to do the best with what they were
given."
"That team," Rod said. "Well, Dick Heath, I guess he did the best he could with what he had."
Dick Heath was the man they were just away from mourning. Rod had once been in the business
with Dick Heath of selling drugs. Francis, in his youth, had been a customer as had his brother Leo,
before going to Vietnam and being killed. Francis had met Dick Heath only once – and it was long ago –
but he guessed Rod had kept in touch.
"What was he doing these days?" he asked.
"Oh," Rod said, "a little of this and a little of that." Rod had got out of the drug business some
years ago. Francis didn't ask what a little of this and that might be. He himself, in middle age a member
of the City Council, might be construed as a representative of the forces of law and order. He had no
idea if that would make any difference to Rod. But anyway, he knew that if Rod were going to tell him
what Dick Heath had been doing lately, he would have done so.
Dick Heath had died falling out of a boat while fishing. There was no great mystery about that,
except possibly to wonder what had made him lean so far over the side. It was a pretty fair assumption
he had been drunk at the time. And possibly also stoned on something. Probably. Who knows? Drunk
for sure at least – the empties had been recovered with the body, which had simply sunk under the boat
and floated down the river with it for a day or so.
"I guess Dick didn't make the team," Francis said.
But Rod looked serious and said, "It depends. You said he had to making the best use of his
talents. As far as I know Dick always made good use of his talents."
"To do good," Francis said. "They stressed that, I'm sure. Making good use of your talents to do
good, to help your neighbor as yourself and all that."
"A lot of people found Dick really helpful," Rod said.
"Really," Francis said. The waiter brought them two more beers. Taking a swallow, Francis said,
"I'd still like to know. But you know, what they told you in school, all kind of feels like a fairy tale. I wish
we had more evidence."
"Any evidence."
"Well, yeah, if you don't count hearsay." Rod smiled at that.
"Right," he said. "if we just had some really definite testimony from somebody who made it over
there."
"And got on the team," Francis said.
"Definitely."
"But we don't. We just tell kids all these things, which they are supposed to believe all their lives
and that's that."
"Nobody ever told me anything about it," Rod said. "No, I take it back. I met my brother blank
once (blank was nearly twenty years older than Rod and did not live in Duyktown or visit) that if I didn't
straighten up I was going to hell. But he never explained."
"No heaven, just hell," Francis said. So what do you think happens when people die?"
"That's easy," Rod said. "they disappear."
Before there was Google, people may have occasionally said, "Is there really such a place as
Ducktown. Who would name a place Ducktown? It was surprisingly often the butt of jokes in the movies
or on the radio. "And where are you from?"
"Duyktown, New York."
"Excuse me, I thought you said, Ducktown."
"I did. Duyktown, New York."
"No, seriously."
Now, of course, all they have to do is look it up. There it is. And you can go to Google Earth and
look at all the abandoned property, the things that used to be factory, the things that used to be homes,
the vacant lots that were once playgrounds, the parking lots that have been turned into parks and
thence, into drug bazaars. Oh, it’s all there. As cities disappear they don’t just vanish, they buzz from the
inside out with a sound that is not like an alarm clock, though it could be, that is not like a scream,
though it could be. In the end it’s only a buzz. It could almost sound like laughter.
We are all merely a blip on the screen of time. That is so well recognized a proposition, you
hardly ever hear anybody dispute it – or offer an amazement about it. Still, it's a fact that doesn't always
make itself into awareness. Do you think of yourself as a mere blip. Or do you leave it to some
supernatural being capable of seeing the whole picture, blips and all? And yet, death is our way of
recognizing our blipdom and it comes fast enough.
Indeed, the speed of time seems only to become apparent to those who labor under the yoke
of quite a lot of it. Old people and such. People over forty, say. "My how time flies!" they tell one
another and they are right. Time is flying and so are they. Soon they will have been only a blip on the
screen of time. Replaced, not forgotten perhaps, for a time, at least, but gone. Vanished, in fact.
And so, you might think, it would occur to cities, that they too, being, in fact, only
agglomerazations of human beings, are also blips. Big blips, maybe, but blippish all the same. Cities like
to style themselves (see Rome, Italy -- if not Rome New York -- for example) eternal. The eternal city. All
right, thousands of years with the same name? Impressive. A blip just the same. And all those
Babylonian cities of which we have no only their names, or their street plans incised thousands of feet
down into the earth which has swallowed them. Oh, they are vanished. Being dug up and noticed hardly
counts. Or even if it did, what of the cities before them? What of the cities without fossils? Well, you get
the idea. They're gone. Vanished.
You might think a city in the United States of America would not exactly be suffering from any
such delusion as thinking they, or their progeny, are scheduled to be here for all eternity, however.
Cities in the United States are not very old. They are getting older every day, but they still retain the
delusion that none of them have ever vanished. Even as some of them have and others are, in fact, in
the process of vanishing.
Well, for example Duyktown. . Founded by Dutch settlement in 1688. That was Duyk with an
umlaut, which made it may have been pronounced something like “duik,” or “doyke” and for a time it
suffered both of those distinctions. Fortunately (some would say) the umlaut got lost somewhere in the
nineteenth century. There was a brief struggle whether to say Dick, Dyke or Duck, but finally Duck won
out gradually, among the people of Italian and German origins who came to be the principal residents.
And to all and sundry, just as Cairo, New York is pronounced Karo, as in Karo Syrup, so Duyktown is
Ducktown. On posters and signs, no, but on the frequent graffiti, yes. And those who have a sense of
humor, such as the public library sometimes sport pictures of Ducks too, but the high school has
resisted. Its totem animal is still the wild lynx.
Over three hundred years old! If you take that as the date of the city. Of course there was no
city then. There was a fort on a river and a handful of families who lived in around and within the fort,
servicing the army stationed there. Or the army was servicing them. The Duykkers, the Van Schmattens,
the Schaicks, the Mullers, and one man by himself, Jacobus Van Vleet. That all these names are still
known says something about the persistence of history. It also says something about the persistence of
names – because every one of these names, as of the year 2006, was still well represented in what by
then was officially Duyktown.
Along, of course, with all the Browns, Johnsons, O'Hara's, Replepkis and Rosenberg's. The
Suarezes, the Diego's, the Lincolns, the Royales, and well, and so on. By 2006, Duyktown was a city, even
if you counted only from its official papers – or that plinth in the front of City Courthouse, that had been
in existence, as a city, for at least two hundred and fifty years. That meant, vanishing or no vanishing
(and there were those who discussed such things), Duyktown was about to celebrate an anniversary, a
significant, an important, Founder's Day. There would be, at the very least, a parade.
So what do you mean, vanishing? Were there any blank spots on the landscape? Any black
holes, any places where you might find yourself talking to someone who suddenly wasn't there
anymore?
Of course not. That may be one of the things about the vanishing of cities that makes it so hard
for the cities themselves to recognize, let alone accept. The buildings are still there. More and more of
them may be empty and boarded up, but there they are. It looks like a city!
This did not include any of the buildings from 1688, I'm sorry to say – although there are cities in
New York State (for that is where Duyktown was located) that have buildings , a few at least, from 1688,
or even earlier. Duyktown was not one of those fortunate cities, in that its earliest, its 1688 fort and
everything in it, has been burned to the ground in 1697 by an Indian attack. It's a fact that the Duyks, the
Van Schmattens, the Schaicks le and so on, were able to escape with their lives – and even some of their
possessions. And they did rebuild. Alas, none of those houses are still in Duyktown either.
Wood is terribly vulnerable to fire. There was a church, a Dutch Reformed Church, that survived
until 1820, when it was knocked down to make way for the first version of the Canal. Nobody thought
historic buildings were more important than canals. Well, in fact, nobody thinks that now either. It's just
more gets said about it. The pulpit from that church was save, and some miscellaneous bibles and
prayer books and such. And they, being the property of the First Dutch Reformed Church of Duyktown
got saved and transferred to another church when the congregation got too big for its once new 1820
church and transferred yet again when the congregation moved itself, to escape encroaching slums in
1870, and moved yet again!, when that church caught fire and yet another version was built in 1890.
That church, at the time of this writing, was still standing, but, thanks to various kinds of politics, the
historic goodies, the pulpit, the prayer books and so on, had been moved to yet another church, the
Second Dutch Reformed, way uptown.
So far uptown in fact, that for a long time there was bitter resentment on the part of the
congregants of First Reformed that their heart goods had been moved to the suburbs. Not quite, but
almost. By 2006, of course there were Dutch Reformed Churches in the suburbs, but they were all
almost new, not venerable at all, -- although cheery, very cheery and neighborhood oriented, as
suburban churches are required to be. But the historic goodies were still encased in the "new church"
built by a relatively famed architect in 1908. Its congregation consisted as of 2006, mainly of people who
came in from the suburbs faithfully in order to keep this church standing. Most of them were not
Dutch, even by heritage, except for one remote branch of the Schaicks, but the feeling was there.
Aside from these various churches, little remains of the basic housing, even that which stood on
the spot when what had been called Fort Amsterdam– although no fort still stood there – was formally
incorporated as the City of Duyktown in the late 1700's, one of the very first cities incorporated as an act
of the relatively new State of New York in the equally new United States. They couldn’t call it
Amsterdam because a city of that name already existed. Thus, based on the name of the family currently
owning the most property, it became Duyktown.
And the names of those from Fort Amsterdam who had served in that first of the great wars (no
one wanted to count Queen Anne's various wars, in during one of which the actual fort had been taken)
were inscribed on a plinth. As of 2006, that inscribing still existed, but not as an outdoor memorial. Far
too fragile for outdoor display, it lay behind a glass covering in the Historic Determinations anteroom at
City Hall. The place you went to get permission to make changes to your previously declared historic
building in Duyktown.
It's necessary to understand that Duyktown was still a pretty small city at that time. Just big
enough to meet the then requirements for being a city. That is, it was on the Mohawk River. It was a
trading place. It manufactured – brooms, beer, house shingles, and a number of other useful items. It
had a dock on the river, and it was a Gateway to the West. In fact, it had liked to be called by that name
for many years. Duyktown, Gateway to the West. Then came the Erie Canal. After that, no one at all
could dispute Duyktown's right to be called a city. Not an eternal city perhaps, but a city.
Everybody – at least everybody who studied Social Studies in the New York State public school
system – knows that Duyktown, for many, many decades, was central to the economy of it states for the
existence of two great forces, which made themselves at home there from the middle of the nineteenth
century until near the end of the twentieth. They were Amalgamated Industries and Leppart
Automotives. By the time of World War I both of these industries were in sufficient production mode to
ensure Duyktown's place in that war economy. By the time of World War II, they were central. The
population of Duyktown rose to one hundred and fifty thousand, its peak to that date and, though not
recognized as such, what was to be its peak forever. And from the end of World War II, it began to
vanish, although, to be sure, nobody knew that at the time. During the 1950's everything looked good,
what with the Korean War and so on.
By the 1960's it began to be apparent that something was not right in Duyktown. The closure of
Leppart Automotives was a hint too big to be ignored and the census of 1960 had already showed what
Leppart's decline had wrought. The population of Duyktown had slid to one hundred and twenty
thousand and was falling fast. By 1970, it had hit eighty-five thousand, no matter how much the city
father might plead that the homeless and so on were not being counted adequately. It was then that
Amalgamated Industries, previously the creature of its strongly unionized workforce began to make
noises – well, speeches in fact – about cutting down, about closing some facets, about letting people go.
And then it did.
To say that these events came as a shock to the city of Duyktown would be something of an
understatement. Or overstatement, depending on how you define shock. Most Duykkers, as the city
fathers liked to refer to its citizens, (“We are all Duykkers,” Mayor Timothy Duyk said in a speech he
made on Founder’s day, May 1958) took the news in with a kind of numbness, a numbness which left
many outside commentators more shocked than they felt the citizens themselves should be. By 1980,
when the Federal Census showed that Duyktown had fallen to a not so grand total of sixty thousand
inhabitants.
Half of the cities elementary schools were closed. That got a reaction. Suddenly Duykkers who
had been accustomed to seeing their children walk to and from school found it necessary to put them
on a bus in the morning and watch them whisked off to another part of the city.
The Game House – a beautiful collection of fowl, including some lovely peacocks previously
donated to the city – was closed to eliminate the salary of the person who had previously been in charge
of taking care of it. The peacocks were sent to a zoo in Baltimore Maryland. People wept.
By the time all of these things happened, of course a lot of other things had been going on in
Duyktown. The sexual revolution, for example. The War on Drugs. Many people began to feel, quite
logically – if one considers a basic reasoning of crude cause and effect a kind of logic – that Duyktown
was suffering a punishment for the gross moral decline on its streets. Others blamed the communists.
Whatever the reason may have been, by 2006, when, as previously noted, the events about to
be related here took place, communism was no longer a threat, but the City of Duyktown stood on the
brink of some kind of vanishing. Amalgamated Industries, now the only industry in town, unless you
counted a couple of micro-breweries and some other stuff of that sort – had sharply curtailed its
production, but not, as so often threatened, closed out entirely. It was the home base of Amalgamated,
after all, said Jack Munroney, head CEO. And of course now it was not an industry dominated by its
unions. That was all safely under control. Stasis was the hope.
And so, on with Founder's Day, with all due pomp and circumstance, however cynically it might
be being brought to bear. Bring in the high school marching bands. Bring out the fire department and at
least one of its great engines. Bring out the boy scouts and girl scouts. Oh heavens, let all of Duyktown
get off its duff and celebrate. You don't have to use the word eternal or immortal to entertain the
delusion you are going on forever. You can just have a parade.
Two
Francis Mulberry was walking down State Street in lower Duyktown. Francis was a person well
aware that cities disappear. He didn't like to think this one was, it meant so much to him, and yet, he
could hardly blind himself to the evidence. No matter how much others did. And as he walked, he
occasionally looked around and sighed. He remembered what used to be here, what used to be there.
His walks were a series of used to be’s. But he was not a person given over to melancholy, so he did not
stop and weep, but put some coins into the hands of various drunks and homeless persons who
accosted him and went on his way.
He walked because it wasn't far where he was going. And, he had to admit to himself, he might
meet a voter or two. He could also reason fairly enough, that he usually walked wherever he could. He
had a thought for the environment after all – and god knows the streets of Duyktown could use some
environmental attention. They were gray. They were industrial. They were sad.
Every block or so, he was amused to see posters in windows or stuck in the meager lots that
passed for yards of the buildings he went by, signs saying “Mulberry.” Along one section of Jay Street,
which he had turned and was walking down, so many appeared in a row it reminded him of a garden
with the labels of the seeds planted showing. As if this part of town were about to sprout a crop of
Mulberrys. He smiled. It was a curious thing to him to think that the signs didn’t even need his first
name for people to know it was him running or what he was running for.
He’d been a member of the City Council of Duyktown for the past six years and stood a very
good chance (depending on your definition of good) of becoming a congressman at the next election,
which, god willing, would take place in about a week. It would be very unusual for a city councilman to
become a congressman – the congressional district being gerrymandered in such a way as to include a
huge swath of the nearby suburban area. And suburban areas were notoriously unfriendly to city
councilmen. It was odd even for the local party to let a city councilman dream of anything bigger.
He was ready. Well, chiefly he was ready to stop appearing on local radio shows and at the
various summer offerings of the various civic groups in Duyktown. He was said to be popular. He didn’t
quite understand why and supposed it must mean he had a friendly face. He had done nothing
exceptional in those previous three terms of office. With any luck, he expected to do nothing
noteworthy in the next one. And if he lost, well, so be it. His opponent was a man who vigorously
opposed illegal immigration. Not only was that not a terribly big problem in Duyktown, but a very large
proportion of the current voting stock was related to those who had come, if not to Duyktown, then to
New York City. As a whole, the City of Duyktown was not in a panic about immigration. Were it not for
immigration (chiefly from New York City) the population would be even lower than the forty thousand it
was currently hovering at.
That was another story in the suburbs of course, but Francis, like Dorothy in Oz, was just not in
the suburbs anymore. He’d grown up in Rose Hill and lived there till his children finished high school.
Then, as soon as he could decently arrange it, moved back to the city where he had spent the first five
years of his young adulthood. Where he had felt innocent or something like it. Where he had believed in
possibilities.
Not that he didn’t still believe in possibilities. He was Francis Mulberry after all, registered R.N.,
former head of Emergency Nurses at Shoonhaven General Hospital, where he had – in that innocent
youth of his, toiled as an orderly, then as a student nurse. Being on the Duyktown City Council was not a
full time job. Once it had been. If that were still so, he might have had to think twice about running for
office, back in 2000. And it ought to have been a full time, but legislation in 1997 had put an end to that.
A brave new move! it had been called. Well, there was no use being cynical about it. Why not call it a
brave new move, an attempt to cut back the budget.
When he walked, he ambled, as had been pointed out by a couple of local news people. “Our
new councilman doesn’t stroll,” someone had remarked. “He ambles.” It was not a walk depicting or
revealing indolence. It was a way of moving he had perfected on the Emergency Ward. It was a calm
walk, a quiet walk. And it always got him where he was going. Francis always had a purpose. In this
case, it was number 73 Jay Street, a three story apartment building.
Jay was not notably beautiful. It was in fact a slum of some mean proportions, inhabited chiefly
by people currently being subsidized by the state and county. It was clean in that somewhat dowdy way
that places are clean where someone is being paid too much to keep them so. No plants grew. The
garbage cans were all lidded. The streetlights worked. It was a street politicians were wont to visit, but
that was not Francis’ reason for being there. Francis was merely visiting.
He pressed the doorbell for #39 and a woman’s voice said, “Who is that ringing my bell?” and
then laughed as if she had made a serious joke.
“it’s me, Yonnie,” Francis said.
“If I had a TV monitor on that door I wouldn’t have to ask you,” the woman said.
“That’s all right,” Francis said. “I don’t mind saying who I am. Do you want to let me come up?”
“Certainly,” the woman said. “I’ve been very good. You won’t mind seeing me at all.”
“Of course I won’t,” Francis said. “I never mind seeing you Yonnie. In fact I chose to come here.”
“So you did,” said the disembodied voice.
“Yonnie,” Francis said, “please push the buzzer so I can get the door open.”
“Oh, whoops!” said the voice. Then the door buzzed and Francis pushed it open, then walked up
a narrow flight of stairs. The smell was not nasty as such, but like a veiled threat, it held the possibility.
Something like industrial cleaning fluid was the chief serenade. Under it the tones of other things less
friendly. And of the age of the building and all the feet these stairs had withstood. A coat of paint might
have been welcome too.
At the top of the stairs he found, as he had known he would of course, Yonnie Stewart, standing
in the open door of her flat, holding her arms out to greet him. “Hello Francis she said, “fancy meeting
you here.”
He smiled to show he took it as a joke, though you could never be too sure with Yonnie. She was
a tall, large woman with long gray hair that still wanted to curl and fly wildly about. Today Yonnie had
secured it with an Alice band, so the bulk of its wildness hung behind rather than in front of her face.
She was wearing a multi-colored caftan that hung to the floor and had long loose sleeves. Under the
hem of the caftan, her slippers, which had faces, protruded.
Yonnie was, as she described herself, a recovering schizophrenic. She was aware, she would tell
you if you raised the issue, that so far no one had been actually accredited with having recovered from
schizophrenia. “We’re all recovering,” she liked to say. And it gave her optimism to say so.
“Real optimism, you know?” she would say. “Not that other kind.”
The other kind was where Yonnie had gone about saying everything was fine and that she had
no disease at all. Or if she did, it was her mother's fault or her father’s fault or the fault of the Secret, for
which she did not know who to blame – and therefore nothing to do with her at all. And therefore she
was still fine.
Francis and Yonnie went way back. First, Francis had known Yonnie briefly when she was eight
year old and he was ten. That was when Yonnie's parents lived in a house in Rose Hill. Francis and
Yonnie were both at William J. Sagamore Elementary School in Rose Hill and on the same bus. Francis
had only the briefest memory of that time. What ten year old remembers an eight year old, even if she
is a very pretty girl. Yonnie had been a very pretty girl. That was a fact. She'd had curly blonde hair that
fell to her waist and big blue eyes, like a girl in a soap commercial.
She had also caught the bus at the same spot as Francis. Vaguely Francis remembered the five or
six others who used to catch that same bus to William J. Sagamore Elementary: a fat girl with glasses, a
couple of boys who liked the same television shows as he did. And even if he had remembered Yonnie
more than glossily (that long blonde hair had been some kind of notable), it would only be the most
superficial kind of memory, because Yonnie's parents, after a year and a half in Rose Hill had moved
back to Duyktown and Yonnie had stopped being at the bus stop at the corner of Malkins Road and Rose
Trellis Ave in Rose Hill.
Francis next knew Yonnie as the sometime girl friend of another friend of his in the late 70's and
early 80's. there had been a lot of drugs around at the time and he had supposed that she was a typical
drug-dazed type, the type this particular friend of his – well, more like his connection – had preferred.
And Yonnie had remembered him as the boy who stood at the corner of Malkins Road wearing a terrible
lime green jacket which his mother had made him wear because he had a tendency to asthma. He had
not welcomed this reminder (and his asthma had improved considerably). Also he had noted that
Yonnie's hair was no longer the pale blonde of her childhood, but had mellowed into a kind of honey
color. Would he have been interested in her if she hadn't been Ed Frank's girl friend – or, more to the
point, Ed Frank's used goods? It was said that she was pretty available, and he could believe that. At any
rate, he hadn't tried his luck, though god knows he had been desperate enough at the time. There was
just something about Yonnie, not just her tendency to blurt out the obvious, that put him on some kind
of guard. It was a few years after that, after he had been away at school and returned home to
Duyktown to work as an orderly at the hospital that he came to understand something about what it
was that put him off Yonnie. Their next meeting was in E Wing, the psychiatric center of the hospital. He
was the green young orderly, she was the patient. "Francis Mulberry!" she had cried. "How absolutely
fabulous to see you here! Will you smuggle out messages for me?"
Which was ridiculous, because there was no need for Yonnie to smuggle messages to anybody.
She was completely free to contact anybody she wanted from the telephone in the Day Room and to
receive any visitor she chose to okay. Her mother came frequently, her father occasionally, and a
number of other people, some of whom Francis remembered from the old days. Besides, she was only in
for a few days at a time. It was only a locked ward in the sense that during the first seventy two hours
patients had to be protected from themselves a little.
Otherwise, Yonnie could, after seventy two hours have just packed up and checked herself out.
Although she didn't. Two years into his experience at Shoonhaven, Francis got used to seeing Yonnie
every few months. And he was still an orderly in 1988, when she made what she herself referred to
afterwards as her Big Breakthrough.
Whether it had been a breakthrough or just a happy coincidence of happenings Francis had
never been prepared to say. Nevertheless, it had bound him and Yonnie is a very definite way. Legal?
Not that exactly. First her now deceased parents and now the state, were primarily legally responsible
for Yonnie. That is to the pat of her existence at least which required the payment of fees and stipends.
Not that Yonnie was too much in need of money. She lived in a rent-controlled subsidized apartment for
the disabled. She had, since her parents' death, a nice allowance from a trust set up by them precisely
for that purpose.
Legal, yes, in the sense that Francis had, through the agreement of Yonnie and her parents,
obtained the right to adopt and raise her two fatherless children. There were probably more than a few
people in Duyktown who supposed that those children Francis Mulberry had raised were his by-blows
from some earlier liaison, something he had decided to come clean about. But that was not true – even
though Yonnie had rather publicly proclaimed him to be so. But Francis was, as his friend Rod Thwaite
put it, "One of the only two guys never to fuck Yonnie Farris." Rod himself being the other of course –
and that was a slanderous remark, but only technically. Yonnie, when she was fully on her meds and
could talk for a half hour or more without veering into fantasy, had once admitted that she herself had
no true idea who the father, or fathers of her children was – or were. Francis had his own suspicions,
but what did that matter? It was all in the past.
Sometimes he thought his connection to Yonnie was spiritual, though he couldn't quite explain
it. Francis was still a Catholic, as he had been dutifully brought up to be by his parents, the rough, but
pleasant Frank Mulberry and the petite and devout, Marisette Dufresne Mulberry. Yonnie didn't exactly
have a religion, so far as Francis could tell, but she occasionally attended a number of churches in the
immediate area of where she lived. She welcomed her, even to their coffee hours, so long as she kept to
her medications. Francis had never taken her to Saint Agnes, where he customarily went to Mass. On
the other hand, she had never expressed any interest in going.
In fact, what was their relationship? Other than that Francis, through the years, had been
constant in attendance, visiting Yonnie whether when was at home or in the hospital, checking on how
she was doing, letting her know how the kids were doing. And now the kids were more or less grown up,
one of them in school, the other one in the Air Force, Francis still showed up to see how Yonnie was
doing.
It looked like she was doing okay. She had a dog, which was new. A little tan pug. "I bought him
from a breeder, you know," Yonnie said. "You mustn't buy a dog from a pet shop. They breed them in
puppy mills."
"I've heard that," Francis said. He didn't ask Yonnie where she heard it. He knew she listened to
the radio all day long. It seemed to keep her informed, even if some of what she heard there was not
always what was being broadcast. For example, the disc jockey she was convinced was sending her
amorous messages.
But she didn't have anything to say about that today. She showed Francis the puppy's new food
dishes, his cute little plaid jacket, for when it got colder, and his leash.
"Now I have a good reason for taking walks," she said, with a certain amount of satisfaction. As
if there could be other reasons. As if she knew what some of those reasons might be. "You know I'll take
good care of him, don't you Francis?"
"Of course," he said, and he meant it. And he didn't ask how she got to the breeders. This
Yonnie of today took taxis whenever she needed one. Or maybe she relied on friends. She belonged, he
knew, to a support group from E Wing. Not all schizophrenics, but all people who had spent some time
on the wing.
This Yonnie of today was not the younger woman who had walked out with her two little
children, one of them still in a stroller, to the local McDonald's and then, distracted by voices that she
was hearing all too often in those days, simply left them there. If it hadn't been for Claire Clayton, who
knows what might have happened.
But that was in the past. Francis took a letter out of his pocket. "I heard from Eddie last week,"
he said. "He sent some pictures of the guys in his unit. I thought you might like to see them."
"Ha, ha," Yonnie said. "You didn't know it, but he sent me some pictures too. Would you like to
see them?"
That was a tense moment for Francis, a memory of some moments when Yonnie thought she
had a picture to show him, but on second look it turned out to be something else – a store circular, for
example, which she had once taken to be a wedding invitation. But he said, "Sure."
Yonnie went to a credenza on the wall (one he recognized from her parents' old house in fact)
and the collection of china elephants that danced across the top shelf) and began shuffling papers. She
pulled out a sheaf of colored ads. "This is…" she said. "Oh no, it isn't." She began to look worried.
Francis held his breath.
"Here!" she cried suddenly and pulled an envelope out from one of the piles. From it she pulled
a handful of pictures.
Francis breathed something like relief. At least they were photographs and who else?
Yes, there was Eddie in his gear standing in front of an airplane. Not the same pictures he had
sent Francis.
"I knew, I knew, I knew," Yonnie said, clapping her hands together. "My goodness, isn't he
handsome?"
In fact, Eddie was handsome only in the sense that the young are all handsome to the middleaged, but Francis was happy to agree. Eddie looked happy, he was doing all right, they were probably
going to send him to Afghanistan, any day now. Yonnie held one of the photographs to her breast. "My
baby," she said. Then she looked at Francis and laughed.
"That was a silly thing to say, wasn't it? I always wanted to think he was my mother's baby." She
put the photo back in Francis' hand. "Or your baby. I wasn't supposed to have babies." This was a
statement that chilled Francis with its pathos. He wanted to reach out and take her hand. If only she
weren't smiling. If she had cried now, he could have seen it as some kind of good sign, but she didn't.
She was smiling her awful smile. He had never liked that smile and he especially hated to see it on the
face of a gray haired woman.
Three
Rod Thwaite was busy and not paying very much attention to either the upcoming elections or
the city's plans for Founders Day. Although he would ride in Founder's Day Parade. You bet your ass he
would. And he would not be the only one in his contingent. As proprietor of the major Harley shop in
the region he would be at the head of a contingent of motorcyclists (all Harley Davidson if he had his
way, but every once in a while, some interlopers crept in; since he also did repairs on these various
bastard brands it just wasn't good business to dispute them – but he would have liked to). But that was
all set up already. He didn't have to think about it.
And he didn't have to think about voting, because Francis would call him on the morning of
election day and remind him. What the hell. That's what friends were for, to remind you to do the futile
things they thought were necessary. Voting for Francis. That was something that still amused him, but
he didn't have to brood over it. He would have voted for Francis whatever he was running for. He would
have voted for Francis for mayor, for senator, for whatever the hell else there was.
He wasn't even thinking about the business. For a change. It was still early in the evening. The
October sun was just setting and the air was not yet chilly. He had put on one light in the dining room
and was shuffling a batch of brochures with brightly colored pictures. Rod Thwaite was in the process of
selecting a headstone for his father's grave.
His father had been dead for three years now, so it seemed like time. He had the brochures on
the dining room table in his mother's house. Since his most recent divorce he had been living upstairs in
the apartment that had been his when he was a young man, still working as an automechanic, only
dreaming of having his own Harley dealership. Two marriages later, two houses lost to aggrieved
women, he was back where he began.
Only it didn't feel the like a beginning any more. What did it feel like? All he could have said
about it was it irritated him. But anybody who knew him would have said most things irritated Rod so
what did that signify? Nothing.
Being there for his father's last illness. That was the worst goddam thing he'd ever experienced.
Divorce was not even in the picture in terms of comparison to that. Divorce was something he was
almost used to. Had almost gotten used to. Would never do again. At his age he knew he would never
give in to the temptation of making a legal arrangement. Why should he anyway? It all came down to
money in the end. Money and trouble. And moving out of houses.
"If only you had children, Rod," his mother would say (and she said it more often than he would
have preferred), "it would give you some stability in life."
"I'm stable," he would invariably reply. "I'm stable as hell. I hardly moved an inch this year. What
more do you want from me?"
Was it grandchildren? But Patsy had a raft of grandchildren. Why would she want more? Every
year they did Christmas here and the place rang with the sound of little feet all over the place and their
piping little voices. And he had to lock the door to his place or they would be into everything. Going on
fifty years old, he could look back on at least one good decision. Well, two, if you counted the Harleys.
Except that hadn't been a decision so much as a necessity. He had never in his life debated that dream.
Being careful not to have children was something he had thought about.
When his mother said she hoped he would be stable, she meant she hoped he would give up
motorcycle riding. That was just silly. What did she expect him to do? Motorcycles were his life. And if
he was going to die wiped up on a bike, well so be it. In fact, of course, he was careful of the
circumstances so that should not happen.
At one time she'd hoped he'd become a fireman. She'd told him that once. "You were always
rescuing people," she'd said. "I thought that might be something you'd like to do. Instead of just riding
around on bikes. I think you were in love with bikes."
Maybe that was true. He didn't love the bikes now the way he had when he was younger. Hell,
maybe he had been planning to wipe out. Planning in the way your mind goes on planning things you
don't know about. They meant something to him then he could hardly put into words. The way some
people talked about falling in love.
He'd never been in love that way. Emotionally anyway. Although he certainly had panted after
his first wife. Lou. The first woman after Claire. Had he been in love with Claire Clayton? He could let
that sit in his mouth and see if it felt that way. He couldn't say exactly what it had been with Claire
Clayton. Maybe he didn't want to. It was three years of his life he hardly had been able to think about
objectively. It was just something that happened. And then it was done
He knew the expression "gold standard." He didn't want to use it. But it was after Claire that he
d gone panting after Lou Sembali like a fucking dog in heat. He'd been just like one of those dogs. He
would have howled at the moon if he could have. And because he couldn't have her without marriage,
he had married her. And two years later, much the wiser, he'd agreed to the divorce she wanted, gave
her the house that he'd bought and paid for with the cash he'd been saving all those years.
Cash he could have spent on Claire Clayton, but it was no use to think about such things.
He got married again right away too, as if that was going to be some kind of solution. To a nice
woman who didn't care if they had to take a mortgage, who hoped they'd eventually have children. She
was destined to disappointment. Maybe that was why she decided to leave. Probably he could have
gone on and on with her. Like his mother and father maybe. And all that one got was a house that still
had a mortgage on it. She said she didn't care. She just wanted out. That burned him for a while till he
decided to forget about it. Now, in retrospect, it felt as if he's spent the all that time marrying houses
instead of women, houses that popped up in his dreams occasionally. Which was not something he
welcomed.
His mother came into the dining room from the kitchen and looked over his shoulder at the
brightly colored pictures of tombstones. Tombstones photographed on the sales floor, tombstones
photographed in beautiful graveyards. Scenic places. Tombstones with fronds of greenery hanging
around their sharp edged.
His mother limped a little now, but you wouldn't know she'd ever had the stroke. She stood tall
still and both side of her face were even, her mouth a firm line. Her nose was still like the prow of one
of those old ships, even though her cheeks were fallen and there was too much fat under her chin. Her
hair was gray instead of the dark brown it had always been, but she still wore it straight and parted in
the middle, with combs holding it back. Like one of those pictures of an old-fashioned woman. She was
wearing a dark blue dress and over it a sweater. She was not heavy the way she had been before the
stroke, but she was still solid, almost imposing. When she sat down, she steadied herself against the
chair before dropping into it. She patted her arthritic hands on her knees, a kind of centering motion
and looked more closely at the tombstones.
"why does he need a stone anyway?" she said. "He never bought a stone for anybody. My
mother sits up there in Holy Innocents still with nothing but a lump of shale. Not even her name on it.""
"That's not what it's about," Rod told her. "He was my father. It's a question of respect
"Respect for him?" she said in a wondering tone of voice. "I never knew you had so much
respect for him."
"Who changed the sheets?"Rod said. He would not say, "Who cleaned him? Who carried him to
the bathroom?' he would not say those things. He didn't have to.
His mother fingered the brochures. "These are expensive. How come they cost so much?"
"It's the stone," he told her. "Imported from Vermont."
"Huh. Don't they have any stone in New York?"
"Not this kind. This is granite. See how it sparkles? Anyway, you ought to help me pick it out.
it's for the both of you. Someday, I mean."
She pushed the brochures aside. "When I'm dead, what do I care about that?"
"All right, nothing," Rod said. "Don't worry about it. It's my stone."
"Well, while you're at it, why don't you get one for my mother?"
Rod sighed. "Your mother was a bitch," he said. "A troublemaking bitch. She turned you out of
the house when you were fourteen. She stole the money Ed Herbert gave you"
"Yes," said his mother. And then she took a mocking tone. "But she was my mother, wasn't she?
Don't you think that calls for respect?"
"Maybe. But not from me." He laughed when he saw that she couldn't keep back a smile either.
Her mother had been a bitch. He never knew the woman but he'd heard about her all his life. If she had
her way his mother and father would never have married, his brother Cal would be a bastard instead of
adopted and he himself would never have been born. The way his children never got born. But he didn't
need to think that. The way his children escaped this life.
"Well, it's too bad," she said, as if answering what he was thinking. She got up, a process that
involved folding herself over, and then raising like a wooden ruler being unfurled. "Lots of other things
you could spend that money on. If you had children, for example, you'd be sending them to college right
about now."
"What makes you think my children would be going to college when none of the other of your
grandchildren have?"
His mother looked over at him from the doorway where she had stopped. "Because you were
the smart one," she said. "Too bad you don't have more to show for it."
"I have plenty."
She sighed. "All right. No use arguing about it. Too late now anyway. Have you had your supper
yet?"
"Have you?"
"I had a late lunch."
He knew what that meant. She'd had some crackers and cheese in the middle of the afternoon.
"What if I get us some spaghetti?" he said. "I can run up to Morelli's."
"Only if you're going to eat too."
"All right. I'll get some salad too." She made a face. She was supposed to eat more vegetables.
The only way he could trick her into it was if he brought salad. Cooked vegetables she would stow in
little refrigerator dishes and hide them away till they rotted. Salad she knew would not keep and so she
felt obliged to eat it. Or so it seemed. As much as he understood anyway. He got his leather jacket and
went out to the bike. He could have walked, but it was a nice night for riding.
And it was further away than he liked to remember. It used to in walking distance. A lot of things
used to be in walking distance from his technically in the fort area house. Now, even for people who
were in what everybody thought of as the real fort area, it wasn't so easy to find things in walking
distance. For a long time they'd had Finley's Finest, the sort of exclusive grocery store with a coffee shop
inside and a deli. Finley, who'd lived in the Fort Area since the time the Irish finally broke into living in
the Fort area, was the last holdout. After the pizza places went, after the shoe repair shop closed, after
the elementary school was gone, there had still been Finleys. Now there wasn't even a Finleys, let alone
a decent pizza place. He'd have to go all the way uptown.
All twelve blocks. People still called it uptown. Upper Main Street, making Main Street the main
street it hadn't been for almost a hundred years after State Street became the main drag. Now it was
State Street's turn to be nowhere and the only decent Italian places were on upper main. So upper main
it was. And the bike it was. When he was younger he could've walked it, or so it seemed to Rod. Not that
he had really walked much.
When he got to Morelli's, he put in his order, then sat down at one of the tables and had a beer.
Barbara Morelli came over to talk. She was Lou Morelli's sister and she was about fifty, which was his
age, not that he cared, but she was thick in the middle the way so many women got. He couldn't deal
with that. In fact, he thought, that's why so many men married younger women. They were just looking
for somebody who hadn't let themselves go.
Because Rod had not let himself go. Even when he was supposedly happily married, he hadn't
settled down into it, but kept up his regimen of weight lifting, despite having to listen to all that
complaining about how his weights took up so much room and couldn't he keep them at his parents’
house and so on and so on. He hadn't been married long enough obviously to see whether the women
he married let themselves go.
"Hi Rod!" Barbara Morelli said "Long time no see." That was her idea of repartee. Since he was
in Morelli's on average about twice a week.
"Hey Barb," he said, steering that careful way between not unfriendly and not too friendly. She
seemed to find it satisfactory because she plunked herself down next to him. Rod began to wish he'd
called ahead for the goddam pizza. Of course this happened almost every time he went into Morelli's so
what would be the point of calling ahead once in a while? He couldn't all ahead every time. It would look
unfriendly.
When Morelli's was still in his neighborhood, he'd enjoyed walking down Prospect street on nice
evenings and sitting outside under the awning with his beer while he waited for his pizza. It's funny how
you don't know you're living the good days until they're behind you. Back then he'd been so preoccupied
with his unhappy marriages, one after the other, he hadn't even realized how much he was enjoying
himself. And Barbara Morelli had been working at the shop uptown. Besides being engaged to
somebody else. He wondered whatever happened with that. But he was sure as hell not going to ask.
"How's it going?" he said and took a long draught of beer, swallowing and letting himself burp a
little, which he would not have done if it was a woman he was interested in. Barb Morelli seemed not to
fathom that. She flashed a smile at him and said, "Oh you know. Can't complain. They won't let me!"
and then laughed at her own wit. She had one gold tooth on the left side of her mouth. She had big
hoop earrings and a low cut blouse that showed her ample cleavage.
"Me neither," Rod said.
"So you going to the big day?" she asked him.
"What big day?"
"Oh silly!" she said, slapping at his arm. "You know. The Founders!"
"Foundering again," Rod said, but she didn't get it. Most people didn't, when he repeated
Francis' wit.
"Is that what you call it?" Barb Morelli said.
"Don't pay any attention to me," Rod said. "Of course I'm riding in the parade. I do every year."
"But you didn't donate a bike this year."
Jesus, she kept track of things. "That was five years ago," he said. "It was a second-hand
Bultacco, needed a pipe job. I just donated it because I didn't know what else to give and they were
after me for something." He paused to consider what he had said. "They were after everybody," he said.
"And I always give something."
"Yeah," she said. "We're giving away fifteen large pizzas or sit down meals for two. You gotta.
People think you're cheap if you don't. So what are you giving if you don't give a bike? Motor oil?"
"Tune-ups," Rod said. "It's like a dinner for two, right?"
She was too amused, but then she was always too amused. When he didn't want to be alarmed
by Barbara Morelli, Rod always consoled himself with thinking it was just her way of being a good
manager in the shop. But he knew better. Oh yeah, he knew better. And then his pizza was ready. He
drank the rest of his beer and was off, tying the pizza box to his back of his bike with bungee cord he
kept just for that purpose.
When he got home, or rather, when he brought the pizza into his mother's kitchen – home for
him, being upstairs, but he seldom at there anymore – he found Francis Mulberry sitting at the table
with his mother. That wasn't unusual either.
"Doesn't your wife expect you home for dinner?" he said.
"Still in Rochester."
Francis' wife, Amy, worked for the State Education Department, doing what Rod was not sure.
Something about testing. They didn't have any kids either, so when Amy was out of town, Francis was
pretty much on his own. All of which Rod knew very well. He just liked to get on Francis' case.
"I'm surprised you're not out campaigning," he said. "Instead of mooching pizza off my poor
mother, you could be out eating pirogues at St. Agnes's."
Francis smiled amiable. "That was last week," he said. "I have now visited all the Knights of
Columbus Chapters in Duyk County. And a couple of big parties in Amsterdam."
Rod laughed. The fact that a part of Amsterdam was in the district where Francis was running
for congress was an old and obnoxious joke, a little slice of something carved off that somebody else
didn't want. A slightly suburban district for somebody who had wanted mainly urban Amsterdam. Of
course Amsterdam was nearly a dead issue as a city these days. That ominous day had come galloping
along when to everybody's amazement apparent amazement, they realized it now had no tax base to
speak of, except for the meager houses remaining. No industry and not enough population to be a city.
Of course it still had the name. and the congressional district still had that little slice of disavowed
voters.
There were not as many of them as there used to be, but apparently all of them felt an affinity
for Duyktown. Hell, most of them worked in Duyktown, those that didn't commute to Albany or Glens
Falls.
"So you want some of my lowly pizza?" Rod said. "I can't promise you a vote."
"Stop being a twerp," Rod's mother said and turned her head – she was still a little laborious in
actions like that, turning it majestically, but a tad slowly. "We can promise you two votes from this
house," she said.
"Ah, what's he gonna do for us?" Rod said, lifting out a piece of pizza and shoving it in his
mouth.
"Sit down," his mother said, "and act like a civilized human being."
"Civilized?" Rod said. "Me?"
But he sat down. "How come he has a beer and I don't?" he said, looking pointedly at Francis.
"Because you already had one," his mother said.
Rod stood up and went to the refrigerator, getting two beers, one for himself, another one for
Francis. "How about you?" he said to his mother.
"I'm good for now," she said. Which was her idea of humor. She was teetotal, always had been.
She came from a family of drunks and Rod knew her constant fear was that he might become one. He
was afraid she counted every beer he drank – certainly she had when he was younger. And that made it
all the more necessary to drink in front of her, of course.
"Glad to see you're cutting down," he said to her, settling himself at the table again. "Look,
have some of this before the human eating machine, " – he waved a hand in Francis' direction – "gets all
of it."
Which was another joke. But getting his mother to eat, that was no joke.
"It's got pepperoni on it," he said, knowing that was her favorite.
"What's that green stuff?" she said.
"Green peppers. You know, to add a little flavor."
"Pepperoni has plenty of flavor of its own," she said. But she took a slice. Then deliberately and
carefully picked off the shreds of green pepper, wrapping them up in a paper napkin from the basket in
the middle of the table.
Rod didn't bother arguing about it.
"So what's going on?" he asked Francis. Are you sick of running for a major office yet?"
"Three months ago," Francis said cheerfully. "After the Fourth of July in fact." He shuddered. "It
was a lot easier running for City Council."
"That," said Rod, with all due seriousness, "is because nobody cares who the fuck is on the City
Council."
His mother did one of her majestic head turns and gave him a look, but considering the little pile
of green peppers in front of her – which she would have to have known Rod paid extra for – she said
nothing.
Francis smiled. "True enough."
"Rod is buying his father a tombstone," Mrs. Thwaite said to Francis.
"Hey, yeah?" Francis said. He sounded really interested and he probably was. Francis was the
kind of guy who got interested in other people's shit. No wonder he wanted to go off to Washington and
really get into it.
"A really big one," Rod's mother said. "Granite."
"They're all made of granite," Rod said.
"Is that true?" she asked Francis.
"Weill, almost," he said.
"Not all of them?" Rod said. "The cheaper ones are made of something else? Like plastic?"
Francis laughed. "I never heard of a plastic tombstone, but you know some of the markers out
on Good Savior seem to be made of slate."
"Sure, but those are not tombstones. We're talking about the real thing here."
"Yes," his mother said, again looking to Francis. "Does a real tombstone have to be made of
granite? Don't they have anything cheaper?"
"You know?" Francis said, "I don't really know. Maybe that's something I should look up. There's
some I know made out of something black, obsidian maybe."
"Obsidian?" said Rod's mother. "Is that some kind of precious metal?"
"It's a black rock," Rod said. "You mean to say they tombstones out of that? How the hell much
does that cost?"
Who can say what anyone wants? Especially Rod Thwaite. Even after knowing him for over
twenty year, Francis seldom knew what it was Rod wanted. Well, in limited ways yes. He'd known Rod
wanted a motorcycle when they were teen agers. But that hadn't been difficult to suss out. So had he.
But he was a teenager! Rod went on wanting a motorcycle long after Francis gave up on the whole idea.
The thing was, Rod got his motorcycle. That is, he got the clapped out machine and then he learned how
to fix it and fixing it made him a natural for the motor pool when he went into the army. And being
trained as an auto mechanic in the army made it possible for him to make a living as one in the real
world. And being an automechanic had enabled him to save money to do the thing he next wanted to
do which was to own a whole lot of motorcycles.
Well, that's what it was wasn't it? Having the business enabled Rod to have a whole raft of
motorcycles and not just any motorcycles, Harleys. Sure, the theory was he was having all these Harleys
in order to sell them to other people who were anxious to have Harleys. Bu the fact was Road was such
a reluctant, low-pressure salesman, he was well-known as a guy you could trust. Of course you could
trust him. He didn't want to sell those bikes. He wanted them in the shop, under his eye. Push came to
shove, he sold them of course. He had to make a living, he had to pay the mortgage, he had to pay his
creditors. But if he sold one, the upside was then he could replace it in the shop. And so.
What was the next thing Francis remembered Rod wanting? Well, Claire Layton. That was weird.
Rod was almost thirty years old then, been in the army and so on, and you would think he'd be pretty
blasé about women. But Claire Layton, that was something else. Francis still remembered their
conversation about it. "She's old," Francis had said. "She's old enough to be my mother."
"Yes," Rod had said, "but she's not my mother." Which was insane because of course Rod's
mother was a lot older. Rod was the youngest of eight children. His oldest sister was old enough to be
his mother, technically speaking.
And just like the motorcycle, Rod didn't get tired of Claire Layton. He'd seemed to think they
were going to go down that golden road of old age together. It was Claire Layton who dumped Rod.
And what did Rod want after that? A question Francis could not answer. For a while it had
looked like what Rod wanted was to die, the way he rode his bike around. Then he got married, but it
would be hard to say that was something he'd wanted the way he wanted the motorcycles.
It was something he needed, obviously, but that wasn't the same thing, not the same thing at
all. And the woman he married – Francis couldn't even remember her name – she apparently figured
that out. And never mind Rod's second marriage. That was just so obvious a failed attempt at wanting.
He'd hardly been able to even look like it on the wedding day. Poor Marcie. Francis remembered Marcie.
She was a nurse at the hospital. He hadn't warned her to leave Rod Thwaite on the shelf. That would
have been bad politics in so many ways. And anyway, he had kind of hoped it might work out. Some
hope!
One thing everybody knew Rod Thwaite didn't want was children. Well, those who were the
youngest in large families often got that feeling about the world. They knew how hard it was to get
other people to share. Or maybe it was just a generation thing. So many people Francis knew in high
school didn't have children.
Not that he'd known Rod in high school. Well, he'd been in high school. Rod was his connection,
two years out of having dropped out of high school.
"He must have wanted to friends with me," Francis suddenly thought. Yes, he must. Or that
friendship would be history.
But what did Rod want from the world now? A tombstone for his surly father's grave, the father
who had been so sunk into alcohol by the time Rod was born he'd hardly had any attention to spare?
What was going on?
But it didn't do to ask.
"Bronze," Francis said. "Sometimes they're made of bronze."
"What, like the doughboy?" Rod meant the memorial that stood at the foot of the Western
Gateway Bridge. A World War I soldier, engraved on a plaque with the words, "Brave Men Have Died to
Make Duyktown Safe."
"Like that."
"You think I should put a bronze stone on my father's grave? He was never in the army."
"Marble," Francis said. "That's the other thing I was trying to think of. I don't think they make
tombstones out of obsidian. It probably would be too expensive."
"How expensive?" Rod said.
"I don't know," Francis said. He was sorry to have mentioned it. "A marble stone could be black
and look pretty cool."
"Pretty cool," Rod said. "I don't know if I want my father's grave having a stone that's pretty
cool. I want people to think something better than that."
"What's better than pretty cool?" Francis said, but he knew it was hopeless. "Hey, you'll never
guess who I saw the other day."
"No I won't," Rod said.
A moment of silence. "Well," Francis said, and realized almost immediately that he was about to
step into something much more complicated than the idea of an obsidian gravestone. "Claire Layton.
Well, Layton she was. Claire Harris."
"So?" Rod said. "You get around don't you? Must have been one of your fancy campaign
dinners."
"As a matter of fact it was," Francis admitted. "Her husband is a pretty big donor."
Rod looked impassive, as only he could, his face like that of the dying Indian in the painting of
the same name.
"How is she?" Rod's mother said.
"She seems pretty well," Francis said. "We didn't get a chance to talk for long. She's on the
Founder's Day Committee. She told me a little bit about what they're doing for the speeches part. Since
I'll be in that."
"Of course you will," Rod said. "So, did she send regards to all her friends down in the hollow?"
"She did say to say hello to anybody we both knew," Francis said. Oh, much worse than
obsidian.
"How kind of her," Rod said. Then he left the table and went to the refrigerator for another
beer. When he came back, and had opened it and drunk off a good swallow, he said, "All right, you think
marble is as good as obsidian?"
"It might be better," Francis said. "How much have you been looking?"
Rod shuffled in the pile of brochures, sending them flying around the table. "About as much as I
can stand," he said.
"Not especially," Francis said. He had finished the second beer and stood up. "Thanks for the
brew," he said.
"Oh, do you have to go?" Mrs. Thwaite said. She looked at Rod. He stood up. He walked Francis
to the door. "You don't want to shop for tombstones?" he said. "You might have to do it sooner than
your think."
Both of Francis' parents were alive and well in Boca Raton – as far as he knew. "What are you
saying?" he said.
"Not a damned thing," Rod said. "I was talking about helping out your friends. You know?
Sometimes friends do that."
But Francis had a feeling they weren't talking about tombstones.
Four
Unlike most of the other people in Rose Hill, Claire Harris, as she had told Francis Mulberry, was
deeply involved in getting ready for Duyktown’s Founder's Day. She was not unique in being a
suburbanite whose good works all took place in the city, but her connection to Founder’s Day was
special. One way or another, she had been involved in Founder’s Day from the day she first came here,
forty years ago with her young husband and his employment in Duyktown. They had lived in the city
then, like a lot of people who worked for Amalgamated. Then, like so many in the 70’s they had moved
out to a bigger house in Rose Hill, but kept their attachments to the city which was still the center of
everything for them. Claire’s special attachment had been to Friends of the Library. It was only now, in
this later version of her life, that she paid attention to the whole program
Lately, Founder's Day came by so soon, the years whizzing by, it seemed like she was always
getting ready for Founder's Day. And she seemed to be a permanent member of the Founder's Day
Committee. Well, permanent since 1999, at least. That was when she married Joe Harris. Joe liked to be
active in the community. And it hadn't been hard to convince her to join the big committee. "You have
the experience, Lizzie," he'd said to her. He meant all that time she'd spent with the Friends of the
Library, being on their little committee for Founder's Day. But it was different. With the Friends of the
Library, Founder's Day was all about opportunity, all about publicity, all about advertising the Big Book
Sale. They had never thought about Founder's Day in the whole, about what it was really about.
Joe had thought a lot about what it was really about. "It's about history," he said. "It's about
how a city is more than the sum of its people, it's all about how those people have moved through
history to make something that's more than just bricks and buildings. It's about the heart."
She loved him for saying so, his simple faith in Duyktown was refreshing to her. She wanted to
believe in that. She wanted, what, to be normal? And Joe's lack of self-interest had seemed especially
refreshing and normal. Something to believe in. And she could look at her recent past as just an
adventure, a little bursting out of the confines of her previous existence. A running-away maybe.
Anyway, at sixty you needed different things than you had needed at forty. It wasn't about
adventure any more. It was about being settled and safe and spending the last years in something like
appropriate comfort. That was it. Appropriate. And hadn't that been the right thing to do? Giving away
her house in Rose Hill. Now that had been a crazy gesture. One she could afford. One that had made an
opportunity for someone else. But crazy just the same. Now she and Joe had another house in Rose Hill.
It had been like coming home in a way.
No welcoming committee, but vista of the river from their hilltop. No friends or family to come
back to. Her children were still across the country. But now they didn't have to importune her to come
out and live with them, so they didn't have to worry about what would happen to her in her old age. No,
now she had a bedrock. She had Joe.
He'd been married before. Of course he had. At their age, you expected that. She certainly
wouldn't have wanted to marry someone who, at sixty-seven had never lived with a woman. She could
hardly have trusted that.
The new house. She still thought of it as the new house now, after eight years of living in it. She
still felt the novelty of driving into Duyktown instead of walking to meetings from Rod Thwaite's old
house on the river. She turned her head away when she thought of that. It was as if, now that she
looked down on the river from such a height, that she looked down on Rod Thwaite too. He probably
didn't think that. She knew he'd got married. She heard through the grapevine that it hadn't worked out.
If it hadn't been for Joe, maybe she would have been tempted to. Tempted to what? She could hardly
say. Some adventures you can't go back to.
But she'd had a skylight built into their new house. As if she could retain what she'd liked so
much, lying bed, looking up at the sky. As if that stood from something, but she didn't know quite what.
She sighed and got up from her computer and walked into the kitchen. Her mind had been taken over
that's what it was. She wasn't crazy or anything. It was just thinking about Founder's Day. Goddam
Founder's Day. She was really sick of it and no kidding.
She went out into her garden and picked a riotous bouquet of flowers, everything that was still
blooming. The deep colors of autumn. She brought them in and put them in a glass vase and set it in the
middle of the dining room table. Joe wouldn't comment. He wouldn't even notice. He would say, "Did
you manage to get the chairs?" meaning the chairs for the auditorium where they would go to hear
speeches. And probably Francis Mulberry would be speaking. God, that made her feel really old. Francis,
who had been such a child in her eyes for so long. She still couldn't see him as a middle-aged man. Why
didn't he get a pot belly or something. Why did he stay lean like that? Why didn't he get some gray hair?
Why did he always go on looking so optimistic?
The chairs were one of her assignments. It was the same thing every year: get somebody to
donate them, get somebody else to set them up and if possible take them down, or get somebody else
to take them down. Somebody else to transport them back to whoever had donated them. Then the
coffee hour afterwards. Thank god she didn't have to arrange for the place. That had been decided long
ago. They always met at the Rigby School, a historic building. A historic building remodeled in the
eighties, when she hadn't been paying attention to such things at all. Hadn't been on the committee to
decide that the Rigby School Auditorium was now the perfect place for the speechifying. It used to be
Parson's Theater, another historic building and one that had the great advantage of having its own
chairs, rows of them, padded in fact, and slightly reclining. But then Parson's Theater, during the great
economic cutbacks of 2000, had decided it ought to start charging the Founder's Day Committee for the
use of its space. Bad move for Parson's Theater. Joe Harris was not one to be bullied by a bunch of
niggling penny pinchers. And besides, he was on the board of the Rigby School. What could be more
logical. And so it had come to pass.
Parson's Theater was where her husband Billy had often taken her, back when it was still
somewhat ramshackle, somewhat looked down on, and the entertainment was always a little risqué, act
from New York City, touring groups and so on. Well, it was still the same kind of stuff there, wasn't it.
But when Billy died in 1985, she had turned her back on all that. Oh yes, she had turned her back on so
much. She hadn't been conscious that she was out looking for adventure, but that was what she had
done wasn't it? She went out and found an adventure. Well, damn.
She went back to the computer and sent off her begging emails. Clever emails, in fact, designed
to seem as if the recipient was being offered an opportunity.. Yes, you can be the first to volunteer your
stupid chairs and we will even give you a notice in the program. Now won't that be nice? Of course it
was an opportunity not without its risks. A few chairs always got broken, or stained in some mysterious
unexplainable fashion. Why couldn't the Rigby School offer its own chairs? Oh, they were too smart for
that. They didn't have enough. Something like that. Some kind of logic Joe did not find niggling or penny
pinching, but simply logical.
After she had sent out the begging emails – let's face it, no one was really going to see it as an
opportunity. It was only a question of who would relent first and make the sacrifice – she pulled up her
spread sheet to check what else she ought to be attending to. Coffee of course. And the urns, which the
Unitarian Church around the corner from the Rigby School was usually willing to lend. Well, a lot of the
Board of All Souls was also on the board of the Rigby School. And they had those wonderful huge urns.
The committee person in charge of getting the coffee made wouldn't have to keep making it, the way
they had used to when all they had were smaller machines, donated by a variety of business.
And. She stopped and shut down her computer. She walked over to the door and looked out.
She looked at the clock and the absurd idea crossed her mind that she was looking to see how much
freedom she still had, how much time before Joe got home and said, "How goes it? Have you heard any
responses about the chairs yet?" and she would have to say, I just sent out the emails and try not to
sound annoyed. Or apologetic. Not what Joe would notice either way. "Ah Lizzie," he would say, "What
would I do without you?"
Never mind that she knew the answer was marry somebody else. Joe was just a marrying kind of
guy, as he had told her. She was just the winner. How lucky she had felt. Or had thought she ought to
feel. "Where have you been all my life?" he said to her, but didn't wait for the answer. Would she have
really told him: "I've been holed up on lower River Street with a motorcycle fanatic. I've been going to
rallies and smoking marihuana and drinking beer out of a bottle, and wearing leathers and even having
my own bike." Would she have told him that? She wouldn't. she just said, "Oh, I've been here," in what
must have seemed like a flirtatious tone of voice, because he had taken it that way. Getting over the
death of the husband, she supposed. That was probably what he'd thought. Poor thing, getting over the
death of her husband. Billy Clayton, hell of a guy. Knew him from the Jaycees. Probably been doing
good works. Been on that library committee. Good woman.
It was not fair to make fun of Joe, but he did t talk that way. "Good fellow," he would say of
somebody he did business with or who helped out with Founder's Day. He had a quick way of approving
of people and he was mostly right, wasn't he? She felt that she'd had the advantage of his quick
approval. But oh, oh dear, she was so sick of Founder's Day.
Five
Yonnie took her dog for a walk. Of course, if she hadn't had a dog, she would have made the
walk anyway. She liked to walk. She walked all over the city. Of course it wasn't a very big city, but she
was capable of crossing it from side to side or top to bottom (if you were thinking of the city as a big
map and north and south were its top and bottom). And she had done so. More times than people
knew, although not so much on her only oh as she used to. Not that she wasn't still capable of walking
the length and breadth of the city. It was that she had other things to do as well. That was a sign she had
the road to recovery, right? She had plenty of things to do. She didn't have to wander around like a
crazy person. She did not consider herself a crazy person. She considered herself a person with a
disability. But a person with a disability who got out a lot. Who had friends. Who didn't wind up on E
Ward nearly as much as she used to. Which was good in its own way because Francis didn't work there
anymore. Why did Francis want to go into politics? That was something she did not understand. If she
were not disabled, she might have been a powerful performer. She might have been a great author. She
might have been heroic. But she would never, never have been a politician. "Francis," she would say to
him, "sometime I don't understand you."
But, now she had a dog. The dog was not an excuse for walking. In fact, if anything, the dog
limited the number of places she could go. The dog, being small, got tired of walking sooner than she did
too. Maybe she should have a got a bigger dog. But then she couldn't have it in the apartment, they
were very strict about such things. And Mrs. Twitchet from downstairs was so nice about letting Yonnie
ride to the breeders with her and she was really into pugs. And so on. Yonnie made a theatrical gesture,
even though there was nobody there to see it but the dog. "Bitsy" was the dog's name, which was not
the name Yonnie would have chosen. The name Yonnie would have chosen the name she called the dog
in private, was "Ribbons." That was because upon seeing him she had immediately pictured, or maybe
really seen, the ribbons attaching this dog to herself, herself to this dog. Yonnie knew better than to try
and explain that to anybody. They would think she was relapsing.
"Bitsy," Mrs. Twitchet said, approvingly, "that's a very nice name for such a sweet little dog."
Mrs. Twitchet was not her real name either, of course. It was what Yonnie called her in private,
and to the dog. Because Mrs. Twitchet twitched. That was for sure. She was about a hundred years old
and dyed her hair a very strange red color. She wore her glasses of a string of colored beads. She had
three pugs (Yonnie wondered if she would have three pugs someday; you never knew) and her real
name was Mrs. Brickett. And except for the twitches, she was a nice person.
They had met at the hospital. Mrs. Twitchet was not a psychiatric patient. She was a little quick
to point that out for Yonnie's taste, but apparently it was true. Mrs. Twitchet had a physical problem
that gave her the twitches. Schizophrenia is physical too, Yonnie wanted to say, but she didn't. that
would have counted as arguing and Yonnie had made a definite resolution not to argue. Arguing was
one of the things that got her in trouble, that set off her illness, that made her agitated. That made
people jump to conclusions she could not wish them to jump to. Oh yes, and that was worse than
twitches. That she had to admit.
"Ribbons," she called to the dog and he came immediately. "Oh where is my lovely Ribbons?"
she said to the dog who wriggled with joy. She picked him up and held him close to her face. "Want to
go walkies?' she said. That was something her mother had always said to their Jack Russell terriers.
"Want to go walkies?" with a fake English accent, after some person who used to be on television. And
those dogs would be yapping like crazy and running around and knocking things over. Once they had
knocked over the elephant shelf. Oh that was a bad day. Yonnie still remembered the screaming. Back
when they still thought schizophrenia was something caused by mothers, Yonnie had got a lot of
attention for recounting that episode. Yes, her mother, who practiced yoga, who meditated every
morning. Who was vegetarian and pacifist – well, her mother also screamed a lot. Not for no reason.
"See, Yonnie," one of the people on E Wing – a therapist? An orderly? Something like that – had said,
"That's the difference between you two. She only reacts when there's a solid cause out there. That's
why they call what you do a disease."
Solid cause. That was a phrase Yonnie liked to try out on her tongue and on her mind's tongue.
Solid cause. If you had solid cause you were not crazy. Simple as that.
Aside from the solid causes, her mother had been a very beautiful woman. Oh no one could
deny that. She had beautiful golden brown hair, which she had fixed up at the beauty parlor when it was
no longer golden. She was tall and straight and had done modern dance in school and was now a part
time yoga teacher and she'd been to Europe. She had beautiful clothes. When Yonnie was a small child
her most earnest wish was to be grown-up. Not to grow up, but to be grown up right at that moment.
One of the Freudian therapists she had seen as a teenager had told her it was an Electra Conversion.
"Classic," he had said, with a satisfied smile.
Of course Yonnie didn't grow up, even though she had applied the most rigorous patience, to be
like her mother. If she could have been grown up as a child, she often thought, that would have been
the only possibly happy solution. Everything else was doomed, because even though she didn't know it
at the time, Yonnie was not going to grow up and be like her mother. She was going to grow up and be
schizophrenic. And even if she hadn't been schizophrenic, it would have been hopeless because she was
going to be fat like her father. The only thing Yonnie had that was like her mother was that she was tall
(but so was her father) and she had glorious hair. It was a great temptation to have it colored and
Yonnie would have done that, but she knew it was no use. Her mother should have left her hair alone
too. Eventually it was not beautiful anymore. It was only frizzy and sparse. It might as well have been
gray. It might better have been gray, it was, in the end, such an awful orange color.
Not as bad as Mrs. Twitchell, but still. Yonnie wondered what her mother would have made of
Mrs. Twitchell, but she never got the chance. She just up and died one day. Well, perhaps it wasn't all
that sudden. Her father had come to E Wing and said, "Yonnie, I have to prepare you for some terrible
news."
He was the one who looked as if the terrible news had already destroyed him. When Yonnie saw
the skeleton face over his own she almost told him, except she had learned not to share stuff like that
anymore. She had simply listened. And then when her father had told her, he said, "Why aren't you
crying damn you? What kind of a monster are you?" and then he went away.
That wasn't the last time she saw him. They, whoever they were, arranged for some more visits
and somebody must have explained that Yonnie's not crying was just a symptom. And her father had
said things like, "I'm trying to understand, Yons." But the skeleton face was still there and she still didn't
tell him. And then some months later -- maybe it was a year, maybe more – they came to tell her that
he was dead too.
"Let's not let this interfere with your progress," the psychiatrist she had then had said and
Yonnie had responded, "No, I won't." As if the two things had anything to do with each other. But still,
her father had said, "What kind of monster are you?"
Sometimes she looked at her face in the mirror (she was not yet all gray-haired then and it was
possible to pretend she was a young orphan) and she said, "What kind of monster are you?" but the face
had no answer to that question. It just looked back at her. There was no skeleton.
Ribbons, being the good dog that he was, did not carry on at all in the way Yonnie's mother's
Jack Russell’s had. Even though they were supposed to be very superior dogs, they certainly hadn't
acted like it. They had produced a lot of solid causes. Not Ribbons. He wriggled with pleasure and licked
her face again, but he would stand still and wait for the leash. He was a good dog.
Six
The sun goes up and the sun comes down. Whether you can see it for the clouds or not, there it
is out there and that's how you know it's daytime. Daytime is not as dark as night. That and mechanical
things are sometimes all you can be sure about.
That's what Rod often found himself thinking. The sun comes up and the sun goes down. Or
seems to. Or might as well, because that's the effect. Mechanical things are even more obvious. This
goes here, that goes there. Some of it was knowledge so intuitive, yet so obvious, that his hands seemed
to know it for him. He would put them into the space of say, a combustion engine – car, bike,
lawnmower or whatever – and they, almost on their own, would begin doing what needed to be done.
Or figuring out what needed to be obtained before he could begin doing what needed to be done.
And so it almost always surprised him to find that other people didn't see the world this way.
That they expected things. They expected things as if they thought things would come to them the
same way you can expect the sun to come up in the morning and stop shining at night. Well, most things
didn't work that way.
One of his wives, he thought it was the first one, had told him this was a depressive attitude, but
frankly, he didn't think so. It didn't mean he thought bad things were coming necessarily any more that
good things. He just didn't think you could expect. Anything.
So did Claire Layton owe him anything? She did not. And the fact that her leaving had burned a
hole in his gut was not an injustice or a betrayal or anything like that. It was just how things work out
sometimes. Yet, he could not talk about Claire Layton. Especially to Francis Mulberry, but also not to his
mother. Or anybody like that. Though to tell the truth, there were not many more people who had that
kind of intimate access to Rod.
Certainly not Yonnie Summers, who, he would be just as glad if he never had to speak with
again. And he knew it was only an illness and Yonnie was doing the best she could, and was not
dangerous, and what was there to say? The worst thing about Yonnie was that she was grateful. In the
army once, although it had nothing to do with the army per se, some guy from Wisconsin had told Rod
that – this was an old Chinese proverb, or some such crap – if you saved somebody's life you were then
responsible for them for the rest of your life.
What kind of an idea was that? If anything, shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't they
owe you something – if not necessarily to be responsible for your life (what an obnoxious idea what
was), that they would be responsible for some little thing. Or not, as the as may be. And then, thanking
you, if they felt the need to do that, go on their way.
He very much wished Yonnie would go on her way. And it was twenty damn years now, so how
could she keep going back to it. Did she think he was responsible for her for the rest of her life? The
thought alone brought shivers up his spine. Creepy. Francis and he could not talk about Yonnie. Well, all
right, Francis was the real hero, wasn't he? He had saved at least two lives probably. It was up for
debate. Maybe they world have survived being brought up by Yonnie's creepy parents or in the county
system foster home, what the hell. But Francis had made sure none of that happened. And he had done
it by making himself responsible for them for the rest of his life.
Willingly! Whereas all Rod done was pull Yonnie out of an icy hole in the ground, which he
would have done for anybody. Which any rescue service would have done for Yonnie. He belonged to
the Volunteer Rescue Service at the time, so it was especially no big deal. It was probably not even her
life he had saved, but just some fingers or toes or something.
All of this may be what went through Rod's head the following morning after his pizza evening
with Francis when he heard a knock on his outside door – the one at the head of the outside stairs – and
there was Yonnie. Oh and smiling one of her goddam smiles.
And she had a dog with her. She was holding it up, the way people do when they're holding the
dog's paw and pretending the dog is waving. "This is Ribbons," she said, with that horrible smile of hers.
God she had good teeth. Whatever else happened in her childhood she must have got sent to the
dentist regularly. Or something. Rod's father had good teeth too right up until he didn't.
Rod had just taken a shower and was dressed in his shorts and tee shirt to go out running and
here was Yonnie at the door, with dog. Yonnie in a caftan. Yonnie looking more civilized than she used
to, but still. You knew what was lurking there.
But Rod knew when he was defeated. "Go downstairs, Yonnie," he said. "Knock on my mother's
door. She'll give you a cup of coffee."
"But I don't drink coffee," Yonnie said. She had let go of the dog's paw, but still stood there, as if
waiting for something.
"This is my bedroom, Yonnie. I don't take visitors here."
"Oh," she said. "I thought it was like an apartment."
Rod cocked his head and waited. They stood for a moment or two like that. Finally Yonnie said,
"Are you coming downstairs to have coffee?"
"Right. First I'm going to run. Then I'm going to have some coffee."
"Will your mother mind of I came in and sit down."
"I'll explain that you're just going to wait for me."
Yonnie considered that. "I didn't know you really lived with your mother," she said. "I wouldn't
have come and knocked on your bedroom door."
"It's all right," Rod said although it wasn't. not in the larger sense anyway. "Come on," he said,
taking her arm in a leading kind of way. He led her downstairs and knocked on his mother's kitchen
door. It was up, of course. She was always up at the crack of dawn. Or maybe she stayed up all night and
"just got by on those afternoon naps of hers.
"This is Yonnie," he said.
"Oh, I know Yonnie," his mother said. "How are you dear?"
"Well, I'm just fine," Yonnie said, smiling her smile, and looking for one instance, like the crazed
eighteen year old he had fished out of Greaten's Chasm.
And Christ, his mother smiled right back at her. "Come in then," she said. "Let me give you some
coffee."
"Could it be tea instead?" Yonnie asked, coming into the kitchen. "This is Ribbons," she said,
gesturing again with the dog's paw. The dog looked patient. The dog looked a little sad, the way pugs
always do. The do stayed complacent in Yonnie's arms until she set him down on the kitchen floor.
"He's a very well behaved dog," Yonnie said. "Is it okay if he walks around a little?"
Rod's
mother shrugged. "It's all right with me," she said. "I don't know what my cat is going to think about it."
"Oh, he's very good with cats," Yonnie said, putting her arms on the kitchen table, clasping her
hands together. "You don't really have to give me tea," she said. "I'm really just waiting for Rod to finish
his run."
Rod's mother already had the tea kettle on. "I don't have any of those herb teas," she said, but
you're welcome to some Lipton's.
Rod gave his mother an "is this okay look", and she nodded back. He gave a little wave as he
turned to go out the door.
"Don't be too slow," Yonnie said. "It's kind of important that I talk to you."
What do you do under those circumstances? Rod took his run as if it was the last one he was
ever going to have, which it might well be. Yonnie Summers in his mother's kitchen. If he had his cell
phone with him he would have called Francis and asked him what the hell was going on. But maybe it
was about Francis.
Well, whatever it was, it was about something in Yonnie's head. Wasn't that obvious? It didn't
have anything to do with reality. Except unless it meant Yonnie was off her meds again. It was a warm
day but Rod shuddered at that thought. Saving somebody's life should be something you only had to do
once. And then they went about their business and that was that. It shouldn't be something you had to
do over and over again. It shouldn't mean you had to wonder what they had to tell you while you were
trying to have your run.
Of course it was just possible that Yonnie did know something. She was a Summers after all and
she knew all those terrible people her father used to know. And maybe one of them, thinking she
wasn't too bright – which was a mistake people sometimes made around Yonnie, because she seemed
so damnedably simple, which she definitely was not – somebody let something slip they shouldn't have.
But why would she be coming to tell him about it. Oh God, maybe it really was something about
Francis. Something Rod definitely didn't want to know. Determinedly, he would not give up his run, he
would not, Rod ran down Pike Street, up River, over to the old playground, did a circuit around there.
The sun was up. The air was full of moisture. He was beginning to sweat. He welcomed it. He ran up the
hill past the old Leacock plant and then he ran over to the college track and since nobody else was
around, took a couple of laps around that. And then he gave up and ran on home the easy way, down
Michaels Street. And up the stairs to his apartment where he took another shower and then came down
to find his mother and Yonnie sitting comfortably at the kitchen table. His mother was drinking coffee,
Yonnie had a cup of tea in front of her, although she did not appear to have drunk any of it. The dog was
lying on the old chair over by the stove, snoring a little.
If it was anybody else Rod would have said, why did you name your dog Ribbons? But he knew
better than to get started on something like that with Yonnie. He went to the stove, got himself a cup of
coffee and sat down. "So Yonnie," he said, "you said you had something important to talk about."
Yonnie drew her linked fingers up to her mouth and appeared to consider. "You know I have a
disability," she said.
Duh. "I kind of had an idea," Rod told her.
"But I'm not crazy all the time," she said. "I take my meds very faithfully."
"Of course you do," Rod's mother said. "Is it something private you wanted to talk to Rod
about?" Bitch. She knew if he wanted a private conversation with Yonnie he would have invited her into
his place. Rod drank some coffee and looked at Yonnie. "I don't think this is private. Is it Yonnie?"
Seven
It takes a lot of preparation to get ready for Founder's Day, even when you (meaning you, the
city) have been doing it for all this time, all these decades. More than a hundred Founder's Days have
gone under the great bridge. And still the work has to be done.
Here are the things that happen on Founder's Day.
First there is a rather solemn religious service held at city hall. All of the city's major religious
groups are represented and a few of it minor – such as Unity Church and a splinter group of Edonites.
Leaders from all these religions have a role to play in the proceedings and the roles are rotated so it
doesn't seem as if one particular group is doing the leading.
Due to differences among the various sects of it, Protestantism is represented by one than one
minister – six in fact: Baptist, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist and Lutheran and the African Methodist
Episcopal . This led to such strong cries of favoritism from the ranks of Catholics (who after all make up
nearly y half of the population – or at least, used to) that now three Catholic congregations are
represented -- based on their ethnic origins. So St. Agnes, the mostly Polish Church, St. Dominica, the
mostly Italian Church and Blessed Saint Timothy will all have prelates on board. In addition the higher
hierarchies heading up dioceses more statewide than just the city and its suburbs occasionally have
made known to make an appearance. These are treated as honored guests, but don't have a specific
role in the proceedings.
As of 2006, Duyktown's religious personages also included a Patriarch from the Greek Orthodox
Church and one from the Russian ditto (no way were they to be considered the same), the Imam from
the Muslim temple on Brandywine Avenue, and a Buddhist priest. And the Unitarian minister, whose
presence was always a certain amount of controversy – some people claiming that the Unitarians, like
various ethical improvement groups, were not really a religion. However, since a number of council
members and occasionally the mayor were Unitarians, this controversy was always allowed to tire itself
out, but not to have any effect. But what of the ethical culture groups and the yoga classes and so on?
Well, that would be getting ahead of ourselves. They too had a role to play, but not necessarily in the
rites at city hall.
What do all these varied religious personages do at nine o'clock in the morning, once a year at
city hall? They give introits, they give benedictions, they lead choirs, they give homilies (at least seven
homilies are scheduled through, rotating as noted above). Of course a small but dignified group of
atheists also appears, outside, p protesting these going on. "No Mixing Church and State!" their posters
proclaim. But it's not a state event, it's not a government event at all, being put on and run by the totally
(or almost totally) separate Founder's Day Committee. They are just using city all. This has gone up the
way to various courts, although not all the way to the U.S. Supremes. The general feeling of various
judges has been – so far – that as long as no city government business is being done that day (and how
could anything be open on Founder's Day?), city hall can safely be regarded as just a building.
No use getting into how the atheists feel about this. It's ridiculous, of course. It's what they have
to put up with. Neither Claire, Rod, Francis or Yonnie was an atheist, so that particular controversy
didn't touch them very much. Not even Francis, who, as a city council member had had messages from
the atheists on his patch. But most of those messages began something like, "I know this doesn't matter
very much h to you…" It was not true this didn't matter to Francis, as it happened, since the separation
of church and state had real meaning for him and all those black-garbed dignitaries (including the
woman minister from First Methodist) made him more than a little nervous. However, like the various
judges he had made his temporary peace with the subject.
Who else spoke at this gathering besides all these religious worthies? Well, the Mayor always
made an appearance. Though not as himself of course. That is, not as mayor in any official capacity, just
as an important person who happened to show up. Well, it was not that cynical. Actually, the mayor, no
matter which mayor it happened to be, knowing full well he was there as the mayor, would take great
pains to explain that he was not there in any official capacity, but simply to hear all the wonderful
prayers, benedictions, homilies and so on.
And the music of course. In addition to the singing groups brought by any given priest or
minister, other groups came – the choir from city high school, a quartet from Rose Hill, and a small
performing band from Duyktown's other suburb, New Scotia. New Scotia was where the workers at
Amalgamated lived. Rose Hill, the managers.
This part of the proceedings normally took up most of the morning and everyone adjourned to a
pancake breakfast at the church of whichever had been chosen by a lottery (if you won it one year, you
couldn't be in the lottery for another three years).
This year the pancake breakfast would be at the Greek Orthodox Church downtown on
Eucalyptus Avenue. Very few Greeks actually lived inside the city any more (most of them having moved
out to New Scotia and a chosen few to Rose Hill), but the congregation was, as with many other of the
older churches in Duyktown, faithfully kept up by its members who lived out of the city. And they were
happy to host the pancake breakfast.
Not to imply that it was free. At some point in history, somebody may have been able to afford
to give a pancake breakfast for four or five hundred people but not today. The pancake breakfast was a
money making affair and for that reason, the churches were eager to hold it. They were definitely not
giving anything away.
After the pancake breakfast, which some Unitarian wit was sure to point out should be called
the pancake brunch, as if that made a difference, but somebody always did. Usually in the newspaper,
everybody went home and rested up. No, they went home and got into their costumes, because, at
three o'clock, they would begin assembling for the parade. It was important that the parade begin in
daylight. There would be hordes of people with little children. There would be things that could be
stolen. Oh, it was all about logistics and a family kind of event.
Francis' mother had once told him about the Halloween parade they used to have in the small
town where she grew up. They had lit flaming torches – that was just the beginning: imagine flaming
torches! – and they would march the length of the town (five or six blocks as near as Francis could figure
out from the story with all the children in town in costume behind the flaming pied pipers. And they
would do this, necessarily, after dark. What would be the point of a torchlight parade in the daylight?
Francis often tried to imagine it. He was only too aware there was no point, in his lifetime, that
they could have had a nighttime parade in Duyktown. Well, of course there was the issue of size.
Duyktown was probably never – except very early in the nineteenth century – small enough to contain a
parade of five or six blocks. And from the time of the Canal, certainly not. Duyktown had trolley cars by
the middle of the nineteenth century and they had ripped them up in order to put in a street for
automobiles between Duyktown and Albany by the early twentieth. No, it simply wasn't possible to
imagine a night time parade, even though the thought of it still pulled at him. It would have been
wonderful, he thought. He even wished for it. Or he wished for the magic the idea of it represented.
Francis would be forty-eight years old this year. Where did the time go? But he knew where the
time went. He could account for every year, every month, every day of it. He knew all the things he'd
accomplished and there had been barely enough time for any of them. But taking the kinds to a
torchlight parade, wouldn't that have been marvelous. That would have been marvelous.
Now, he thought with a stab of pain, having them around for the parade, any parade, would
have been marvelous. But they had their lives. They were off making their own way in the world. And
they wouldn't come back to Duyktown to do it, the way he had those twenty-some years ago. It seemed
as if there had been something to come back to then.
So, the parade. It was amazing there was anybody left to watch the parade, so many people
marched in it. But people came from far and wide for the Duyktown Founder's Day parade. Not as many
as used to, maybe, but enough to make a good crowd. Enough to bring out the fried dough trucks and
the pizza and sausage people, and the fruit smoothies and the cotton candy, and the hummus and the
Indian food, and the Chinese food. All the side streets off State Street were full of people selling food.
And State Street itself would be full of people and things: marching bands, one from all the schools in
the county, majorettes, people in stuffed animal costumes, action figures, flat bed trucks with little
instant vignettes of history. Not as many as used to be, but they would still have whats his name the
famous Indian savior of Duyktown. That was a major myth.
In 1688, in the middle of the French and Indian War, when the savage Iroquois were about to
burn down Fort whats its name, he had come to the house of Wilmer Duyks and warned him. There
hadn't been time enough to get the British Army to come and save the fort, but it had been time enough
for everyone to make a getaway. On foot and on horseback, men, women and children, wagons and
what have you, they had trekked overland to Albany and safety.
Only to come back the next day to find their lives – that part of their material lives anyway –
burned to the ground. Nothing left but a black spot. Francis always wondered how they had got the
stamina to build all over again. Not to mention the money. That was one of the unmentioned things
about little Fort whats its name. obviously these were people with money and influence, not your
average rag tag bunch of hapless settlers. But you didn't hear about that. At least he had never heard
about that. And the statue of whats his name still stood in the Fort Area Park, with a wrought iron fence
around it, but it had to be cleaned up every year now. Vandals were always painting genitals and tattoos
on poor whats his name. And somebody was always fuming about how youth had no respect for history
, and so on. Maybe it was inevitable, bound to happen.
Well, respect for history or not, the parade would go on. It would be pleasing and Francis would
be part of it, but not the way he once had – one year he'd rode a horse; one year he'd been on the
whats his name float, oh, and all those years as a boy scout. A parade of memories.
After the parade, when it was finally dark and everybody went home, then came the
speechifying part. It was a rigged event. Enough people were being given awards and perforce, bringing
their family and friends to see this giving of awards that they were guaranteed a full house. And then it
would become a government event. The Mayor would speak. Francis would speak. His political so
opponent would speak. Oh it was going to be fun, not nearly as much fun as riding a float with Rod in a
loincloth, impersonating whats his name.
Then would come the speech giving evening, giving out awards to all the citizens who had done
something special – which would then assure that they and their relatives would be present for the
ceremony. Francis was signed up to be one of the speakers. He had talked to Claire Harris about it just
the other day. “Make it interesting,” she had implored him. “Can I please rely on you at least not to put
me to sleep? It’s so embarrassing to fall asleep during the speeches.”
“Don’t look at me,” Francis said. “It’s a campaign speech, after all.”
Eight
In his lifetime, Rod Thwaite has survived three wars. The first one he got drafted for. No one
would argue about his survival there. The three years he spent in the army motor pool, not quite in the
center of action, but close enough for any reckoning would qualify as survival in anybody's text. The next
two, "the Bush Wars," he called them, he managed to avoid. Managed to avoid completely and yet it
still felt like survival. He didn't go to Bosnia either. Oh, the all volunteer army. A cruel joke and a fact
nonetheless.
Now the Iraq War is still going on, the Second War of the Bush Succession, Rod calls it. He is not
a Bush fan, although he isn’t a Democrat. He isn’t a Republican either. All political parties, as far as he
can see, are just another opportunity for graft. He doesn’t even hold it against them. He hates Bush for
the same reason he hated Nixon and Johnson before him and Clinton too, even if people didn’t even talk
about Bosnia anymore. He hates all going to war. He didn’t hate it when he went in, but being in
Vietnam cured him of his optimism about a lot of things.
At fifty, he’s been safe from Iraq of course, even if they had a draft instead of just depending on
the hopeless jobless.. They wouldn't have taken him if he wanted to go, but it still feels like a close call.
Being in the army just once, just any old one time, is all it takes to convince your average person – well,
if the average person is Rod Thwaite, perhaps – that there are forces greater than we are. Not gods, but
human beings who have so much power they can totally disrupt corrupt and even end the life of the
average human being.
Well, he was naïve when he went in. he was eighteen years old, it was 1972, and they got him.
All around him people were getting out by pretending to be psychotic, queer, or disabled. Nobody told
him how to do that. His older brothers said he had to go. Hadn't they fought the good war? What good
war, Korea? Never mind. Any was his older brothers were in would be the good war.
So he went. People who think that the war changed Rod Thwaite don't know him, of course.
Francis, who did know him before the war and after the war can testify to this. If such a thing as
testimony is needed. When Rod was eighteen, Francis was fourteen. Rod was his older, lost brother's
connection. Leo's death had already blasted the family to bits when Rod got his bad news. And the fear
that Rod Thwaite might die in that horrible and stupid and illegitimate war haunted Francis through high
school and into the first two years of college.
By the time Francis turned eighteen the horrible war was over, just like that, finally. Nixon was
gone, Ford was president. The draft was over. They would probably not have taken him anyway, thanks
to the asthma he'd had since childhood. And he was a little ashamed of that asthma. He was almost
prepared to keep it a secret. Not in order to serve – he was not that kind of heroic – but to claim
something else, like conscientious objection. His parents had suffered more than enough grief. Probably
they would sent him to work in some god-awful army hospital or something. But it didn't happen and
that was fine too. By the time Rod Thwaite got out of the army, Francis was in his second year at school
at Reed College in Oregon. But he came home for Christmas that year because he knew Rod would be
around.
They met at the Round on the corner of State Street and Hayward Avenue in Ducktown. Except
for his hair being much shorter, Rod looked the same as he had. No, he looked leaner and tougher and
maybe just a bit more contained. But Rod was always pretty contained, so who could tell anything about
that? They drank and traded stupid comments, just like always, but it was different. How was it
different? Because it felt different to Francis or because there was a real difference?
He had said, "Do you talk about it?" which they both knew meant the war, and Rod had said,
"Hell no." So that was that. He had said, "Do you think about Leo?" and Rod had said, "I think about a lot
of people who aren't here anymore." And that also was that.
Over the summer, Rod told him about the woman he had to leave behind. That is, he had
showed Francis a picture of a Vietnamese woman. He couldn't say so, but to Francis she looked like a
generic Vietnamese woman. She could have been on a poster or in a news photo, or serving tea at some
chic place in New York.
"They said she was a whore," Rod explained. "I would have brought her back here. That
would've been something, huh?
Then he put the picture back in the secret part of his wallet and h is wallet back in his pants
pocket and that by that. By then, Rod had grown his hair long again and wore it in a pony tail. He had
also reconnected with his suppliers and got Francis an ounce of grass to bring back to college with him.
"Do you want anything else?" he'd said.
"Oh no," Francis said. "Grass is enough for me." Which was true. He'd done LSD once and got
very sick. He'd tried magic mushrooms and got even sicker. At party on campus, he had tried some
cocaine and it was wonderful, so wonderful he knew he must never do it again. He didn't say this to Rod
Thwaite, who might have laughed at him – or that was the fear. But Rod simply nodded.
"Good idea probably," he said.
The following autumn Rod began working for Seamon's Ford in Duyktown and Francis got
married.
By the time Francis, no longer married, no longer as trusting of human nature as he had once
been, returned to Duyktown and the only job he could find working at the hospital as an orderly, Rod
was already head mechanic at Seamon's Ford and already had his first Harley.
That was in 1981. Reagan was president and it was morning in America, everywhere but
Duyktown or so it seemed. Amalgamated had begun its litany of upcoming job eliminations. They sold
their atomic power laboratory to another industrial giant which had purchased it only to shut it down.
Francis got a small apartment near the hospital and Rod (perhaps the year before) had already moved
into and remodeled the space at the top of his parents' house on River Street, technical, but not really,
no never really, in the Fort District. More like on the fringe of the Fort District. But you could see the
river going by from Rod's windows. You could walk to the river from his back yard. And you could see
the abandoned houses and big empty buildings standing out in the shallow water which had once not
been part of the river, but a piece of industrial land.
Francis was full of admiration for Rod's apartment. "It's not an apartment," Rod had corrected
him. "It's just my bedroom."
"Yeah," Francis said. "I got a bedroom with a kitchen in it and they call it an apartment."
And Rod said, "Yeah, that's because they saw you coming."
The greatest thing about Rod's place – because he spent so much time there, Francis could
never bring himself to call it Rod's bedroom – was the skylight. Rod had constructed it himself, with
some help from more experienced friends. It opened the room to the night sky and in the morning it
must be incredible.
Rod's decorations consisted of posters showing Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Some of them had
gorgeous almost unclothed women astride and some had tough looking guys. One (obviously intended
for the new market in bikes, the flush young accountants and such) showed a guy in aviator glasses and
a leathers that looked like he could wear them to the White House or something. So clean. Francis called
that one, "the organization man." But that was a private joke based on his private education so he
never bothered to explain it to Rod, who would sometimes say, "Yeah, he looks like he works for the
Organization all right. " and you didn't have to worry it over too much to know what organization Rod
was talking about.
The Organization wasn't what it used to be, what with legalized Off Track Betting and the
Lottery, but it was doing okay with drugs and prostitution in Duyktown. But Rod was no longer as closely
associated as he once was. He now bought his grass off some people he knew from Kentucky. "Pretty
soon you won't be able to get this at all," he told Francis. Francis remained optimistic about medical
marihuana. As of 2006, he was still remaining optimistic, but, obviously, not buying. He had to look back
on it as some kind of luck that he had only ever made contact with anybody buy Rod, and Rod himself
had never got in any trouble. Oh the things politician have to worry about.
And another war was going on. Rod and Francis, and in fact, most of the citizens of Duyktown
were against it from the start. No, it only seemed that way. The yellow ribbons had sprouted again in
2004 just like this was going to be the same kind of slam dunk as the previous gulf war. By 2006, more
citizens of Duyktown were against it than had been at the beginning. There's something about
experience that chills the most fervent patriotism.
Rod was not against the war on any ideological basis. He was against it because he was against
all wars. "I've been there," he said, and that was that. He could not be drawn otherwise into any debates
about it. He had only one view of Dubya. "Born on third base," he liked to quote (somebody) "thinks he
made a home run."
Nine
Is God good? A really ridiculous question, when you think about it. How can a Being, The Being,
in fact, who is all powerful, all knowing and all, well, all everything, be bad? At St. Elmo's Francis had
learned some sort of answer to this question, but he'd either not gotten it, or forgotten it. And he didn't
think about God any more than he had to, sometimes not even on Sunday, not even at Mass, but the
question seemed to always there, hovering around in the back of his mind. Or somebody's.
In school he'd fastened on somebody's explanation that it was really because human beings,
exercising free will granted to them by God, caused all the evil and that was why there were terrible
disasters and evil in the world and all that. Only later did it occur to him that human beings in the safest
most isolated corners were still liable to plenty of disasters not caused by other human beings. Such as
floor, fire, earthquake and tornado. Such as those. Such as virus and cancer and senile dementia. Such as
growing old itself! How they deluded themselves with the picture of kindly old age, the golden years,
growing gracefully into finally giving it up and passing on to a better place. Some hope! Having worked
in a hospital he knew all too much about what old age looked like.
And how much worse all those natural god-given as it were disasters became without the help
of other human beings. So, there might be a benign god somewhere out there, but clearly He mostly
was leaving humans to deal with it. And he became bitter for a while. As if his disillusionment were
singular. As if no one had ever thought these things before.
You couldn't blame God for the war, of course. That was one place you had to let God off. There
was a true and chilling example of just where the free will of man could lead him. When he had said this
to his mother, his poor devout mother, who had to battle not only her own education but his also, she
had said, "Well, we must pray for God to put an end to it."
The one time he took LSD Francis had – and it was probably much too soon after his brother's
death, he had not only got violently ill and watched himself throwing up into a technicolored toiled for
what seemed like hours (but was probably only twenty minutes or so, other people were happy to
inform him afterwards) he had also had what seemed like a vision of God.
Since Francis knew full well that human beings only see God after they are dead (and then only
if they have been very, very good) Francis was confused on several points. He tried out the idea that he
might be dead, but surely he was by definition not being very, very good, if he was taking LSD. The
illegality of it alone was a seriously troubling point, not to mention the surely immoral hubris of
venturing into an unknown like this. What was he thinking? So if it wasn't God, maybe it was something
worse, like Satan, which he had surely been brought up to believe in. And, accommodatingly enough, his
vision had changed to something hot, horrid and too many shades of red to contemplate easily.
But the vision of God had been glacial and really, not much better. It had felt as if this was
something he could fall into, diffuse and never be seen again or heard from. Which was a pretty good
definition of death, it occurred to him. The voice of God was none too pleasant either. And put it all
together, that should have been the end of his drug taking altogether, if nothing else.
However, he had also done the magic mushrooms. That was better for some reason, probably
because he took them before a rock concert and there was so much distraction he didn't have time to
get a really mad contemplation going. Also, it was more feelings than vision. Francis could tolerate his
own feelings. It was God's he feared.
And what was his status in the eyes of God these days? Or in the eyes of the Catholic Church,
which was an easier thing to think about, none of us being privy to the thoughts of God, even when we
are very crazy. Well, there were a couple of priests here and there who knew about his drug use,
because he had confessed it, but none of them seemed very upset about it. Well, there was a lot of that
going on at the time. They had cautioned him to stop and so on, but since his sins didn't include rape,
murder or theft, he was probably a lightweight to them.
He'd got married instead of fornicating, which Saint Paul, through the voice of many of the
priests, had assured was very important in keeping good grace. And he had got unmarried, through the
good grace of the church. He was still confused about that, but it had enable him to marry his true wife,
the inimitable Amy in a Catholic Church so that was all right. Annulment. He was enough of a college
student to know that annulment meant his first marriage had been declared null and void and not for
just any old reason, like he wanted it that way. Well actually he didn't want it that way. It was because,
although legal, his marriage had not been sanctioned by the church.
And he was enough of a student of the world to know that this didn't mean a hell of a lot either.
Plenty of other Catholics got themselves into big trouble trying to leave marriages that were
unsanctioned. Well, it was his mother who had pulled it off. His mother and the monsignor. So what if
Francis would have gone on with that ill-conceived marriage till the end of time. It wasn't as if he had
anything to say about it. And Becky went back to Los Angeles where she felt she "truly belonged" and
where she was definitely convinced Francis did not (and he had to acknowledge she was probably right).
So Francis had come back to Duyktown, many letters had passed between the monsignor and the
Vatican lawyers, a labyrinth of legality Francis didn't even want to contemplate and in the end, with
some exchange of money and of course a lot of going to Mass, Francis became virgin again. Take that,
Saint Paul.
His wedding to Amy was a proper affair and everyone had to admit that. Never mind they had
been living together for three years before they finally committed to it. Living in sin with two small
children, while Amy finished her bachelor's degree, and then, almost to Francis' surprise, didn't move to
California, but stayed right there in Duyktown to get her doctorate in statistics at the State University
and then to take a job with the State Department of Education. And then, even more to his surprise, she
had said, I think we should get married, don't you?
Once again, things had happened which Francis did not quite understand, except this time it was
not his family that was out of money. There was the wedding itself with all those friends and family of
Amy and ever some of his own. Rod had been persuaded to put on a tuxedo and come aboard as one of
the party. He couldn't be the best man because he wasn't Catholic, which Francis had been worried
would insult him, but even Rod was very mellow about Francis' being married this time. The best man
had been Amy's brother. Well, that was all right. It was only a ritual function after all. Who could care.
The children got to be ring bearers and Francis' mother spent four hundred dollars on a dress.
Don't you know any Catholics, his mother said in despair. She thought it was wrong that Francis
did not have what she called an "intimate friend to stand up for you." Francis had unfortunately said, "I
can stand up for myself, which was not what it was about, of course. But Amy's mother, who was
running the wedding didn't care one way or another.
They were married in Chinook Wisconsin, which is where Amy was from. It was a large wedding
complete with a huge banquet, a bad band, an ice sculpture and plenty of booze. Since they weren't in a
hurry to get to bed, as the traditional newly married couple was supposed to be, they stayed late with
the party and woke up with terrible hangovers. The next day, on money they had saved, plus some of
the loot from the wedding, they went to France and spent a week, first in Paris, then touring the
country, looking at museums and churches that Amy had marked in the guide book. Francis didn't care
where they went and he was happy, even though he was conscious that his mother was watching the
children while they were away. He knew it was a lot of work for her.
And then, of course they had resumed life just as they had lived it before, except for the
difference that it was now not only legal (New York having decided some long time ago that cohabitation of unmarried was not a crime), but moral. That was exhilarating to Francis, fine with Amy
apparently and she went back to her job at the state, while Francis took his final nursing residency and
they settled in to living happily ever after. Or for as long as possible, which is about as much as any of us
can hope for. Or ought to wish for. And in the midst of living happily ever after for the nonce, the
children grew up, finished high school and went on to their lives' destiny – Julie to nursing school
(Francis couldn’t help feeling pride in that ) and Eddie to the Air Force (which troubled Francis a little,
but so far Eddie hadn't been called on to kill anyone, but no doubt he would be). And Amy was happy in
her work and Francis was moderately happy in his. Though, thinking it over, he sometimes thought he
ought to have just stayed in nursing. He had thought he could do something for the larger population,
but especially that section of the larger population served by the hospital, when he agreed to run for city
council. Now here he was running for congress. What kind of crazy was that?
Ten
Francis knew he had always been aware that his parents loved him. There was never any
question about that. Even when they gave him a hard time, he knew it was because they wanted him to
do well. And at all times he had been conscious of their warm regard.
He even knew that they were caring people in general, that his father's business, selling toys and
knickknacks was as much about giving pleasure to people as it was about making money. They gave to a
number of charities. They pitched in at the church and helped at the soup kitchen, all without making a
big fuss about it.
And he knew that their love for their children was not just a branch of that overall
charitableness, but a think in itself. That he and his brother had been wanted and cherished. That alone,
in a Catholic family, was itself something of a little surprise. People sometimes commented on it. To the
order of, "How can you be Catholic and be an only child ?"(people who had not known Leo) or "How can
there be four years between you and your brother? I thought your parents were good Catholics." But it
was all about the possible. His parents – they were free in saying so --had married wanting children.
They had tried to have many. It was even perhaps a little tragedy that they had not been able to have
more. So he and Leo had stood in for other wanted children as well. Each of them welcome and adored.
And not in some fake or political way. As a child, he had sometimes caught a look on his father's face
that was open in its wonder and thankfulness. In a way, he hadn't wanted to see it so clearly. It was
something of a responsibility being the recipient of so much that was good. Especially after Leo's death
in Vietnam. After that, Francis, a teenager at the time, had become aware of being the surviving child,
the only one. It frightened him a little.
And there was something else. It was possible – Francis didn't like to dwell on it too much – that
his mother and father had perhaps loved Leo a small amount more than they had loved him. Not a thing
to be jealous of, there was so much love forthcoming from them. And in its own way, very
understandable. Leo was after all the first child born after several attempts. He must have seemed like a
certain kind of miracle, one elevated above all the other happy incidents and accidents we call miracles.
A real miracle, the answer to prayers. And a loss beyond measure.
Their grief had been terrifying, not because they turned away from him in the midst of it, but
because they seemed to have a need for his existence that he was not sure he could justify. Well, he was
sure he could not justify it. And he himself had felt such grief as well.
No one could have helped loving Leo. He was one of those people who seemed destined to carry
sunshine around with him. An athlete, a good student, president of the student council, and above all,
generous to a fault. In a way, Francis had always thought of him as his best friend, despite the difference
in their ages. Leo had never balked at taking Francis with him wherever he went. He had made his little
brother his friend and confidant.
In 1980, Francis went with his then wife, whatshername, to see Ordinary People. It was then
that he had first had the insight that his brother's death must have been even more horrible than he had
known for his parents. He hadn't known how to articulate this insight, but it had rocked him down to his
bones. It took his breath away and he'd felt, right there in the theater, that he must be suffocating, that
there was no way he could survive this knowledge.
And he hadn't been able to explain it to whatshername. Perhaps that was the final blow which
had brought down the edifice of their young marriage. He would never know. They had quarreled that
night, but not about Leo certainly, not even about the movie itself. Well, peripherally about the movie.
"You hated it, didn't you?" she had said, with a resentment he couldn't quite understand.
"No, no," he had protested. "It's a fine movie."
"Just not your kind of movie."
"I liked it fine."
"Then why did you have that look on your face?"
"I don't know what look you're talking about."
"Well of course not. You couldn't see your own face. But I saw it. You thought it was a chick
movie, didn't you?"
Francis, who had never in his life used the expression chick movie, was astonished, and perhaps
a little hurt. "It's a find movie," he said again, although he had not liked it. Well, of course he had not
liked it, but that had nothing to do with the movie. And at that moment, if he had said that to
whatshername, she would have said, "Then why did you go? You didn't have to take me. There are a lot
of other movies we could have gone to."
How could he explain that he hadn't even known what the movie was about? He went because
Donald Sutherland was in it. That was all he had known about it. Then she would have said, "Oh,
another case of not paying attention, Francis. You have to learn to have some self-protection." Because
that was something she had said to him before.
And besides, would it have done any good. Maybe anything he'd said would have been the
wrong thing. And how to explain about his parents. She was convinced already that they did not like her
because she was not Catholic, because they had married outside the church, because they thought she
was not their kind.
Whatever that meant. He had told her none of that was true, although he knew of course that
his mother was heartbroken by what she saw as his living in sin. His father, more tolerant, had simply
not expected the marriage to last (which turned out to be an accurate assessment). Neither of them had
ever used the expression "not our kind," but perhaps they might have felt it. He could not see that they
had ever (the few times they had been together with him and his wife) given any reason to their feelings
were anything less than cordial. But he couldn't explain about Leo. He couldn't and that was all there
was to that.
And they had made up after the quarrel. It hadn't come to anything bitter. It was only that it had
been that first chink. And he could not cease of seeing it as yet one more example of his having missed
out on seeing something that he ought to have seen, of failing to be present for something he ought to
have been present for – like his parents' grief, which had seemed at the time something threatening to
him. He ought to have had more compassion. He ought to have had more awareness.
He would have reason to remember this quarrel, if that was what it had been, this
misunderstanding, this failure to communicate, this lack of awareness on his part. Even before this year
it had come back to him many times. He couldn't help knowing that no matter how much he tried, there
was always going to be something that escaped his notice.
The horrible fact that often when things look all right, or all right enough to be going on with,
that should be a warning. That is often, often, often an indication that the meniscus has been reached,
the tipping point, the going over into chaos. And Francis of all people should have known this. But the
last time his world had tipped into chaos was so long ago and so far away, a whole continent away, and
nearly forgotten.
Yes, Amy was working out of Albany in far flung, or relatively far flung places like Rochester and
Buffalo and Rome and Utica and Poughkeepsie and so on. It was the nature of her job. Being in charge of
a section of the State Education department, being Assistant to the Deputy Chief of Education. It was a
lot of responsibility, but she liked it, she was challenged by it and furthermore it might lead to greater
things, such as her becoming a Deputy Chief herself. It wasn't out of the question especially given a
governor of the right party, which they just now finally had.
And what was there to make her stick in Duyktown every day after day? Did Francis believe a
woman's place is in the home? He did not. He believed a woman's place is wherever she happens to find
herself comfortable. And besides, when – okay if! – he was sent to Washington, wouldn't there be even
more challenging accommodations to be made. He was aware of the difficulties, but look at them.
They'd been married now for sixteen years. They were the masters of making compromises.
He had noticed that Amy's job seemed to be taking her away from home more than usual. He
took that as a sign of progress. If someone was on a promotion track, isn't that just what would be
happening? Wouldn't they be giving her greater and greater challenges?
He would be forty-eight this year, on his birthday, a month before the election. Amy was only
forty, but of course, for a woman, that was still older. She couldn't play the ingénue any more. She
couldn't even pretend to be in that running. But there was still time for her to make her mark as a
successful administrator.
So, should Francis have suspected something when Amy came home early from her most recent
trip to Rochester and said, "We need to talk,"?
You would think from the comic pages and television sitcoms and oh, a host of other places, that
any American man hearing the phrase, "We need to talk," would get the proverbial goosebumps up and
down his spine, but Francis, I am sorry to say, did not. Francis was as lacking in awareness as he had
been more than twenty years ago. Francis was as lacking in awareness as he seemed doomed to be. As if
some ability to see what was under his very nose had been denied him.
First he noticed her new haircut, which she must have got before leaving for Rochester, or
possibly in Rochester, and he said, "I like your haircut." But this earned him no points for noticing. Amy
only shook her head angrily and said, "Do you ever listen to what I say?" and that angry tone sent a
further warning up his spine, but still, he could not have explained, he could not have traced it to its
roots.
But of course he did listen to what Amy said. In fact, from an unbiased viewpoint it is possible to
say that Francis listened attentively to everything Amy said. Of course it is true that he listened
attentively to what anyone had to say (it may have been part of the reason they selected him to run for
office that first time; he was already a well known community leader). Perhaps it was some other kind of
unique listening that his wife had in mind. Perhaps she had a need to listened to by him in ways never
imagined by all those other mundane people with whom he had so much ordinary traffic.
Or perhaps she was just nervous and tense. That is what she said when he looked hurt and said,
"Oh God, of course I listen to you. I'm sorry if I've been distracted. What did you want to talk about?"
thinking you see that she was wanting to get a new car, or go to Tibet in the fall or something equally
disturbing, but negotiable.
"I'm just nervous and tense," she said, "sorry for being a bitch."
"You're never a bitch," he said, and meant it.
"You're going to change your mind about that," she said, looking into a corner of the room. Her
new haircut was rather splendid. She had it colored a little too, he suspected, though he was never a
good judge of such things.
"How could I?" he said.
"All right," she said, squaring her shoulders and looking him in the eye. Only glancingly, to be
sure, but in the eye, and in that moment he had a frisson of apprehension. Which he then laid away as
quickly as possible. But it was no use.
"I can't go to Washington," she said.
"Well, you wouldn't have to," Francis said. "If I get elected, that may not even be going to
happen, but if I do, I know a lot of congressmen, especially first time congressmen, just have apartments
in Washington. We have to be back home a lot anyway to keep in touch with constituents."
"No," she said, rather sharply. "Listen to me, Francis. I can't go to Washington and even if you
don't get elected, I can't go on being married to you. I just can't."
"What?" he said, in the tone of someone who is thunderstruck and yet, and yet. It was as if in
that thunderstruck moment he suddenly understood a host of p previous signals, and all of them made
sense, took on a clarity and a definition they had not had before. And he knew.
But he had to hear it all.
"There's somebody else," she said. "I'm sorry Francis. I love you, but I'm just not in love with
you. I don't think you're in love with me. You just like being married. It's time we faced facts."
"Somebody else?" he said. "What does that mean?"
"It means I want to marry somebody else. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." But only for a
moment did she look sorry. Only for moment and then a kind of radiance came into her face as if she
could not keep it out. "I'm in love," she said. "God, I thought it would never happen, but it has, and I
have to leave you. I don't want anything," she added hastily. "You can have the house and everything.
And I know I make more than you do, so if you want some kind of financial settlement."
"Don't be crazy," he said. "I mean, I didn't know. Oh god."
"Don't worry," she said, "I won't leave till after the election. I know that means a lot to you. I'll
be by your side on election night and all that. I know I owe you that much."
He's looking down at the pattern in the rug as if that were going to tell him something. "You
don't owe me anything," he said. "You have never owed me anything. I owe a lot to you. I had no idea.
Oh, God."
And now they were both crying, but obviously, for different reasons. And he reached for her,
and she let him put an arm around her, but she did not come into his embrace. It was as if she were just
letting him, just being kind in the only way she knew how. After a moment of that he relinquished and
stood back. Stood with his back against the dining room wall. Finally he said "Is it somebody I know?"
and he could hear the hoarseness in his voice.
"No," she said, "Oh, no, it's nobody from Duyktown." And again, despite her serious tone, and
the tears still wet on her face, she couldn't keep the radiance out of her eyes. "He's from Peekskill," she
said, "we met at one of those conferences."
One of those conferences. Suddenly the whole concept of one of those conferences seemed to
fill the room and take up all the oxygen in it. Perhaps that was why he had to cough. One of those
conferences. He sat down at the dining room table, which was not set for a meal, but, as usual, strewn
with papers and books, the detritus of both their careers. "I see," he said, although he saw nothing.
Nothing but that radiance in her face.
"Well," he said, "I guess I would be glad if you stuck around for the election. That would be kind
of embarrassing, trying to explain where my wife was. Having to announce my divorce on the same day I
want people to vote for me."
"Of course," she said. "Anyway, it will take a while for the divorce."
He nodded, just as if this conversation was making perfect sense. "Are you going to go on living
here?" he said.
She shrugged. "Well, as much as I have been, I guess. I'll stay in the guest room. You don't have
to worry about that."
"It doesn't matter," he said, although, in fact, it mattered a great deal.
He turned his beseeching face toward her. "it's that definite then?"
She couldn't keep her mouth from curving upward. "Neil proposed to me Thursday," she said, as
if Thursday were now a sacred day. "It wasn't exactly sudden, but I'd thought he was going to wait till
after the election."
"In case that made a difference?" Francis said, miserably.
"Oh no." she almost laughed, this was such a happy topic for her. He could see her holding in
her merriment, her contentment. "It's really been kind of in the air for a long time."
"I see," he said again.
"Oh, Francis," said, suddenly contrite again. "I do love you. I'm just not in love with you. I don't
think you're in love with me either."
"I think I could be the judge of that," he said.
"Oh, you know what I mean. I mean, maybe you have a chance to meet somebody now. Maybe
in Washington, who knows?" her tone was that of a mother holding out a deferred gratification to an
unhappy child. A guilty mother.
Francis put his head down on the dining room table, in little spot not occupied by books and
papers. It felt cool under his face.
"Are you all right?" she asked him.
He laughed. At least it was meant to be a laugh. It sounded muffled, even to his ears and he was
closest to it.
Eleven
What does it take to be a good person? This ought not to have been a difficult question for
Francis, who, after all, had several years of training in exactly that question. First of all at home, of
course, and then at the hands of the Brothers at Saint Benedict Elementary. It was only when he got into
highs school that the whole thing seemed to start coming apart. Suddenly the world was full of new
ideas. Not to mention new sensations.
His older brother, Leo, ought to have been a help with this,, but wasn't. Leo was almost five
years older than Francis and liked to pretend he knew nothing about the drug scene that was rampant in
Francis' adolescence. And yet, and yet, there was his friendship with Rod Thwaite. If Leo and Rod had
not been friends, that is, if Rod had not been Leo's connection, if Leo had survived the war, a lot of ifs,
perhaps Francis and Rod, in the eighties would never have become friends. Was that possible?
Francis thought Rod Thwaite was one of the best people he knew. The most honorable, the
most upright, the person you would most want – as the popular question of those days went – on the
lifeboat with you in the middle of the ocean. Not only because you could trust Rod not to kill and eat
you! Although, if you died and he, starving, had to eat you, he would do that. With all due respect.
Francis could imagine it. He could even imagine the eating part (could he imagine himself eating a dead
compatriot? Never in a million years; he could only imagine himself, a poor loser, slipping into a coma,
dying for want of the courage it would take to do that)and he could furthermore imagine Rod, having
done what he needed to do and honorably and with respect, , bending over the side of the lifeboat and
throwing up out of sheer shame. But still, he would do what he needed to.
He would also be the best person to have on that lifeboat because of his skills. Francis could
easily imagine Rod Thwaite knowing how to row a lifeboat without oars and hot to kill and gut large fish
– even sharks. How to devise weapons out of, what, shoes and shoelaces say, the tin box the first aid
shit came in. whatever. If it needed to be done, Rod would find a way to do it. He would know, without
ever having studied it, just where a sharks most vulnerable spot was. He would know how to fool a shark
into a trap. He would know, perhaps most important of all, which part of the shark you could eat. And
how to sink the remains, too. That would probably me pretty important.
He would also know how to read the stars to find due north or south or whatever was needed
and he would know how to dress wounds, cauterize them with sea water and so on. He would also,
though this was not something you could imagine Rod copping to, be interesting to talk to. Not a small
matter when you're trapped on a lifeboat in the middle of the immeasurable ocean. What he would talk
about probably would be motorcycles, but Rod's passion for motorcycle, and secondarily for all
machines, enabled him to talk about those things in a way that made you want him to go on. It would be
all right. You would emerge from the ordeal knowing you had learned something, and not just about
human cooperation. And not about machines of course, but about human passion.
In real life, of course, Rod was not known for going on and on. Even in the goddam lifeboat you
would probably have to coax him. But you would have to, of course. What would he, Francis, have to say
to amuse or distract or entertain Rod Thwaite. That was impossible to imagine. Rod was not the kind o
guy who encouraged other people to go on and on either. Basically, you had to imagine, Rod was the
kind of person who thought human speech ought to limited. The more so the better.
For about two years, when they were first getting acquainted, about all they had talked about
dope. And in code at that. Francis had to learn the code, but it was not complex. He would say, "My
mother went shopping in Binghamton last week. She bout a new umbrella and it was on sale, so she
bought more than one. Do you need an umbrella?"
Or he would say, "It looks like rain." And Francis would understand that umbrellas were
available.
And he himself could call Rod and say, "Have you looked at the weather channel lately?"
Aside from that , Rod did not discuss drugs. He only alluded to them as discreetly as possible.
When he meant cocaine he would simply put a finger to the side of his nose. That was not to inform
Francis that he had coke to sell – because he knew Francis didn't want it and in fact, he didn't much
want to sell it either. By 1982, in fact, Rod wasn't even much in the business anymore. He was too
preoccupied with motorcycles. The army had taught him a skill that was negotiable on the open market
than drug dealing. But he still had his own supply of marihuana to think of and didn't mind thinking of it
for on behalf of the brother of his deceased friend.
At what point had Francis become a friend in his own right? Any friend of Leo’s was a friend to
Francis, so it was not a question of Francis making hp his mind. It was very much a question of Rod’s
coming over and seeing him as more than the deserving shadow of his older brother. And when had that
happened? It was hard to say. It may have been the trip out onto the river. Or the trip out on the river
may have been the symbol of that. Francis wasn't sure, and he certainly would never ask, but it seemed
possible, just remotely possible, that the trip out on the river was a test.
It was a late April evening in 1982. They were sitting around drinking a beer at the Beef and
Brew when the subject of the weather had come up. And Rod had said, "Damn, I left my umbrella
someplace. Want to go with me to pick it up?"
It was the first time he had ever invited Francis to go anywhere and Francis of course said "Yeah,
sure. Why not?"
To which Rod had said, "Lots of reasons," but let it go at that. Then he said, "You better wear
some warm clothes you don't mind getting wet." And when Francis looked puzzled, he said, "I really
mean that. I'll drop you at your apartment to get something."
"Like waders?" Francis said, ha, ha.
"You've got waders?"
"No."
Rod shrugged. “Waders would be good. Something waterproof. Or you don’t care if it gets wet.”
So Rod, after being given a ride on the back of Rod's bike, to his apartment on Jay Street, ran
upstairs and got what he could find: a pair of golashes his mother had once foisted off on him, his
rattiest jeans and an old flannel shirt, and a green plastic poncho that he used when he went to outdoor
concerts.
He wanted to ask Rod where they were going, but he knew better. He was not terribly surprised
to find they were back at Rod's house. When Rod said to get something he didn't mind if it got wet, he'd
supposed they were going out on the river. And what more logical place to go out from that Rod's dock?
And what more logical vehicle than the motorboat Rod kept anchored by and tied to that dock?
Rod emerged from upstairs, while Francis sat and drank tea at the kitchen table and watched
the news on TV with Mr. and Mrs. Thwaite. It was his first time to meet them also, but apparently Leo
had been a frequent guest. “This is Leo’s brother, Francis,” Rod said to them.
They shook hands with him rather formally. Rod’s mother was impressive, tall and with a face
like the mermaid on the prow of an old sailing ship. In fact, she had the same profile as Rod and her hair
was the same dark chestnut. She was wearing jeans and a fisherman’s sweater, hoops in her ears.
Rod’s father was a completely different type, short and wiry with closely cropped hair that was
going gray. He was sitting at the kitchen table wearing green workpants and an undershirt. “Going out
on the river?" he said, looking at the clothes Francis was wearing. The look on his face was one of
amusement, a kind of cynical grin. Francis nodded. "I think so," he said.
"Nothing out there," the old man said. "What the hell go out there for?"
"Well, that's not quite true," Mrs. Thwaite said. "There's the island. Maybe he's going out to the
island. Did he tell you?"
"No," Francis said and neither of them seemed surprised by that. They just nodded. Of course
Rod hadn't told him. Why would he waste time talking about something he was going to do anyway?
At that time, the river had already begun eating away the shoreline on the Duyktown side. Rod
had already had to rebuild their dock once. And a little further out, there were buildings, which had
once stood on what had been the shoreline a little father down from Rod's parents' house. Those
houses had apparently stood on the continuation of Ferry Street. Ferry Street no longer continued, but
stopped some six house down from the Thwaite's. The city had put up a retaining wall at this new foot
of Ferry Street, but part of it was already under water. Francis wondered if Rod and his parents worried
about the value of their real estate, but he didn't want to ask. Maybe it was a taboo topic. He knew it
was the first thing his father or mother would have asked about. And felt no shyness.
"Your mother said there's an island out there," Francis offered as a topic of conversation as they
got in the boat and settled in. Rod said nothing, handed him a life jacket.
Then he said, "You won't need this, but put it on anyway."
Francis did as he was told. The life jacket stank of mildew. He tried not to breathe through his
nose. But it seemed the smell came in through his mouth as well. In the light cast by the houses that
fringed the water here, he noticed Rod looking at him, almost the same smile his father had asking
them if they were going out on the river.
"You won't smell it after a while," Rod said.
“Hope not,” Francis said. "So is there an island?"
"There is," Rod said, "but we're not going there."
"Oh," Francis said. Rod started the motor and they were off, though not very fast. Rod had a
small light at the front of his boat, but it didn't seem big enough to see where you were going by it.
“Can you see by that?” he asked Rod.
“Not much,” Rod said, without seeming to be concerned about it. "That's so nobody runs into
us. You never know what fools will be out here in the dark." He settled back with the tiller in his hand.
Francis tried to relax too. The river was wide and dark. Once they got away from the shore, no other
lights showed, except for the town of New Scotia across the way, not much more than a glow on the
horizon.
Rod had pulled away from the dock, but once out in the open water, he didn't head out into the
middle of the river, where, Francis guessed, the island must be. He had never heard of an island in the
middle of the river down here. It must be pretty small, but he would have been interested to see it.
Instead, however, Rod took the boat out only a hundred yards or so and then began running parallel to
the shore. After a while, Francis eyes got accustomed to the faint light from the moon and the almost
indistinct glow of lights from the houses along the shore. They were not far out and they didn't go much
further. In fact, Rod steered them parallel to the shore for a while and suddenly they were into the
midst of the abandoned buildings that hulked up out of the water, dark and forbidding.
The river, as it happened, smelled even worse than the life jacket. "Phew," said Francis, "What
the hell is in this?"
Rod, who was navigating his eyes on the buildings they were approaching, said, "Amalgamated."
“Industrial waste?” Francis said. “I’ve heard there was a pollution problem, but this is awful. It
smells like shit.”
“Well,” Rod said, bending forward to steer carefully. “There might be some of that too.” He
brought the boat carefully and slowly in between two of the hulking buildings and steered down what
must have been an alley or even a small street when it didn't used to be under water.
He nosed the little boat around various obstacles till they were opposite what looked like a
doorstep, or it would d have been, had the bottom part not been under water. He threw off a looped
rope and fastened it around the doorknob of this half-submerged door. Then he leaned over and rapped
on the window that was next to this door. A face appeared in the window.
Then the window was raised and a kind of metal ladder, composed of linked chains was tossed
on the window. The window was so close to the water, only about two links showed. "Better take your
golashes off," Rod said to Francis, as he stepped onto the bottom link. "They'll be okay in the boat.
Nobody's gonna steal 'em."
“I don’t care if they do, “ Francis said and followed Rod up the peculiar ladder. It reminded him
of the ladder he had at the back window of his second story apartment in case of fire. And it occurred to
him that fire was never going to be the problem here. The face at the window had opened it wider and
now pulled Rod in. then Rod pulled Francis in. But they weren't in yet. What they had climbed into was
what looked like it used to be an entry hall. A flight of stairs, half-rotten at the bottom was in front of
them. The man who had been at the window led the way up. He was carrying a lantern, Francis saw. At
the top of the stairs, the man shouted at the door. "It's Rod Thwaite. Open up!" and the door opened.
Suddenly they were in the midst of light. Four men sat around a round table with a hurricane
lamp in its center. On various pieces of furniture – a dresser, a small table, a bookcase with no books –
candles bloomed. Why hadn’t this been visible from the water? Oh, the windows were covered with
black cloth. It was like a well-lit cave. The flames trembled in the small breeze they made coming in.
One of the men stood up so Rod could sit down, then left the room and reappeared dragging a
couple of tubular kitchen chairs that looked as if they must have belonged to a Formica kitchen table. He
set one down next to Rod and gestured for Francis to take it. Then he put the other next to the man who
had let them in.
For the first time, it became clear to Francis that – no that was the wrong way to put. Not clear,
just evident as it always should have been – that moving drugs was not something that was done by
people like his own father, who had a store where he sold model trains and such. This was a different
kind of men.
Although the room had seemed so bright when they first entered, Francis saw that was only an
illusion created by the darkness they had just come out of. The hurricane lamp threw heavy shadows on
the faces of these already unfamiliar men.
He tried to make out their features. They were all long-haired and bearded, except for the man
who had let them in. almost bald, he wore a bandana tied around his head and had no beard. His face
was pocked and scarred and his teeth were spotted with black. "Who's this?" he asked Rod, pointed to
Francis. And they all looked, first at Rod and then at Francis, then back to Rod again.
"Don't worry," Rod said. "He's Leo Mulberry's brother."
"Ah," said the man with the bandana around his head. "That was a shame. That was a damned
shame. Did you serve too?"
Francis was suddenly speechless. The ghost of his plans to become a conscientious objector
seemed to swirl around him.
"Too young," Rod said.
"I was in his company," one of the men volunteered. He had thick tangled dark hair a huge nose
that cast the rest of his face into shadow and heavy brows over his eyes. He put out his hand across the
table and Francis shook it. The long-haired man smiled. Then he said, "A damned shame. Fucking gooks."
He handed Francis the joint which evidently had been going around. "Are you old enough to drink?" he
asked, which got a good laugh.
"I thought you were coming last night," the man with the bandana said to Rod.
"Couldn't. I had to work overtime. Big pile up on route 5. They brought the cars in at six o'clock. I
had to stay and help sort things out"
"Like talking to the po-leece?" said another of the men, a skinny string bean whose hair hung
down over his chest. Despite the coolness inside the room, he was wearing only an undershirt.
"Talking to the cops, some," Rod said. "They wanted to know what the damages were." He
smiled. "Total loss. Obviously."
"Not everything is obvious," said the man with the bandana. "For example, are you breaking in
this young man. And does he have a name?"
"Name's Francis," Rod said. "No I'm just showing him a good time. Like how the other half lives."
They all laughed again at this. Then those who hadn't shook hands with Francis each stood up in
turn and offered their hands. "Your brother was a good man," bandana said. "Never forget that. Even if
he was only in the army."
"Fuck you," Rod said cheerfully.
"Yeah," the bandaged man said, "semper fi. And we had all the best drugs."
Rod shrugged. "What's the situation?" he asked.
"No, just a minute," said the man who had asked if Rod had talked to the police. "You owe us
from last time."
Rod took a wad of money out of the inside pocket of his leather jacket and threw it down on the
table. "Wanna get me a beer?" he asked. "Two beers."
"Right," said one of the men who hadn't talked yet. He was fat and wore a pendant on a chain
around his neck. Francis recognized it as a Harley Davidson symbol. "I should be asking you if you
brought us any beer. You just came in from town."
"You didn't ask me to," Rod said. "Want me to go back out?"
"Knock it off," bandana man said. "Get them some beers. What kinda manners you got?"
The skinny man shrugged and left the room, coming back with two cans of Old Milwaukee. Rod
took them and passed one to Francis. He looked at the label. "Ran out of money, did you?"
"Fuck you," said the skinny one.
"Well is everybody happy now?" said bandana. He stopped and toked on the joint, which had
come round to him again, then mashed it in his fingers, put the roach in a bowl on the table which
already held several. "Can we get down to it?"
"What I'm here for," Rod said.
"All right then." Bandana man turned to Francis. "Close your ears now." Francis nodded and the
other men seemed to find that amusing too. The man with tangled hair who was sitting next to him
slapped him on the back.
"Unless you want to learn something," he said.
That was Francis’ one and only trip out on the river and he and Rod never spoke of it. The
silence he had maintained while there seemed to have been appropriate and the right thing to go on
maintaining. But after that, he was invited more and more often to Rod’s house on Ferry Street. He
learned that the house now belonged to Rod, who as a veteran got a break on the property taxes. He
learned that Rod’s father was resentful about this. He learned that Rod had three other brothers and a
sister, none of whom did anything for their parents, but their father still thought it was inappropriate for
Rod to own the house when he had so many potential heirs.
Rod had bought the house from him for a dollar.
“More than it’s worth,” Rod said at one point. But Francis knew better than to ask him about the
property values. He’d already heard that conversation between Rod and his parents.
The old man said, “Hell, he might as well own it. When the river gets here, we’ll all be out on our
asses.”
And Rod had said, “The river’s not going to come up this far. It’s reached its limit.” And cast a
look in his father’s direction that seemed to invite the kind of argument an old man would not want to
have with his heavily muscled son. He coughed in a way that sounded derisive, but said nothing more.
And Francis didn’t either. Nor did Rod’s mother. But she did nod her head when Rod spoke. So evidently
if Rod said it, she was willing to go along.
Despite Rod’s urging, Francis never bought a motorcycle. Well, he could hardly have afforded it
on what he was making as an orderly at the hospital. And then, after he had the kids with him, and he
was going to nursing school, well that would have been really ridiculous.
They had anyway lost touch a bit after the children came into Francis’ life. He no longer smoked
of course. It was a testimony to the fact that they were real friends and not just customer and supplier
that Rod kept in touch with him, that Mrs. Thwaite occasionally sent on an invitation to dinner – for
himself, and Amy and the kids as well.
But what really kept his feeling that Rod was his only close friend, certainly the most important
friend in his life. He knew it must have had something to do with Leo. The way so much in his life always
seemed to come back to having something to do with Leo. He didn't think it was anything so simple as
imagining that Rod was a stand in for his lost brother. Certainly there was very little resemblance
between Rod Thwaite, even as a young man, to Leo Mulberry. But of course resemblances aren't
everything. There is also function.
And in relation to the children, Rod certainly functioned, despite his manners, or maybe because
of them, as some kind of surrogate uncle for the children. Or even as a substitute grandparent when
Francis father sold the store and he and his wife moved to Florida. Rod, who had rescued their mother
(although perhaps they were not too aware of that) also turned out to be one of the steadiest people in
their lives .
In 1992, the county finally got the money it had been petitioning from the federal
government for decades and the river was first dredged, then cleaned up some, and series work was
done to barricade the lower end of Ferry Street. He had remarked on this to Rod once, who had said,
“But it was all unnecessary. The river was never going to get up this far.”
Twelve
When she was younger, everybody thought Yonnie was mischievous. They didn't know , they
hadn't known, that she was in hiding. That she was in hiding from something you couldn't hide from, not
really. And she was cheerful because something told her to be cheerful. That it was too dangerous not
to be cheerful.
That part got confusing. "Was it the voices?" a psychiatrist had asked her. No, no. the voices
were a different thing. The voices. Yonnie didn't, in the first place, call them "the voices." No, no. it was
only after somebody else told her that what she thought she had heard was really an illusion in her own
head, that Yonnie had any idea such a thing had happened. No, voices? No, messages in the real world.
Things that needed to be ferreted out. They always had substance. She got messages over the radio. It
was really confusing to think those might be "voices."
But then, schizophrenia is confusing. That's its essential nature. Who ever heard of rational
schizophrenia? "You're lucky it's a treatable illness these days, " Yonnie's disagreeable social worker told
her. "They used to just lock up people like you and throw away the key."
Yonnie said, "I'm sick. I'm not stupid."
"Who said you were stupid?"
"You talk to me as if I'm too stupid to report you," Yonnie replied. Oh yes, she had many
experiences with the social service department and many of them were very unpleasant. That particular
social worker (who, it turned out, had a schizophrenic sister) asked to be taken off Yonnie's case, saying
she was too difficult to deal with. That's an accusation a person with schizophrenia can hardly dispute.
And Yonnie, with her past, was beyond denying it.
Some days she didn't care. She didn't care anymore than she had when she was twenty years
old and had already been twice pregnant and everybody said she must have seduced somebody and she
couldn't tell the real secret. And when she did, one of the psychiatrists had thought for a very long time,
that the secret was what had made Yonnie have schizophrenia. But the voices went back to before that.
They surely did. Yonnie could hardly remember a time the voices had not been with her. It was possible
the voices had told her to go along – although, she couldn’t be sure. Sometimes she thought she was
really hearing these things, that they had been said by someone who was in the room with her. Or on
the phone, or the radio. Other times, that she had merely thought them, as if the voices were her own
thoughts.
“Well, they are, aren’t they?” another therapist had asked her.
Well, no, it didn’t seem that way at all. When she heard the voices – and of course, what with
the meds and all, she heard them much less, but almost always could identify them as themselves -- it
was still as if they came from another source. They were definitely not to be credited to the Yonnie who
was here. They were, apparently, of some Yonnie who lurked deep undercover, who could mimic any
number of other voices, and who must be guarded against speaking.
Why is it so bad to hear things? She sometimes wondered. The bible was full of stories of people
hearing and seeing things. And somehow, if you got in the bible, they didn't call you schizophrenic.
They called you a prophet. Later, she came to read about other cultures where people saw things and
heard things and they were medicine men, shamans, healers. With just a little training, Yonnie figured
she could have been a medicine person. She would have been good at it. She would have seen what
needed to be seen.
A burning bush? No problem. That was her favorite bible story, because she herself had once
seen a burning bush. It wasn't out in the desert of course, but in her mother and father's back yard. And
a voice hadn't come out of the bush to go with the burning. Just the burning. It was, perhaps, her first
vision. Her first hallucination, they, the professionals, would call it. And some of them claimed she must
have dreamed it. “How likely is it, Yonnie, that you would have been outdoors in the middle of the night
like that?”
It was three o'clock in the morning in fact. In those days, this was early, like when she was
twelve or t thirteen, they hadn't started locking her up at night. In fact, the Fort Area was so safe in
those days, they almost didn't lock up at all. Or rather, they kept a key under the mat for anybody who
needed it. Including the burglars apparently. Or when things are safe it means potential thieves aren't
smart enough to look under the mat for the key? Well, Yonnie didn't understand it, but what it meant
was, she was pretty free to come and go when she needed to.
She was often awake in the middle of night, what with the confusion and all – she was just
beginning to notice that not everything she saw was always there, but she hadn't yet had to tell anyone
about it. And she was already aware of needing to be careful what she told her mother, who was liable
to bet overexcited. Somewhere, a long time before that, her father had said, "Don't get your mother
overexcited." And sometimes he said that directly to her mother, "Daphne, don't get yourself
overexcited."
When Daphne got overexcited, she might scream and shake. Yet another psychiatrist had once
intimated to Yonnie that this was the reason for her schizophrenia. But now they knew better. It was
possible, another of them had told her, that this over excitability of Daphne's meant that she too had
some of the illness. Not a full-blown case, but some.
Yonnie, of course, was "full-blown." She'd read enough about it all to understand that might
mean a lot of different things. It might mean both her parents had been carrying the genes for
schizophrenia! But then, there was her brother, George, the Eagle Scout, who never had any
psychological problems at all. Or at least none that he had ever been forced to divulge.
George did not come and visit Yonnie. He lived in Denver now, and since Daphne's death last
year (their father had died some years previously) he never came back. Which was understandable. He
had always found it embarrassing to have a sister like Yonnie. Also there was the age difference. They
didn’t really share a childhood. Even if she had been more normal George probably wouldn’t have been
very interested in Yonnie. Although he might have made more of an effort for the sake of appearances.
He was ten years old when she was born. Her mother talked about that sometimes.
Jo-jo, that's what they called him, because their father was named George also and didn't want
his son to be called "little George" or "junior." It hadn’t been Jo -Jo, but just Jo or Gee-oh. Jo-jo had
once explained to Yonnie that it was really supposed to be "Gee-oh, the way you would pronounce Geo,
but she, Yonnie was responsible for turning it into Jo-jo. That must have been the first embarrassment
and she was not yet even felled by schizophrenia. She was just a little kid who couldn't see the sense of
saying gee-oh, when Jo-jo was so much easier. And everybody liked it. It caught on, and George had to
be Jo- Jo till he could get out of Ducktown. Maybe that’s why he didn’t like coming back.
Jo -Jo the dogface boy. That was someone she discovered later in middle school, when she was
eleven and he was twenty=-one. It was mean, really and purposefully mean, but she began calling
George that, especially after he started growing a beard. Of course he wasn't around much then, away
at graduate school. Jo -jo the dogface boy she would say when he came in the door. Later, they took it
as a sign of her schizophrenia, of course. Just as they took everything as a sign of her schizophrenia. He
mainly didn't come home for vacations, but would come for one week in June r July, when it was nice
out and he could spend a lot of time out of the house. But she would watch for him and sit on the top of
the stairs where she could see the front door. “It’s Jo -Jo the Dogface Boy,” she would call out.
At first he used to argue with her and say, “Yonnie, for God’s sake.” Then, after her diagnosis,
when she was sixteen, if he was home and she called him dogface boy, he would try to look patient,
because the general feeling was she couldn’t help what she did, right? And he would just shrug and say,
“Hi Yonnie. Why don’t you go back to bed?” or back to her room or back to whatever she was supposed
to be doing. And she knew he would be in the kitchen arguing with her parents about why they were still
keeping her at home. And that was before she had the first baby. After that he really thought they
should put her away someplace. Once, she had heard her mother saying, “But you can’t do that
anymore, Jo- Jo. After a crisis she goes in the hospital, but they just send her right back to us.”
Then he had said, “Do you have to keep calling me Jo -Jo? I have a name.”
So that was how Yonnie knew he blamed her for his being called Jo-Jo. And inside her head she
had the realization that somebody must have already discovered the dogface boy. Somebody George’s
own age. That would mean she wasn’t the first, but how could he forgive her for rubbing it in?
The night Yonnie saw the burning bush Jo- jo was not home. He was already out of the house.
"Ought of the house,," that's how Daphne described it, as if they had thrown him out, instead of that he
escaped. "My older child is out of the house already," she would say to people. "We have only Yonnie at
home." With only a hint in her voice – how big a hint being very much dependent on who she was
talking to – that this was a burden. That she might like to have Yonnie out of the house too.
This was before she got the diagnosis. They thought she was just an ordinary teenager. A little
bit fast for her age, since technically she wasn't even in the teens yet, but still, a teenager. Daphne had a
lot to say about this being a difficult age and all. Having raised one teenager, she was like an authority
on it or something. So they were ready for Yonnie's adolescence to be difficult, but how difficult it was
going to be, they didn’t know.
"We didn't know the half of it!" Yonnie heard her mother say to somebody, some years later.
No, they didn't know the half of it. They still didn't know the half of it, Yonnie sometimes thought. She
wondered if there was really an afterlife after all (she hoped not), in which case, according to a Catholic
friend of hers, they would know everything. So they would know the half of it after all. The half they
hadn't wanted to deal with. The special part. The Secret.
"Which is worse?" Yonnie had asked a therapist once, "being fucked by your father or having
schizophrenia?"
She could see the woman – her name was Frieda; she was one of a succession of therapists who
had come and gone in Yonnie's life – almost laugh. It was quick. You had to be quick to spot it. And she
made a nice recovery. She said, "What do you think, Yonnie?"
Beautiful. A beautiful opportunity. "I think they are exactly equal," Yonnie said, taking advantage
of her opportunity. That was her considered opinion. Everything, if you thought about it long enough,
was equal to everything else.
But the night of the burning bush, that was all before the fucking and the schizophrenia. That
was just Yonnie, an early teenager – she'd got her period at ten; some people said it was hormones in
the beef, but Yonnie's mother was a vegetarian so they hadn't had all that much beef – who was awake
a lot in the night.
It was one of those beautiful nights. The moon was like a silver dollar in the sky and their long
lawn, that sloped down almost to the river, looked silver itself in the moonlight. It was three in the
morning and not cold out at all, even though it was only early April. And Yonnie, in her bunny slippers
and leopard pattern pajamas went quietly down the big stairs and out the back door through the
kitchen.
Their house in the Fort area was very special, although of course it didn't date from the time of
the fort itself. All those houses were gone, burned down by the bad Indians and the bad French who
wanted to try and take New York away from the British. Their house, or parts of it at least, was built in
1812. It had a bronze plaque on the front door that said so. "Home of Jeremiah Plaith, proprietor of
Plaith's Broom Factory," it said. So it had been the house of somebody who owned property, who was
important in Duyktown. But it had still been small, only four rooms, two up and two down, built in the
federal style, and plain. Then in the l890's it had got more upstairs added and the el out the back, so
now it was a pretty big house. Though the rooms were still small. That was something Yonnie didn't
quite understand: why they hadn't made the rooms bigger when they added on to the house.
She had even asked Jo -Jo about this once (because she didn’t want to ask her parents about it,
each for a separate reason: her father would say too little and her mother would say too much).
“Bearing beams,” he said, which was almost as bad an answer as her father would have given (he would
have said, “Because they had too.”), but at least it had a noun in it. And Yonnie could say, “What’s a
bearing beam?”
And Jo- Jo, instead of turning her away maybe because he had already entered the phase of
feeling sorry for her and about her, went and knocked on one of the walls. “That’s a bearing beam,” he
said. “It holds up the house.”
What an astonishing and yet beautiful idea! Bearing beams that hold up the house. Yonnie
imagined there must be something like bearing beams in the brain to keep it from collapsing. And when
the bearing beams were damage, well wasn’t that what her disease was like. That a bearing beam had
been compromised somewhere and things came pouring in? Or maybe it was the other way around and
diseases had bearing beams, in her case, her two parents.
In fact, without even being asked about it, Daphne said it was all about "authenticity." The
reason they hadn’t knocked any rooms together (there was an idea!) was that it would spoil the
authenticity. Daphne was very big on authenticity. All her furniture was authentic as were her clothes
and her books and well, everything.
Apparently if you changed the house too much then it wouldn't be authentic anymore.
Apparently also, however, you could change the kitchen. The kitchen used to be in the cellar. Brrrr. That
must have been pretty disgusting. When the river got high, they sometimes got water in the cellar. She
could only imagine what it must have been like for those servants then, in those days, working in the
cellar.
There was still a big fireplace there, but it didn't work. They used the chimney from it for the
fireplace in the living room. Because she could imagine those people working down there in the damp
dark, Yonnie always thought the cellar was a kind of scary place. But that didn't explain why she found
the kitchen they had built on upstairs was also scary. It had a nice shale floor that made a clacking noise
when Daphne walked around in it in high heels (and Yonnie as a child had walked around in Daphne's
high heels). There was a huge refrigerator/freezer combo, a butcher block island in the middle, a
dishwasher and everything. That did not explain to Yonnie why she found it scary.
In the middle of the night it was especially scary. Some of the machines had little green lights to
show they were on. These lights would be on even in the middle of the night. They were like night lights
for some shadowy creatures that were wafting around. Maybe the ghosts of those old servants who
used to work in the cellar, looking for their kitchen, which was only a dark space under the house now. It
didn't even have the washing machines in it, since when Yonnie was born Daphne decided she needed
the washing machines to be upstairs and they had added the laundry room. But anyway, if Yonnie
wanted to go out at night, she used the back entrance.
Well, to be truthful, going through the living room was in fact a little scarier than the kitchen.
Well, gosh, that meant the whole house was scary, didn't it? Now why was that? Alternate theory
number two hundred forty-five about the cause of Schizophrenia included a scary mother. Well, that
certainly applied to Daphne, but really, was Daphne that scary? And anyway, now they said that wasn't
true. One of Yonnie's therapists had once said, "Your mother sounds like she was pretty neurotic, but
that would only have made you neurotic too." Well that made sense. In some ways, Yonnie was glad she
wasn't neurotic like Daphne. Even if it meant having schizophrenia.
So there she was in the middle of the night, in her pajamas and bathroom and big bungly
slippers, hanging out in the backyard. The backyard was as wide as the house, or as narrow as the
house, depending on how you looked at it. The house was about one room wide, with a little extra for
stairs and such. The backyard was like that, with fences on each side and at the bottom, where it almost
went to the river. It had been longer still, at one time. It must have been. The additions were all onto the
back of the house, so it still had it federal façade.
So Yonnie could sit on the back stoop and almost look down at the river, but not quite, because
the slope of the lawn was very, very gradual. What she looked at was the row of juniper bushes that
substituted for a back fence. And on this particular night, one of them was on fire.
Yonnie as surprised how calm she felt about that. She simply sat and looked at it. What she
thought was, "My goodness, if that spreads, it will burn up the whole fence." What protective instinct
kept her from going in and calling the fire department? Did she know somehow that this was her first
vision or did she just not want to get Daphne overexcited?
Or maybe she didn’t care one way or the other. If she had been older at the time, this would
probably have been the truth of the matter. But she was only eleven. She wasn’t so disappointed in her
life yet was she? She didn’t know about fucking – well, she knew about it, but she didn’t know about it
personally – and she didn’t know about schizophrenia. But still, she sat there and she watched that
hedge burn. It was an electric kind of flame. It sizzled red and orange and then green and blue. But no
voices came out of it. Sometimes Yonnie wondered what those voices would have said.
Thirteen
Francis had an odd memory of Yonnie. It was from 1972, when he was sixteen. She was from
the city, of course, her family living in that exclusive preserve known as the Fort Area. His family lived in
Rose Hill. But his father's store was in Duyktown and eventually, what with pretending to be a help
around the shop and so on, Francis began spending more time at the store and then, just more time in
the city. There were parties.
It was hard to remember how free those parties had been in 1972. They would all get together
at somebody's house, somebody whose parents were at work or out of town or didn't care or
something. Most often it was at the house of a guy named Michael Smirnoff. Michael's father was a
dentist, his mother an interior decorator. Michael, at sixteen, the same age as Francis, had his own
apartment in the finished basement of his parent's house in Duyktown. It was a big house on a big lot
with the dentist office in half of the front. The other half of the front being Mrs. Smirnoff's exhibition
room. Well, that's what Michael called it. Maybe it was just a living room.
Francis had never been in it. You got to Michael's quarters by going down a set of stairs at the
back of the big house and nobody as far as Francis knew had any idea you were there. It was not a small
space. The only part of the basement Michael had to share with the rest of the family (which was only
his mother and father and very young sister) was the furnace room, which also had a washer-dryer
combination in it. Michael's mother didn't do laundry however. That was done by a woman who came in
daily and did things like the laundry and cleaning up the kitchen (Michaels mother did her own cooking
and according to him was very proud of that fact). So nobody but the hired help came downstairs.
Dr. Smirnoff's dental office and consequently Michael's apartment, was located in a part of
Duyktown that used to be rather grand, but was not any longer. There were several large houses like the
one the Smirnoffs occupied, but most of them had been broken into flats and even tinier apartments.
But the lots were all still big and if you didn't live there, just drove through, you would think it was still
pretty classy. Except for the number of doctor's offices of various kinds. And the Kentucky Fried Chicken
place on the corner.
The Kentucky Fried Chicken Place figured largely in Michael Smirnoff's social life, because, after
everybody had smoked some weed and began to get the munchies, they could duck out and get a
bucket of the Colonel's finest without having to take too much exercise.
Francis knew Michael Smirnoff because Michael Smirnoff's father the dentist collected electric
trains. He had an entire room filled with track and the assorted accoutrements as well as an actual track
that ran around a ledge in his waiting room. And it wasn't that Dr. Smirnoff specialized in children's
dentistry either. He just really, really loved toy trains and had always wanted them in his apparently
poverty-stricken childhood (Michael liked to retail stories his father often told, the point of which was
how much harder he had it as a child).
A toy train collector would eventually have to make his way to the Mulberry Tree, which was the
name of Francis' father's store. It was downtown, which was not the greatest place for a store (he was
always talking about relocating to the Mall in Leatown), but it had its clientele, people who used to
come here when they were children, people who needed just a certain kind of thing, gizmo, gimcrack,
crackerjack. That's what Francis' father said in his TV commercial: "Gizmo, gimcrack, crackerjack, we've
got it all. Oh yeah, and Lionel's." Cut to a quick motion shot of a huge locomotive blowing down the
track with an equally quick pullback to show it was on a display board in the Mulberry Tree itself, close
commercial with a big shot of the store windows. Oh yeah.
So, as these things happened, it was really Dr. Smirnoff Francis got to meet first and it was Dr.
Smirnoff's idea Francis and Michael should be friends. As in – "I have a boy about your age. You two
should meet."
When Francis met Michael Smirnoff he got some idea why Dr. Smirnoff might be trawling for
friends for him. Michael was huge and pimply and wore coke bottle glasses. His father ought not to have
worried, however. A glad hand with the dope ensured that Michael always had a little coterie of people
in his apartment, listening to music, smoking or snorting or popping, ass appropriate to the drug
involved.
And it was, of course, at one of Michael Smirnoff's happy afternoons that Francis first made the
acquaintance of Yonnie whatshername. Several people pointed her out to him first, although he was not
sure why they bothered. Yonnie was noticeable under any circumstances. And, to be perfectly truthful,
at that time, rather beautiful. Her glossy chestnut colored hair, parted in the middle, as was the style of
those days, hung to her waist. She was wearing a caftan of many colors and multiple strands of exotic
looking wooden jewelry. But probably Yonnie would have been noticeable in whatever she wore. Her
beautiful face was expressive and animated. Her perfect smile was constantly present and she was
surrounded by a little group of people.
Francis later learned that Yonnie was always popular, despite the fact that, even now (she was
fifteen), she was known to be a little odd and unpredictable, which might have put any other group of
teenagers off, but of course, Michael's guests were too happy to notice something like a little odd
behavior. And Yonnie had pills. "Yonnie always has pills," Michael Smirnoff confided. "You see that
bag?" he said, pointed to the big, oversized, vaguely native looking shoulder bag Yonnie carried. "You
can hear it clink when she walks by. That girl has three doctors and they all give her meds."
Apparently true, as Francis later learned. Yonnie had diet pills, not yet illegal, with or without
prescription. Yonnie had antidepressants, and Yonnie had Quaaludes. Yonnie had even some
antipsychotic medicines – "They won't do much for you," Michael Smirnoff said, in the tone of one who
has tried them.
When Francis sat down on a large pouf in the middle of the room, Yonnie moved over from the
couch where she had been sitting and sat next to him. "Michael says I should meet you," she said,
turning her huge blue eyes his way, smiling her strangely exotic smile. "He says your father is the king of
electric trains."
Francis had to laugh. Of course he was already a bit stoned – you could get a bit stoned just
walking into Michael Smirnoff's apartment – so it probably was not as funny as all that. But he had to
top it, so he said, "No, no, Dr. Smirnoff is the king of trains. My dad is just his supplier."
"Is that legal?" Yonnie asked.
Really he didn't know if she was asking seriously or if this was some elaborate form of flirtation.
And since Yonnie smiled so much, that was hardly a clue. So Francis contented himself with just saying,
"Last time I looked, it was."
But Yonnie had drifted off anyway. He ran into her a few more times after that, but never did
find out whether her question was just ridiculous, ironic, or perhaps a misunderstanding. His most
memorable experience of Yonnie as a teen, however, had been the time she announce to all and
general, "There are two things which always turn out to have been a good idea – getting stoned, and
orgasm."
"Oh my God, " Michael had said (he happened to be sitting next to Francis at the time). I think I
have to get into this girl's pants."
Whether that ever happened or not, Francis had no idea and shortly after that he stopped
seeing Yonnie at any of Michael's impromptu, but predictable parties. And then shortly after that,
Francis gave up going to Michaels himself. Not because he had given up dope, but because he had a new
connection and a new girl friend. And it was easier to get around in the suburbs, than to continually be
finding a way to get into the city and an excuse for being there.
The next time he saw Yonnie was on E Wing. He was working as an orderly, getting over his
divorce ("annulment!" his mother would remind him) and Yonnie was doing what she did. It was not her
first visit to E Wing. Nor her last.
Fourteen
Duyktown was never a really big city, as these things go. When asked to name, for example, the
five largest cities in New York State, the average high school student would be expected to say: Buffalo,
Syracuse, Yonkers, Rochester and ta-da, New York City. No one ever was expected to say Duyktown, not
even in its heyday, though you might reasonably expect a few to make the mistake of including it
because they had heard of it. By 2006, Duyktown was so far past its heyday, it was a wonder that
anyone would think to talk about it at all. And yet they were going forward. They were treating
Founder's Day just as if the morale was there to sustain it.
Sometimes Claire Harris despaired at the ability of human beings, at least human beings she had
known, to be so eternally optimistic. What did that mean? The triumph of hope over experience, that's
what they liked to say, as a joke, when somebody got married again, especially if it was for the third or
fourth or fifth time. That's what she would say too. And was her own optimism in getting married for
this second time (she didn't think what she had with Rod Thwaite could be counted as a marriage,
although sometimes it felt like the same kind of optimism. Other times it felt even crazier.
Well, she hadn't gone into this marriage with undue expectations. How about that as a way of
putting it? She had gone into this marriage with her eyes wide open. That made her sound cold and
strange, even to herself. Did other people imagine she had finally found love? Or that she needed
security. Oddly enough, neither of those things was true. She hadn't married Joe Harris for his looks (as a
way of putting it) or his money. She had married him because he was there? Because she didn't want to
live by herself in that godforsaken house of hers which Francis had stopped needing several years ago
after his kids grew up and he moved back to the city.
Why couldn't she just live in that house. Or, why couldn't she sell that house and use the money
to buy a house in the city? Couldn't she be part of the urban return, as they were calling it. Was
Duyktown having an urban return? That was a question even more to the point. And why not live by
oneself? Perhaps she had done Joe Harris a great wrong.
On the other hand, she had a pretty strong suspicion that Joe Harris had not married her for her
looks (at sixty-two, even a well buffered sixty-two, no woman can suspect a man of being lured by her
looks) or her money. So perhaps they were even.
Fifteen
"Rejoice with me, for that which was lost has been found." If Francis wasn't mistaken, that was a
woman who had lost some money. Dinarii, if he remembered right. And of course the parable wasn't
about lost money. It was about lost souls. About God's love for the lost soul. As a Catholic, he wasn't
much given to reading the bible or meditating on it, but that particular lesson had showed up lot in the
Masses he had attended all his life. It was still liable to show up, although he couldn't have said when.
Anymore than he could have said when what he had lost would be returned to him. If he were honest,
never, would be his guess.
He wondered, bleakly, but also cynically (it felt cynical to him) whether this would be an
occasion for another annulment. Probably not. He wasn't important enough for two annulments, he
guessed, and besides, he didn't care. He hadn't ever cared, come right down to it. He didn't know why
he was thinking about it now. No, he did. It was so he didn't have to think about anything else.
That which is lost returned to me. Francis could not think of anything that had ever been lost
and returned to him. Was he talking metaphorically or for real? There was that time somebody found
his sunglasses at the refreshment stand on the Cape. Of course he'd only been about five feet away
when the next guy in line said, "Hey did you leave these behind?"
The last thing he wanted to do was sit and think about all the things he'd lost in life. Oh yes, the
very last thing. He had pleaded. He had questioned. He had stormed and raged – to no avail. As near as
he could figure out, he was just a boring person. And then, as if she had decided that she'd waited long
enough for him to become something other than a boring person, his wife had found someone who was
interesting.
"I admire you, Francis," she'd said to him. You are a truly loveable person. Someone is going to
love you, you'll see."
And she knew about whatshername in college. Of course she knew. She knew every goddam,
blasted, bereft thing about him. Well, hadn't she once been his thing returned to him? His person?
Never mind that she had first come to be with him because she wanted to be helpful. And then how
helpful he had been for her. And there they were, helping each other, helping the kids, being helpful all
over the goddam place and he hadn't known that wasn't true love.
Rod took him out to the Beef and Brew (God, how did that place survive?) and got him very
drunk when he found out. And being Rod, he didn't waste time on any placebos like she was too good
for you or you'll find somebody else. Rod himself had stayed sober enough to drive Francis home and
make sure he got in the house. And Francis had crawled into himself for a few days. When he came
back into the world the next day, hung over, wrung out, it was as if he had passed through some
baptism of fire. It all looked different. It as if, if he looked down, he would see that his body was scarred
from head to foot. As if when he looked in the mirror he would see that his hair had turned white or
teeth had fallen out. It was outrageous that he still looked like himself.
Now he was out walking around. Amy had taken away her clothing and books, packed whatever
trifles she cared to claim (he didn't even care to notice what they were) and left them in the basement.
She would come back and get them sometime he wasn't home. And she would be back to stand beside
him on election night. And Founder's Day? Dear God, the fucking election wasn't for another two
months, but Founder's day was in three weeks. "I'll be there too," she said. "I promise."
And he refrained from telling her some of the other things she had promised. Once upon a time,
ago when the world was young, when the children still believed in Santa Claus and he still believed in
the good fairies, obviously. In the real world the good fairies came up empty an awful lot of the time.
This was not news, of course. How can anyone work at a hospital for twenty years and more and
not know how unpredictable human life was. And not just that the body betrayed, but that those once
thought nearest and dearest and most dependable failed to show up at that hour of need. Oh yes, he'd
seen enough of that. Especially on E Wing, where those attached to the nearest and dearest had
become pariahs, parodies of their former selves and now no one to love them but each other and
Francis. And what use had his love been to them? It hadn't brought about one single cure, not lifted one
single depression, not erased one single anxiety attack, not obviated one hallucination or awoke one
catatonia. A useless person, that's what he had been.
And hadn't he prided himself on his life with the children. Hadn't he given them a family. Some
family. Now he had to tell them, each one individually – he supposed he ought to be glad Amy had
waited until after they were no longer at home. Oh yes. It would be much easier to tell them
individually wouldn't it? Well, it probably wouldn't mater all that much to them. He didn't know if that
was better or worse. He supposed, being the children of Yonnie whatshername, they wouldn't so much
think it reflected on them whether he was happy or not, successful at being happy or not. After all , he
was just a benefactor, the guy who took them in, the guy who made sure they got to school and grew up
relatively normally and could try to have a life, if they hadn't inherited their mother's awful illness. And
so far, fingers crossed.
"I don't care if you come to Founder's Day," he said, meaning the speeches and all that. "If you
could arrange to be in Buffalo, I wouldn't mind. I can say you're unavoidably at work. God knows I've
been saying it for years."
And she had the grace to look sorry when he said that. He added, "It would probably be easier
for me if you weren't there."
Two months till the election. They were already showing the commercials on the local TV
stations, but not too often they didn't have that much money in the campaign chest. Later, the week
before the election, then they would carpet bomb. It was bad enough now. There he was, in all his
urban splendor, speaking from the stoop of his city home. There he was with his wife and grown
children around him, looking proud and confident. It was as if they had all disappeared and suddenly the
person in the commercials was somebody he didn't know.
Did he still want to be a congressman. Oh yes. Oddly enough, his appetite for success in that
quarter had grown rather than shrunk. Compensation? Perhaps. He had never before been all that
interested in public office, accepting the nomination for city council almost as a favor to Stu Whitman
who had recruited him. And when he first heard they were thinking of him for the congressional seat, he
thought it was a joke. He didn't see himself that way. He knew he could do it. He knew he knew this
district like no one else – because he knew it from the perspective of the poor and ill. He knew it from a
hospital-size view. And he had a stake in the improvement of the life of those people. But he had still
felt like it didn't have all that much to do with him personally. And anyway, whoever heard of a
Democrat taking that seat? It was more of a ceremonial thing he was doing. A sacrificial thing, if you
looked at it from a certain angle. Maybe nobody else in the party wanted to run actually.
And running on the same ticket with the first black man ever to be nominated for president.
That would be historic or it would be pathetic. If Barack Obama succeeded in winning the presidency it
might only be by a hair. It might not be sufficient to bring in the other candidates. It was an oh well
situation. That's what Amy called anything she couldn't figure out what to do about. "It's an oh well,"
she would say. "Oh well."
Oh well. At the beginning of the campaign she'd been with him more often. That was the period
of getting all the news stories they could. "Local City Councilman Selected To Go Against Fremont" the
Gazette said. And in smaller print, "City Man is Expected to Bring a Good Following." A line which
bemused and puzzled Francis. True, the Gazette was biased a little toward the Republican end of things,
what with all the money being in the suburbs these days, that was natural. So the fact that the reference
to his loyal following made him seem a little like some kind of cult leader was not to be wondered at. Oh
well.
Both the kids were excited, in their own ways. Jenniferwhats her name called him from the New
York City where she was training. She'd seen a squib about it in the Times. Good god, the Times. "I'm so
excited, Dad," she had said. And he could tell she was because it was when she felt close to him and
affectionate that she called him dad. She was older than Eddie and they both knew him as Francis
before he went to live with them. Jeffinerwhatshername had tried out calling him 'dad," but it must
have felt funny in her mouth. He'd liked the sound of it. And then, he'd always supposed there would be
children of his own. His own and Amy's. wouldn't he want them all to call him dad, no differentiating the
adopted? But as it happened that problem never occurred.
He'd sent Eddie an email and Eddie had responded with a text message "Grrr8." And Francis had
been inclined to think that ironic assessment fit the case. Maybe it still did, but he wanted it now. He
wanted to be congressman from the impossible district. He wanted to follow the first black president to
Washington. Suddenly he head was filled with the idea of how great that would be.
He wouldn't say anything to the kids about Amy until after the election. There you go. It would
either be, "I've lost my wife, but hey, I've won the prize!" or it would be, oh god, what would it be?
Would it be come here and save me I can't take this anymore. Oh by the way, I don't have the prize and
by the way, your ersatz mother has left for good?
Ersatz mother. That was something Amy had called herself. He'd hated to hear it and she'd
stopped saying it because he pleaded with her. Yes, don't mock this Amy, don't mock yourself. This is
good. This will be good. And so on. What a lot of speeches he had made in the privacy of his own
home. As if he had been practicing for this great moment in his life. This ersatz moment.
Oh well. If he could win, it wouldn't be ersatz would it? In h is imagination Francis straightened
his shoulders and walked with a springier step. He could feel his smile gathering itself like a weapon. He
would carry people off with him. He would. He would take their dreams prisoner. And he would be kind.
Not like some other people.
Sixteen
Rod Thwaite did not believe in romance, but there was nothing new in that. He had never
believed in romance. So when romance had torn his heart out, he had been surprised. When the U.S.
army told him he couldn't bring a Vietnamese whore back to the states (what the hell else had they
expected her to be doing to keep body and soul together?) that had been a terrible disappointment.
Yes, and he had raged and been angry and all that. But it was not because of romance. What he felt for
Mih Linh was good. He had hoped to bring her home to his family just as he had brought her to bed in
Saigon and he expected it to be good, but he hadn't had illusions about it. He had even supposed that
given the freedom of living in the old us of a, she would start looking around and lusting for somebody
who made more money than he did. That was all right. He was prepared for that too. So, yes, a
disappointment.
And his failed marriage, what had that been but a mistake. A bad mistake and the reason for
which was not hard to find. Because romance had got its hooks into him and his heart was already torn
out. And so he was angry with Claire Layton. He refused to think of her as Claire Harris. For Christ sake,
he knew Joe Harris. Why would she want to be with a stick like that? It was incomprehensible. It was a
joke.
If, for some reason, she found she couldn't bear to be living with himself, Rod could understand
that. And romance had snarled at that, but kept its claws sheathed. Could he let her go? She had asked
him that. She had said, "Rod, can you let me go?"
Of course he had said, "You don't have to ask me that. What the hell does that mean?"
And she had said, "I feel as if I need permission to go."
But why had she needed to leave? When he looked at Francis sorrowing, he wanted to say,
"Forget it. They never know what they want."
He always knew what he wanted. Whether he wanted it only a little or whether he wanted it a
lot. And he had wanted Claire Layton a lot.
He had pursued her. Maybe it would be called stalking these days. If you make a point of being
where you know you will see a woman, where you will make the opportunity of talking to her. Where
you will show her with your every expression that you hunger for her.
Well, he hadn't gone and hung around outside her house. He wasn't one of those creeps.
Somehow, he had known that what he was doing was not breaking any rules. Not rules now and rules
then or any rules at all. Because he had seen it in her face that she wanted to be with him just as much
as he wanted her to be with him.
Nothing complicated about it. Nothing wrong. Except that she couldn't get it out of her head
that something ode just be wrong about. That she was old enough to be his mother. Not quite. Twelve
years, what was that? He had a sister who was older than that.
"You have to let me go," she said, as if he had anything to say about it. And he had said,
"Nobody is telling you what to do."
He used to be more impatient, that's true. He used to not understand that people could get
themselves all in a knot about something, even when from the outside you could see clear as a bell that
nothing was so complicated.
"It's too much like my past," she said, and then he knew he was beaten.
In the past she'd lived from hand to mouth. In the past, her brothers took chances. In the past
people looked down on her and called her skag. And when she came to New York and got an education
and married a man with get up and go, all that had changed, and she became a suburban housewife.
And she had liked it hadn't she? If she hadn't found out, like so many suburban housewives
before her, that things were going on behind her back. If she hadn't been betrayed, she would have just
gone on, without interruption – the interruption of himself – being a suburban woman, in this case, the
widow Layton. Yes, that is just what she would have done. So in some sense he could see that coming
into her life, he had rode on the wave of her dismay, her betrayal. Her husband betraying her, as it were,
posthumously, since the information came with her sorting his papers, it was as if suburban life itself
were what had betrayed her.
And she had been happy to run from it, to lend out her house to a good cause, to live with him
in a way that could not have been the same as the life she came from – no alcoholics in the Thwaite
house, no futile farming. Just hardworking people, but the nostalgia was there. The good restaurants,
the art galleries, Jesus only knew what. She felt in danger. "We can go to art galleries," he'd said. "We
can get on the train and go right down to New York."
And she had just let her head sway from side to side. Seven years. Seven years of doubting what
she was doing and no one could answer the kinds of questions she had. He kept thinking if they had got
to eight, it would have been all right. She would have turned fifty. The dithering might have been over.
But not, it appeared the dithering only got worse when fifty approached. And now the
difference in age was turning on its axis again. She would be fifty and he would still be in his thirties.
Well, thirty-eight, that's not a kid for crissake.
And so he let her go. And he didn't brood about it. He didn't even think about it. He had Francis
to blame for this wave of remembering. If you see her, I wanted to say, cant you keep it to yourself. I
don't need to know.
And so it came to pass that one day Rod was outside the whatsitsname school, delivering with
his truck and loader a motorcycle he had just finished repairing to the vice-;principal of the school, a
man who thought of itself as pretty hip. Personally he thought anybody who really was devoted to his
bike would find a way to get to the shop and pick it up himself, but what the hell. The guy was paying for
it. That made the pickup truck worthwhile to maintain. That and using it to pick up firewood for the
fireplace he'd put in for his mother's pleasure. And as he was finishing up dealing with the viceprincipal, collecting his fee (no money, no bike) and locking the cycle into the special bike section the
school had added since 2000, that he saw a woman walking up to the entrance of school. Her arms were
so loaded with boxes, her face was not visible, but he knew who it was and ran to open the door for her.
"Can I help with that?" he said.
"Well, sure," she said, without looking at him. He took the packages boxes off her arms and was
gratified to see the look of surprise, and maybe, a glimmer of pleasure.
"Rod!" she said. "What are you doing out here?" He pointed in the direction of the viceprincipals' bike. Did she think he was stalking her?
"Business," he said.
"Oh," she said, "well that's good." Her smile was still brilliant. Ten years passing hadn't done
much to it – or she had a good dentist. Of course she had a good dentist. How could she not? And ten
years had etched some more wrinkles into her face. He admired every one of them.
"How are you, Rod?" she said. As if he'd been away or something.
"You know," he said. "Same, same."
"I heard your father died," she said.
"You sent a card."
"I did," she conceded. "I should have come to the funeral."
Right. "It was small," he said, as if that made a difference. Would he have wanted her at his
father's funeral. Her and Joe Harris. Probably not, really. Probably not.
"Well, how is your mother?" she said. "Oh, those boxes go in the auditorium. There's a place to
store them."
"The janitor's closet," he said, walking ahead of her.
“You remember!” she said, and he knew she was talking about when he used to come with her
and help store the Founders Day crap. As if he never had any other reason to be at the school.
More talk along the same lines. Did it matter what was being said? He helped her store her
various paraphernalia, walked to the door with her. Walked to her car with her. At the car, an unfamiliar
Lexus, probably Joe Harris’s, she said, “Say hello to your mother for me.” And there was almost a wistful
note in her voice.
All right. It was nothing really. But Rod Thwaite walked back to his pickup with something like a
smile on his face. As if, oddly enough, something he had lost had been given back to him.
Sixteen
Things that used to exist in Duyktown, but don’t any longer: the State Theater, Winton’s
Department Store, the Mulberry Bush, the Pennsylvania Railroad Station, the John Warner High School,
Solomon’s Kosher Deli, Chantelle’’s Tea Room and, the Amsterdam Art Gallery, and an assortment of
doctors, dentists, chiropractors, and eye doctors, too numerous to mention. Except for the State
Theatre, which closed in 1968, but everybody still talked about it, that was just talking about things
which had disappeared within the past ten years.
The State Theatre, fine movies for the discerning family, had actually been replaced. When the
city got federal money to spruce up the downtown area where the department store and art gallery
used to be, one of the developments they’d encouraged was a multi-plex cinema, called the Zazoon. It
was not unique to Duyktown, but a franchise out of New York City, but still popular. It’s lobby was
downstairs, its four screens, with stadium seating, were upstairs, on two levels, with an escalator and a
regular stairway and elevators.
The Mulberry Bush still existed in the Freaktown Mall, but it wasn’t what it had been Actually, it
was now a branch of Hobbytown, so it was called the Hobbytown Mulberry Bush and still sold some toy
trains, but mostly craft supplies and radio controlled model cars and airplanes. And Frank Mulberry lived
in West Palm Beach, Florida.
The Pennsylvania Railroad Station, torn down in 1985, as too expensive to heat, had been
almost immediately replaced by a small squat cinder brick building that sat rather too close to the tracks
for anybody’s pleasure. There was talk of tearing it down and replacing it with a more attractive
building. As Rod Thwaite liked to say, so people could feel more comfortable about getting out of
Duyktown as efficiently as possible.
Chandelle's Tea Room had moved to upper Owen Street for a time, along with Solomon’s Kosher
Deli, the Amsterdam Art Gallery and a couple of small bookstores that dealt mostly in graphic novels and
used books. All of those were no more. They had been replaced, though not in that order, by a hot dog
shop, a pizza hut, a comic book store (which itself was on the verge of closing) and an adult bookstore.
Winton’s Department Store, after a brief foray into the suburban malls, had eventually
succumbed to the competition from Macy’s and such, and been bought out and closed. What with Old
Navy, Macys, Kmart, Wal-Mart, and Target on hand, nobody noticed except the Gazette, which ran a
series of nostalgia pieces about stores that used to be in Duyktown. Some of them were so remote in
time, that possible only the over-fifty crowd had any remembrance of them at all. Such as Two Guys for
example. People still referred to the huge empty lot on Lafayette Street as the Two Guys Parking Lot, but
probably most of them didn’t know why they said that.
The John Warner High School was simply closed when all high school classes were consolidated
in Duyktown High, formerly known as the other high school. John Warner High, the letters embossed
over the doorway student had used for over thirty years, was now a drug treatment center and its
neighborhood, formerly a part of the city where executives from Amalgamated had lived, was now
where the clients of the drug treatment center lived. Sic transit. Such executives as the Duyktown
branch of Amalgamated still had lived out in the suburbs.
What was new in Duyktown (besides the drug treatment center): the lawyer who specialized in
immigrant legalization cases, the off-campus branch of Duyktown Hospital dealing in outpatient
treatment (located where St. Anne’s Hospital used to be), the Islamic Temple, the Quick Loan shop.
The Off Track Betting Parlor was not new, but it had withstood the winds of change and was
now prospering, just down the street from the Amtrak Station. There was talk of taking over the building
as an annex. The State Gaming Board had under consideration the issue whether it would have
constituted a second OTB in the same location, which would have been against the law. Several of the
Italian restaurants, for which Duyktown had once had some fame, were still in existence, but it was a
diminished existence. On the other hand, the number of Pizza places had double. Likewise, Chinese
takeout.
Another part of Duyktown that still existed, though diminished in its own way, was the Allen
Street Passage, an urban renewal project of the late 70s in which Allen Street had been closed to traffic
from State Street to about three blocks up. Pedestrian shopping at its finniest and a number of those
interesting stores still existed.
For example, the Nook still sold a good selection of books, although its half a store formerly
devoted to children’s literature had been turned into an emporium for soaps, lotions, gels and bathroom
accoutrements. The children’s lit section had been squeezed in among fiction and history, more or less
squeezing out poetry and philosophy. A big section of Young Adult Fiction still prospered as did a good
selection of mystery novels. Nature’s Garden still sold a fine array of organic foods. An enterprising
Pakistani sold gorgeous wraps, tops, and even a sari or two, at cut-rate prices. A shoe repair shop hung
on as did the much cleaned up Head Shop called the Balthazar Bazaar. It sold porn and sexual aids as
well as water pipes, clearly marked “for use with tobacco only.” As if anyone believed that.
Two restaurants continued to exist, if not thrive on Allen’s Passage: one sold various things in
wraps with a vaguely middle-eastern flavor. The other called Asian Fusion, was a buffet style that
offered Chinese dishes, some sushi, some Thai curries, and a bit of Vietnamese fare. It was run by a
Vietnamese couple who may have been the only Vietnamese in town. At one end of Allen Passage was a
Buddhism Temple in what had been a shoe store, and at another end was a Salvation Army thrift store.
Those were new to Allen Passage and, in the case of the Buddhist temple, new to the city as well. The
Salvation Army thrift store was controversial and very much the result – some people said – of some
people on Allen Street just not being ready to face reality. Would they rather have the empty storefront,
they said. The city, of course would have preferred a business which had to pay taxes.
In many ways, the city did not look desperately different from what it had looked like twenty
years ago, or even thirty, or even forty, if you didn't look too closely. Amalgamated Industry, for
example, was still there in its little bend of the highway, the big old red brick buildings looking as
substantial as they once had. And the big neon illuminated sign at the top of the main building still filled
the night sky. Amalgamated: Industry for the Future.
And Central Park was still green and beautiful, its grass kept cut and curried, its trees, in all
seasons, brightening the air. There was still a public swimming pool and a playground. Paddleboats were
still available at the pond. A refreshment center still offered clean restrooms and a concession sold hot
dogs and pizza slices. You could still have a good time at Central Park.
It was the commercial streets that showed the devastation that had occurred and it wasn't just
the empty store fronts or the absence of old standbys. It was things that hadn't been repainted or
repointed in too long. It was missing letters in neon signage. It was reduced lighting at night (where
increased lighting might actually have been a good thing). It was a police presence that suddenly
seemed more threatening than protective.
This latter phenomenon was a mystery to Francis. He certainly had no reason to feel threatened
by a police presence. In fact, of course, he was one of the city councilmen who had voted definitely in
favor of increased money for the police – at a time the city was desperately cutting funding where it
could. And so the police. Not a protective presence but a kind of desperate last move in a game already
lost. A symptom of how the game was already lost.
They always smiled at him, of course. He was well known for advocating cleaning up the various
neighborhoods most plagued by crime. He was their hero, even if their deployment in numbers had not
actually brought about the decline in crime statistics that had been promised. Or at least hoped for.
Desired. Nobody came downtown at night anymore. That was axiomatic. Nobody but the druggies, night
crawlers, the drunks, the prostitutes (and their customers) and the homeless.
The simple thing to say would be that there was no reason for anybody else to come downtown.
There was nothing legal to come downtown for. Anything that was still open downtown, the little rag
tag clutch of services, the bail bondsmen, the chiropodists, the antique dealers and coin collectors, the
real estate agents, the insurance men – they all departed discreetly at five, if not before, leaving the
downtown streets to whoever would have them.
That included Allen Passage, which was off downtown State Street, of course. All the little
merchants on Allen Passage, whatever their desires and pretensions, kept to the side of discretion as
well. With the exception of the two little restaurants, which had to stay open until nine, if they hoped to
stay in business at all, and the bookstore, which was currently experimenting with being open on
Thursday nights, a practice with a history in the city. Thursday had always been shopping night. That
was, some said, only part of how the malls had defeated the inner city. All that parking and night hours!
Not to mention the drunks, the druggies and the johns. Which nobody did mention.
The main building of the library which was not all the way downtown, and for many years had
held itself aloof from the terror of the downtown establishments, was a kind of bellwether in this
process of diminishment. As early as 2001, it had become clear that the public library was not as safe or
secure as it had once seemed.
They'd always had the homeless, of course – the poor shattered, mostly drunken, mostly male
shells of human beings, who had huddled in the library pretending to read the magazines while the
winter weather raged or simply immobilized everything outdoors. It seemed to happen almost invisibly,
almost unnoticeable, but suddenly there was no denying that this part of the library's clientele had
taken a sinister turn. It began to be rumored that drugs were being sold in the men's restroom, and it
became necessary to lock the restrooms, making people who wanted to use them sign out, one at a
time, for a key at the front desk.
Then there had been the destruction of books and magazines, the nasty things written secretly
when nobody was looking, the trashing of library property like the tears in furniture the slash marks on
the chair frames. Soon it began to happen, that a uniformed, although unarmed, policeman would
appear, standing around uncomfortably, watching mothers and children take out books and movies,
watching teenagers reluctantly doing their homework, glaring at old ladies checking out murder
mysteries – but mostly keeping a beady eye on the homeless and drunken, ready to escort them out at a
moment's notice.
This was a source of great pain to the librarians and library clerks, who seemed all to share an
ethos that Francis associated with his youth, the camaraderie and gentle generosity of a world that said
everyone had a right to belong. In those dark days of riots and violence, it was said, only the libraries in
the inner cities had escaped destruction. They looked back to that time (and of course, some of them
had been on the job at that time, not that there had been any riots in Duyktown). Now they didn't know
what to do with what they called "this police presence."
And as a final source of sadness (and a loss represented in the salaries and wages o f the various
library personnel) library hours, had been cut. The main library, which formerly had been open from
nine in the morning until nine at night, every weekday night and u until six on Saturdays and Sundays,
was now open only two nights a week until nine, and not open until noon on some days. And during the
summer – a k kind of tacit acknowledgement that only high school students were using the library –
closed on the weekends. This last had brought – finally – public complaint. And so Saturday hours (ten
until two) had been reinstated. But everyone seemed to know that was only temporary.
The library, so enthusiastically refurbished in the 70's was also beginning to show its age and the
wear and tear inflicted on it. New carpeting was always on its wish list. New carpeting, new furniture, a
new bus for the mobile library. Some hope. Instead, the book buying budget was cut. Only new
computers made their appearance. That was because they were donated by Amalgamated.
"Nobody cares if anybody can read anymore," the head librarian told Francis, over wine at a
reception the library was holding jointly with the League of Women Voters. "If they can use a computer,
that's all that matters."
Francis temporized. "Well, computers are the future," he said. "You must be glad to be able to
provide them for your clients."
The librarian, a woman whose degree was, as it were, still wet, shook her head sadly. She didn't
have to tell Francis about the applications she had outstanding to library systems elsewhere. Especially
the large college library. Wouldn't that be the way to go? They didn't have to worry so much about the
budget. You had to be able to handle a technical specialty. That held her back, she knew.
"Amalgamated gives us computers," she said, "and I'm not complaining. It's just that I wish they
cared as much for the students' ability to read and write."
This was not a new topic of discussion for Francis, who had survived many such conversations
about the budget in his four years on the city council. He knew nobody was getting enough. The
neighborhood associations, for example, had noticed that potholes weren't getting filled as speedily as
they once had been – or as speedily as people imagined they once had been. And snow removal. Don't
even get started on that one!
People seemed not to understand that money had to come from some place. Francis could
remember a time when the concept was hazy to him too. He wasn't over surprised. When you see a
functioning city, you can't imagine it' dependent on someone as needy as yourself. Surely someone,
some ones, richer and more consistent in their earnings must be paying for it all. And of course, most
people thought that someone would be Amalgamated.
There may have been a time when that was true. Maybe when Duyktown was Amalgamated
home base (oh, those were the days, eh? But long ago). Maybe when Amalgamated was the top player
in its own field. Maybe up to World War II. Maybe during WW II. Maybe, oh here the maybes begin to
get thin – maybe for a few years after the war.
None of any of this is in Francis' memories, but his father remembers and has told him of
coming to Duyktown when it was a bustling city, right at the end of the war, and himself, recently
demobilized, ready to put his money into a good business, something he could stand dong for the next
thirty or forty years. And so he had done, and married as well, a nice local girl he met at St. Agnes social
function. Then Leo was born and a few years later (he had never asked them how, good Catholics they
were, they had managed the four year gap, but manage they had). It was shortly after Francis was born
that the family had moved out of their city apartment into the nice new house in Rose Hill. Things must
have been going well for the business. He had no memory of the city apartment, but Leo did. Leo always
said he liked the city better. Rose Hill was boring. And the Catholic church in Rose Hill was new too, with
an Irish priest who had also been in the war.
So Francis grew up in Rose Hill and had no notion of how things were managed in the city. Well,
of course, he wouldn't have, even if he lived there, being a small child and all. Water came out of the
faucets, heat came out of the vents, the newspaper appeared on the doorstep. The garbage went away
in a noisy dirty truck. And all as if by magic, or Divine Will. Which is how things seem when they are
being managed well.
It was in the 70's that Francis' father began talking about moving the store into the mall in Rose
Hill. It was a nice mall, had a Sears at one end and a K-Mart at the other. It could be just the place for a
store like his. He could have a big display window instead of the tiny one his store on whatsitsname
street offered. But when they closed Allen Street and renamed it Allen Passage, he had been content to
stay where he was. Despite the taxes. That was how many of his sentences about Allen Passage began:
"Despite the taxes, I'm seeing some increase in foot traffic," he would say.
Taxes were something to be avoided. That was the message. And then, where would the tax
money come from. As a city councilman, Francis had the opposite problem. Where on earth would the
money come from?
The obvious answer, or at least you could see it was the obvious answer after you talked to
enough of Duyktown's citizen taxpayers was: Amalgamated. Weren't they the birthplace of
Amalgamated. Hadn't the college here educated some of its bets inventors. Wasn't there almost an
synergy of identity. Didn't it owe Duyktown?
Francis once had an interesting conversation with Jack Doherty, the current CEO of
Amalgamated. Of course his office was not in Duyktown, that being located somewhere in the middle
west, where rents were cheaper, taxes lower, and employees less likely to strike. But he'd been visiting
Duyktown, in some sort of ceremonial way, or possibly as a result of yet another study of their saying it
was time to close the Duyktown branch. One of those things. And among other things he had met with
the Chamber of Commerce and the City Council (together, as if they were one and the same entity).
"People in Duyktown don't seem to understand," he had said, cordially, to Francis, over some
very bad wine at the reception preceding the dinner, "they can't have it both ways. They want
Amalgamated to be here for the jobs, right? That's the most crucial thing, I would think."
Francis had nodded. That was probably true. What else were people in Duyktown going to do
for a living, if not work at Amalgamated? Or one of the other small local industries, which were, in all but
the technical sense, subsidiary to Amalgamated, making things mostly needed by it.
"So given that," Jack Doherty went on – a small group had gathered around to hear these pearls
of wisdom – "how can they think they can also offer us a ruinous tax system. If Duyktown doesn't get its
taxes down, it just won't be economical for us to be here anymore."
Somebody made a rude noise at that point, but it was not Francis. And everyone else present
made haste to pretend they had not seen or heard. Oh yes, go easy on that stuff. Because it was true.
The love affair with Amalgamated, Amalgamated love affair with Duyktown, all that was in the past. The
city and the corporation were like lovers who have grown too old to even remember how they came to
be together in the first place. And one of them was now more seriously dependent on the other, than
the other had ever been dependent on – well, maybe in the beginning. Beginnings are so important, but
they get forgotten.
"They fuck up the river, they fuck up the ground they stand on and now they tell us we need to
be more considerate of them?" That was Walt Simpson, one of Francis' fellow council members. And he
was being more careful to modulate his voice now, sitting next to Francis as they both ate creamed peas
and boiled chicken, as they both raised their glasses when the mayor made his toast. "Fucked," said
Walt Simpson again. "I'm thinking of moving to Alaska."
"Where everything is great?" Francis said.
"Well, at least you can catch a moose."
So that was how it went. The love affair was over. What the city had thought was some kind of
marriage was over. The real nature of relationship was much clearer and it was not pretty. Meanwhile,
there was the garbage to be collected, the water to be kept running, the streets to be kept from
reverting to nature.
Not to mention maintaining the park, taking care of the indigent and homeless, keeping the
streetlights burning, for god's sake.
The library, as he had pointed out to the clerk librarian that other evening, when he was out
supplicating votes, and the librarian was supplicating his understanding, was not really a city problem.
Well, he hadn't said it quite that way. But he had pointed out that the library system was now just that,
a system, supported by the county, not the city. And the State of New York, and even to some extent
(depending on how they floated their proposals) by grants from the federal government. For an example
of the latter, for instance, Duyktown's big help the immigrants program. Not only English as a Second
language, but the books, the posters, the special stuff for the little kids. Oh, the library was a whole
other thing. But the city was a rejected lover. That one really hurt.
The city was like a lover who has been told the loved one is only hanging on for the time being.
Can you make yourself useful to me? That's what the beloved said these days. Keep the streets repaired
around the plant, yes. We consider that a valid tax issue. As for the rest, well, whatever happened to
volunteerism. Whatever happened to city planning?
Lose some weight, pull yourself together. Take a little care in your appearance. Show me how
much you care. And for god's sake, stop nagging. Meanwhile, the furniture begins to disappear. The
cupboard gets bare. The loved one demands ever more and more ostentations of love. But does not
reciprocate.
Over the rubber chicken, the mayor made nice noises about the computers in the
library. The computers in the schools. The computers at the girls and boys clubs. "Yes, " said Walt
Simpson to Francis' ear only, "let's drink to that."
"Let it go," Francis said. The mayor was of their own party. A mayor or any party would have
done the same. He understood only too well. And when Walt Simpson looked at him with amazement –
or feigned amazement – he said again, "Let it go."
"what are you," Walt Simpson said, "one of the fucking Beatles?"
How do you run for city council without establishing how you think the city is going to get
money to keep itself going? That is, how do you do that without mentioning property taxes? How do
you do the doubletalk required to take a noble stand – "This is our city. We must find it in ourselves the
steadfast faith that its problems can be solved." Oh yes, he had actually said that. He had said that many
times. People loved it. Rich people loved it. The poor people loved it. Church groups loved it. Party
picnics ate it up with the free coleslaw. They all thought he meant somebody else. They never asked him
what they were supposed to have steadfast faith in.
Well, Francis knew he was a councilman almost by default. It didn't pay well. He'd had to keep
on working at the hospital, and on some very unforgiving shifts to keep his income up. It was almost
public service. And now, running for congress, well, wasn't that almost a joke too? When was the last
time a democrat won this particular seat, which took in so much of the steadfastly republican suburbs
(oh yes, they had their faith too). They expected him to lose. There would be no humiliation in it.
Or at least no more than the usual amount. So long as he made the appearances. So long as he
spent his own money on transportation. So long as he encouraged the groups who were always on his
side, well, it would only prove once again that he had fought the good fight. Nobody would chastise him
because you can't change the status quo.
Well, you can change it. But you need some luck. You need some circumstances. Francis was not
altogether sure that the campaign of the first man in history to win the Democratic nomination for
president was going to be that set of circumstances. He even had a suspicion of sorts that his own
nomination might not have happened if Hillary Clinton was the party's choice. That was just suspicion, of
course.
These were thoughts hardly worth thinking about. So why did Francis think them? Because he
didn't want to think about the real problem in his life, the pain that would go on and on, long after the
lost election. The knowledge that he was the rejected lover. That he had been found wanting.
For some reason he was remembering whatshername lately, when he hadn't thought about her
in years. "You're too nice, Francis," she had said to him. "You're such a good person. You're the best
feminist I know (strong praise, especially in those days). You're the best human being." And she stressed
human being, as if she were making reference to some unique character. The real human being. But. It
was all preamble to the "but. ""But there's just something…" her voice trailing off. "I don't know what it
is. Maybe I think you're too good for me."
He had offered, only partly in jest, to be badder in the future. And she had looked at him with
pity and actually said, "I don't think you could, Francis. And I certainly wouldn't want to be the one
responsible for making you think you had to be."
And then she was gone. And then it was all annulled, which in the eyes of the Church, meant it
had never been. How come he had so much memory of something that had never been? And now, what
was he going to do with all those memories of the last twenty years. He supposed Amy was going
through some kind of annulment process in her mind, even now. Not a legal one, not a religious one, but
an emotional one, and that of course, was all the worse.
Seventeen
It so happened, many years ago, that Claire Layton (as she was then) had a conversation with
Rod Thwaite's mother. Of course, she had many conversations with Rod's mother back in those days,
but this one in particular had stayed in her memory, like a little bouquet of flowers. Like a bouquet of
flowers seen through a mist of the vision of other flowers, but still vibrant.
They were sitting at the kitchen table in Rod's parents' part of the house, the downstairs was
how she always thought of it. Because Rod's presence, it seemed to her, was everywhere in that house.
Not just his owning of the house, which was certainly significant, but of inhabiting it. Rod might have his
own quarters at the top of the house, but his being was everywhere in it.
mother, the accepting and friendly mother of the man she was currently sleeping with. Patsy Thwaite
was an interesting woman in her own way. In her many ways.
Not just in being Rod's mother, although Claire thought privately that there must have been
some kind of challenge in that itself. Rod could not have been an easy person to have as a child, as an
adolescent, as a returned soldier. Chaire's own childhood had been relatively trouble free and her own
children pretty tame, compared to what she heard from other people, and the newspapers – but
somehow she suspected that Rod's childhood had been a lot more complicated than that.
And all the other children. Because she seldom saw any brothers and sister of Rod's, Claire had
at first assumed he was an only child. A very premature assumption. He had laughed when she
supposed it. "Seven," he said. Seven brothers and sisters. Well, six brothers, one sister. They were all
older. They were all much older. His sister, the nearest to him in age, was nine years older. It meant, as
it were, that he had grown up as almost an only child, only with the ghosts of those others hanging over
him.
And they hadn't lived down here on the Ferry Street Extension either, but in one of the
scrubbier outlying towns (you couldn't even call them suburbs), a place called Mariaville. It was Rod who
bought the place on Ferry Street Extension, it was Rod who wanted to be in the city. His father, by then
long past the age of retirement, and penniless but for social security, hadn't been able, apparently, to
resist the desires of his youngest son – and his wife, who was more than happy to pull up stakes and
move to the city, any city.
A country woman. That brought up certain stereotypes to Claire's mind – the woman who sold
vegetables at the stand near where she and Charlie had a weekend cottage, various women in movies,
heroic women from novels written much earlier in the century. Oh, Claire knew a lot about country
women and she knew nothing, really.
Rod's mother was not a woman who made quilts or wonderful dinners. She did no canning or
freezing or preserving. She did not make her own dresses. She had never milked a cow or fed a chicken.
And she had hated, for the better part of her life, she had hated living in the country.
It turned out she was from Duyktown. She'd been born on one of the back streets, in an area
that was now ghetto and drug ridden, but in those days had been simply a little out of it. Her father
worked at Amalgamated. She had married Willard Thwaite against his wishes and her mother's too -and everyone else in her family, apparently. And he took her away to Mariaville, where he had a small
and useless farm, where he repaired bicycles, where he put shingles on people's roofs, where he could
drink and watch television and curse the world at his own leisure. Which he had done for thirty years
and more and she had made do, without any country woman skills, only a kind of proud determination.
Where were the other children? Where were the grown-up siblings of Rod Thwaite. Claire had a
brother herself, whom she seldom saw, and it would not have surprised her to hear that they were gone
to Chicago or Nevada or East Podunk. But she didn't like to ask.
"It's not a mystery," Rod had said, when she could no longer contain her curiosity, and put
forward a tentative question. keep from bringing up the subject of his missing siblings. "They couldn't
deal with the old man."
"But your mother," Claire couldn't keep herself from saying, "they cut themselves off from her
too?"
Rod shook his head. It was perhaps something he didn't know much about. And when Rod didn't
know about something, it was not likely that he would speculate. He seemed to guard himself against it.
But then he said, "I think Archie is in jail. Well, probably not anymore."
"He was the oldest?"
"Nah." Rod seemed to think for a moment. "Raymond was the oldest. He would be older than
you by now." He laughed. "Well he was always older than you. He was born before my parents got
married. But don't tell my mother I told you so. He's a doctor."
"A doctor?" Claire said, with more surprise than she had meant to show.
"Yeah," Rod said. "Why not? He won a scholarship and the old man couldn't keep him from
going, so he went to school and then he went to school some more, I don't know. I never met Raymond.
Lucy told me about him."
"Lucy," Claire said. "That's the sister. Well, where is she?"
"What difference does it make?" Rod said.
"But you knew her. Don't you wonder?"
"I didn't wonder," Rod said. "I know. She's a dyke."
It was 1989 after all and not so much reason to be surprised. "Oh," Claire said. "And your
parents didn't approve?"
"I don't think she ever asked them," Rod said.
"But your mother," Claire said. "Oh dear, I keep saying that. Doesn't she care?"
"Oh, she knows," Rod said. "She knows everything."
It was a couple of years later before Claire learned anything about Rod's other four siblings:
Matthew, Terry, Jack and Morgan. It was as if they held no interest for anyone in the world but her.
Matthew worked on oil rigs. Terry died in Korea. Jack was a gambler and had, in fact, moved to Nevada.
Morgan, like Archie had vanished into the criminal world. They just weren't around anymore.
Claire never spoke of Patsy Thwaite's other children to her. She wouldn't have known how to
begin. And certainly not how to go on afterwards. She could only surmise the pain. And here they were
now, those two almost comical lovers who had escaped from their families (or from Patsy's family
anyway; Willard claimed to have no kin, even in 1938), living in their son's house, not talking to any of
their own children.
Well, you could say the old man (Willard, Claire corrected herself; she had no argument with
him, nor any intimacy, why would she use that name for him?) didn't talk to Rod either. Or too much
anyway. He did not talk to Claire, except to nod his head, almost grudgingly, when she came into the
room. And to leave soon afterwards. Then she would hear the television booming in their living room.
Patsy had never actually apologized for this behavior, but once, she had shook her head and said, "He
can't help himself." And that was that.
At least it meant that she could talk with Patsy in relative privacy, while Rod was out doing
whatever he was doing. (What would it cost him to say he had to go over to Albany to pick up some
parts? Well, who knew.) He didn't seem to mind parking her with his mother. In fact, she noticed that
Francis got parked there often as well – and sometimes Francis would just show up on his own. And
Claire remembered many conversations between the three of them, Francis, Patsy Thwaite, and herself.
But the conversation that stuck in her mind didn't include Francis. Except as the unacknowledged
subject matter, perhaps.
It always seemed sunny in Patsy Thwaite's kitchen. That couldn't have been true, the weather in
upstate New York being what it is, but the house having nothing but the river on its kitchen side always
got what sun there was. The windows were tall and uncurtained. The kitchen table sat in front of the
windows. They would drink coffee. Patsy Thwaite had a pot of coffee going all the time in the Mr. Coffee
that sat next to the stove. It was terrible coffee, just as the coffee Rod made was also terrible, but Claire
was aware she wasn't there for the coffee.
"Love is hard," Claire found herself saying. That surprised her, but they had only a few moments
ago had a few words with Francis, who was stuck in his own problems. Yes, this must have been fairly
early in her relationship with Rod. This must have been before Francis found Amy, or Amy found him.
Yes, it had been a time that Claire sometimes thought of as Before Yonnie – although it wasn't really
before Yonnie, considering that Yonnie had been the force that brought her into Francis' Mulberry's
orbit and thence to his friend, Rod. But it was before what Claire thought of, sometimes with wry
amusement and sometimes with real anger, as Yonnie's Big Adventure, the adventure that got them all
inextricably involved with Yonnie's children. She had resisted that. She had, thanks to Francis Mulberry,
escaped it, mostly.
Claire steers her mind back to Patsy Thwaite's kitchen, the evil smelling coffee in the Mr. Coffee
carafe, the sun on the river, which you could just see from the kitchen window (no wonder they had no
curtains). And it was a newish time in her relationship with Patsy Thwaite. Claire was a just a person Rod
had left on his mothers doorstep, as he may have left others, for all Claire knew, and they still conversed
the way strangers do. Friendly strangers, but strangers, nonetheless.
Well, Francis was so sad in those days. It was almost hard to remember that. He'd come into his
own so much and lost that faint air of melancholy he'd seemed to carry around in those days. But those
days – that was a different Francis. It wasn't that he whined and complained. Not at all. He was, in that
way, the same courteous Francis she had always know. And of course she had known him before she
knew Rod Thwaite or his mother. She had known him as the child of a neighbor.
God, that was weird enough. It seemed like she had been constantly in battle with that
weirdness. It didn't help much that Francis' parents – and Rod's as well, of course – were enough older
than herself not to be exact contemporaries. They still felt that way. And she was running around, like
some daffy thing trying to recapture her youth with these people's sons. She had often thought she
must look worse than ridiculous. Evil, even.
Except, not with Patsy Thwaite, who must have been in her late sixties at that time. God, how
old was the woman? And how did she survive. Well, Patsy had treated her as being precisely the age of
her son and his friends. It made no never mind.
So when Claire said, "Love is hard," she might have been referring to her plight, about which
Patsy Thwaite knew less than nothing, but she might have been talking about Francis.
And Patsy Thwaite had said, "It always is for them. They need it more, men."
"More?" Claire had said. "But they're always laughing at us and saying we're the romantics."
"They can't admit it," Patsy Thwaite said. Then she had said the thing that Claire always would
remember. "Romance is something else. We're the ones who need romance. Romance is magic. We
need magic to convince ourselves we have to be with them as much as they need us to."
Eighteen
Founder's Day in Duyktown, August 6, 2006, dawned, as it so often did, bright and sunny. There
was always a rain date, because of the parade, but old timers could tell you how seldom it ever got
used. August is as irritable a month in Duyktown as anywhere else, even as moist, but for some reason,
in Duyktown, it seldom rained on the day of the parade.
Francis, in his so empty and lonely house, was up at 6:30, which was ridiculous since nothing
would begin happening until nine in the morning and he had little to do, but turn on the sprinklers (it
had been a particularly dry summer that year), feed the dog and cat (theoretically Amy's dog and cat,
but he had a feeling she didn't plan to take them; that may have been just part of his dour memory
since whatshername when she left had left him with a gerbil and a fish tank). "Whatever," he said to the
dog, busily scarfing down her breakfast. A big dog, part Labrador, part something that gave her a curious
look around the ears – instead of that stolid submissive air which Labradors seemed to feign. Her name
was Gretchen, for reasons Francis did not understand.
The cat was Siamese, or almost Siamese. He had bought it for Amy as a birthday present from a
fellow councilman who claimed the mother at least had papers. The kittens not so much, but they had
been charming to look at, all eyes and big ears. The cat, named Max, had turned out not to be as cute as
he had seemed as a kitten, but had been with them for three years now. Gretchen and Max.
"Is there some reason our animals have these Germanic names?" he had once asked Amy, at
least partly in jest. And she had turned such a horrified look on him that he hadn't persisted. Gretchen
and Max. Was he going to find out at this late date that she had been having an affair with someone
named Max?
"Stop talking to yourself," Francis said to himself, amiably enough. The dog named Gretchen
wagged her tail and looked hopeful. The cat named Max wound around his ankles and then, seeing
nothing more was forthcoming, went into the sunroom to lie in the sun on the braided rug next to the
patio doors.
Francis made himself a poached egg – it was one of his favorite challenges – and ate it on a
piece of dry toast. He's was getting too old to have an egg every day but today was a special occasion in
more ways than one. He probably wouldn't see anything to eat until after the parade, or if it was too
crowded around the concessions, or he ran into people he had to talk to, it would be after he got home
that night.
That was because he never attended the post-religious brunch. Tickets for that were always at a
premium and he had given his away to one of his valuable campaign workers, a woman who stood at
the register in Food Giant and yet seemed to have the time to break her back over Francis' ideals. Since
his ideals were feeling tattered this morning – hell, everything about him was feeling tattered – that
seemed only fair, that somebody should get something out of it.
After eating he took his shower and dressed appropriately, suit, tie, American flag tie clip, all but
the jacket, to be blessed over by the multiverse of clergy hw would shortly be facing. Then he retrieved
the Gazette from his front step and sat down with it for the time remaining before he would have to
leave. The headline, of course, was: "Duyktown Faces the Future With Confidence." Which was
something the mayor had said at his big press conference yesterday, announcing that the parade would
take place (surprise, surprise) and that Duyktown was facing the future with confidence.
There had also been a big pileup on the Thruway, which, along with its horrific pictures, made
the space beneath the fold and didn't add a great deal to the mayor's message. Normally, on the kind of
news day you could expect in Duyktown in August, the girl scouts would have been there, announcing
that their cookie sale would begin in September. Not exactly news either, but they always like to appear
on the same page as the mayor.
His phone rang. It was Amy. "I wanted to give you one more chance to say yes to my coming to
the awards presentation tonight," she said.
"No, that's all right."
"Are you sure. I'm here in town for a couple days. It wouldn't be any problem."
"Are you staying with your friend?" he asked her.
"Of course not!" she said sharply. "I wouldn't do that. He's in Rochester, anyway."
"Where are you staying then? If I'm allowed to ask."
"I'm in Albany," she said, after a pause. I'm staying with some friends I have here. Don't worry,
they're discreet."
"I don't need you to show up for the awards," Francis said finally. There was a silence and then
he said, "Thanks for offering."
"That's all right," she said. "I guess you'll want me around for the picnic. on Labor Day."
Considering that everybody in the Democratic party from the district would be there. "Yeah," he
said. "If you're going to pretend to still be my wife on election day, I guess you better pretend to be my
wife on Labor Day."
"Francis I'm sorry this is so hard," she said.
"Think nothing of it," he said. Then, "Oh, oh, it's time for me to go. I'll be in touch to talk about
Labor Day, all right?"
"Of course," she said. "I haven't changed my cell phone number."
He didn't even comment on that. He understood what that meant. They were on the same
contract. Sooner or later she was going to have to be changing it. One more thing. All these little things
like knives in the gut, every time he turned around. "You could have told me after the election," he said
suddenly. He hadn't mean to say that, but there it was.
"Oh," she said. "No, that wouldn't have been right. I mean, the timing. Oh Francis, I don't know
what I mean. You know."
"Never mind," he said. "Sorry I said that. Bye."
And let himself hang turn off the phone before she had a chance to say anything more.
Then he put on his suit jacket and headed for City Hall.
The rites of blessing were as hard to take as ever. Well, why wouldn't they be? There was
something about ecumenicism that made it all feel trivial. He couldn't help feeling that. He supposed
everybody there felt it, making this not a religious occasion but a political one. This year it was the pries
from St. Agnes who gave the final benediction. He looked as sandblasted by the occasion as Francis felt.
And as far as Francis knew, Father Pete had nothing else to feel blasted about – unlike himself – and so it
must be pure boredom. Had they all looked so jaded? Francis couldn't tell. The Methodist minister who
did the homily had actually told a political joke with a minister (not unlike himself, one felt) as he butt of
it. That had gone down well. The mayor had once again told everybody Duyktown looked to the future
with confidence, and this time, also with faith in the power of the Almighty to help sustain them. Grand.
He skipped the brunch, as planned, and went out to the parade assembly to help out there.
They always needed help at the parade assembly which always, no matter how many times the people
in charge had done it, turned into a cacophony of bands tuning up, horses neighing, people chattering
and wandering around, little children in fancy costumes being pursued by their mothers who were trying
to keep the somewhere near the floats they were supposed to be on. It would be a good two hours
before they finally took off. He went to the refreshment stand which had been set up just to cater to this
occasion and helped give out tiny cups of water or sweet cider to participants who wandered up. There
were also doughnuts, a controversial thing because somebody always claimed the grease and crumbs
had spoiled the look of their float. And some didn't want their children eating what they saw as junk
food. And the various band directors were enraged to find their marchers wandering off, instruments in
hand, to get food and then stand around, instead of assembling.
Most of the adults who were in charge of the parade seemed to think it ought to assemble right
now and then what? Stand there for an hour and a half? Would they do that themselves? Well, in a
certain sense, they were prepared to weren't they, right here, right now. But would they have been
prepared to do that when they were teenagers, when they were little children wearing bows and
starched costumes? After a while somebody spelled him at the refreshment stand and he went to where
the floats were assembling. There was always a need for somebody to help repair the decorations,
retake the fancy paper, reclip the signs to their stanchions, go and get something somebody forgot. And
the time passed, even though many of those assembled were beginning to show they had no faith it
ever would.
"Hey Councilman!" somebody called out. "Come on over and be part of school spirit!" It was the
float for this year's upcoming varsity football team. There they were in their uniforms. They'd been
practicing already. The coach who was with them looked over to see who was being hailed and waved
his arm in Francis direction.
"Hey, yeah!" he said. "Mr. Congressman to-be, come on and show it for the school."
Francis jumped aboard. "I'm not even an alumnus," he said to the coach. "I went to Rose Hill."
The young coach laughed. "Who cares?" he said. "You live in the city now, right?"
"So do I," the coach said, "but that's because they make me."
"Well, given my present job, they'd be p pretty mad at me, if I didn't too," Francis said.
"Yeah, but you chose it. Hey, get in position!" he said to his players. They formed a loose
huddle, arms around each other's shoulders. Ready to turn around at a moment's notice and wave to
their fans. It was a good place to be. The coach gave him a football helmet, donning one himself. Then
draped over his shoulder a sash that read, "Team Spirit" and "GO DUYKTOWN."
It always amazed Francis that there enough people left over in Duyktown to form a crowd for
watching the parade. It was a very slow parade too. It began down by the high school, which was the
assembly point and wound its way down Union Street until it intersected with State. Then they marched
up State until they reached Jay, would around Jay, making a big circle and eventually came back to State
again and marched down to Division Street, and up it to City Hall.
At City Hall people were hanging from the balustrades and perched on the statues. They waved
and cheered. In front of the float he was on was the Duyktown High Marching Band. They made a
ferocious noise and were greeting with cheers and whistles. And there was no need to talk to anybody.
It was all just about being part of the parade.
Nineteen
Rod Thwaite was like his father in having less to say than most people expected. This was
probably the only way he was like his father and Rod was aware of it. He didn't wonder much about it. If
he did at all, it was probably only to reflect that women always had more to say than men. And so, what
else could he be like. It he had known his older brothers sooner, he might have had to revise that. It was
true that his sister whatshername had a lot to say always, but then, as it turned out, as he discovered
the few times he actually made contact with them, so did his brothers Archie and Raymond. So go
figure.
Francis, he couldn't help noticing, also had a lot to say under most circumstances. And Leo had
been talkative like that too. Rod had always viewed it as an aberration. Mr. Mulberry was a talker too.
Of course, maybe he'd had to get that way if he was going to run a store. You have to be able to chat
people up if you hope to sell them anything.
Or maybe some families are all talkative. It was more than Rod could figure out. But it did
bother him on occasion to think he was at all like the old man. There, that was the crux of it. Francis
would have probably loved to talk with him about this, but was not about to get the chance.
He would probably have said something like, "Well, what was wrong with your father? I think he
was very interesting."
And that would have been true. Francis had obviously found the old man interesting. Got knows
why – and Francis, oddly enough, was one of the few people the old man would really talk to. Not much,
that was for sure, but talk. Not just grunts and nods, which was pretty much what everybody else got. If
they were lucky.
Rod had even been driven by curiosity (an odd experience for him) enough to ask, "What the
hell do you and the old man talk about?"
And Francis had said, "What?" as is there was nothing unusual in any of it all.
"You talk to him more than he talks to my mother," Rod said.
"Really?"
"Really."
"Well, let's see. Yesterday after supper," – for this was in the period when Francis, a poorly paid
orderly at the hospital, had become a kind of regular supper guest of the Thwaites – "we talked about
fishing. He said you're a pretty good fisherman, but you don't have enough patience to really make it
pay."
Rod had to laugh at that. It was the old man all right. The old man could sit out on the river for
hours without moving. God, if he didn't have to come in finally to go piss, he could probably sit out there
for weeks at a time. Rod couldn't sit that long on a boat. In the first place, he didn't have that kind of
patience, but to tell the truth, he didn't much like being in a boat at all. He found the way the river was
under there, pushing and prodding and paddling them around just a little creepy. It was like sitting on
the back of some animal you had no control over.
Rod preferred motorcycles. You had control over them. You knew what they were doing,
because they couldn't do anything unless you told them to. The river was just strange. If he hadn't
needed an excuse to have a boat, he probably would never have gone fishing at all.
"But you don't fish," he said to Francis.
"Are you kidding?" Francis said. "My dad goes fishing every vacation. I've fished in almost every
state in the union."
"Your father took you fishing?"
"Well, yeah, just like yours."
"Nah," Rod said. "The old man never took any of us fishing. I never did any fishing till I moved
here. When we lived in Mariaville, the old man went fishing by himself."
Francis looked surprised, but then, Francis looked surprised a lot, Rod had noticed.
"I got the impression you and your father fished a lot together."
"Now," Rod had told him. "If the old man wants to go fishing now, he has to ask me. It's my
boat. He doesn't have a boat. Hell, he never had a boat. He always had to borrow somebody's. now it's
my boat he has to borrow."
"Oh," Francis said.
"So what else do you talk about?"
"What? Oh, birds."
"Birds?"
"Yeah, last week he was telling me all the kinds of birds you get here by the river, that are
different from the birds on the lake in Mariaville."
So the old man thought about birds. That was something new. "Wait a minute," Rod said, "who
brought it up?"
"Well, I may have," Francis said. "I was just asking him if he'd seen any hawks on the river. My
father says there are a lot of hawks on the river because of the otters and moles."
"You talk to your father about the river too."
"Sure. Why not? Among other things."
Oh sure. Among other things.
What was the longest conversation Rod ever had with his father? He couldn't get that idea in
focus. It seemed in his memory that any conversation he ever had with his father was no more than a
couple of sentences long. They certainly didn't talk out on the river! His father would say, "Don't move
around so much, you scare the fish,"
And Rod would say, "For Christ sake, my ass is going to sleep."
And his father would say, "Nice talk."
But that longer conversation was somewhere at the back of Rod's mind. Something about it.
Something about, oh yeah, Archie.
His father had said, it was a wonder this had never come from his mother, "You know you have
another brother."
"Yeah, Raymond," Rod had said.
"Besides him. And whatshisname. You have a brother named Archie."
"Archie? Like in the comic books?" Rod was thirteen at the time, so that was what had occurred
to him.
"What comic books,?" his father had said. "Archie. He was our second son. Born in 1938."
Which sounded like ancient history to Rod, which it might as well have been. It was like trying to
imagine his parents young. No way.
"So what happened to him. Is he dead?"
And the old man made a face. "Worse," he said. "He's in jail."
"In jail? Since when?"
"Since before you were born."
"How come I'm just hearing about this now."
"Your mother doesn't like to talk about it. I just thought you should know."
Why? That was what Rod wanted to ask, but you didn't say that to the old man. "Is he getting
out sometime soon?" Rod asked instead.
The old man made a face like he was going to spit, but instead he said, "Probably not."
Twenty (epilogue)
Maybe it’s because we crave revenge more than survival, Francis was thinking, as he looked
around the table at the Beef and Brew and saw, not elation, but simple acceptance. Try as we might, we
don’t really want to forgive our enemies. And the enemy of my friend is my enemy. But at least they
were all here, Rod with a cane, it’s true, and a still vibrant scar on his face. A scar he would probably
have forever.
And Claire. Maybe it was a kind of revenge that Claire was here, but none of them had brought
it about, so how could it be revenge? They had wished for it certainly. And here they were – not quite
the same people they had been those many years ago, but still connected. In some way or other.
There weren’t many people in the Brew this time of night on a Tuesday. Other than that, it
seemed much the same as ever. Things change in our lives, he thought. People appear and disappear
but sometimes you get an illusion that no change has happened at all. Of course it was an illusion. How
many more years could the Beef and Brew sit here on the corner of Decay and Despair before it too
closed its doors. Probably, it was a rueful thought, until the last big bust brought the owners themselves
into court. That ought to do it. In the meantime, here they were, almost the only people in the place.
There were other places they could have gone. They could any one of them have afforded
something fancier and they might have found it, even in Duyktown, and Rod’s mother might have been
more comfortable in a quieter, cleaner place (though she didn’t seem unhappy). Francis didn’t ask
himself what Claire might have wanted. He wondered if she knew. He wondered if she was content.
She looked calm, neither happy nor unhappy. Of course she was dressed well, in something dark
gray with a brilliant blue blouse. Her hair, which he noticed, was becoming more white than silver,
glowed with health as always, and good care. She caught him looking and smiled. At her side, Yonnie, in
one of her long full dresses, her dog on her knee, her big bag over the back of the chair, tossed her head
back and then squinted. But she said nothing.
In front of her, as in front of the others, was the remains of the meal they’d had. Nothing fancy
at the Beef and Brew. Burgers of various kinds, or salads, of which little remained but the grease on the
plate or a vagrant French fry. The odd memory of how they used to sit in the Brew and smoke came into
his head. Not just tobacco! He almost laughed. Now the place was clean of smoke and free of obvious
infractions on it surfaces, if not clean of the grime of decades. The cigarette burns were still indelible on
the edges of the tables. And the memories, oh they would be smoky forever.
He cleared his throat. Four people looked at him, and so did Yonnie’s dog, who was perched on
her lap. The dog looked the most attentive of them all, its eyes bright, its pink tongue hanging out. The
others seemed merely quizzically attentive. Patsy Thwaite looked solidly amused. And she was the first
one to speak. “Francis has something to tell us,” she said.
“How did you know that?” he asked, although he was not surprised.
She didn’t bother to answer, but simply sat calmly, dipped just that slightest but noticably bit to
the left, both hands on the table at either side of her plate. Francis shrugged. Of course it was not
necessary for her to answer.
“I do have something to tell you,” he said.
Rod put his elbows on the table and looked up. The scar made him look suddenly old. When had
that h happened? And there seemed to be more gray in his hair.
“He’s moving!” Yonnie said, with a great jolt that nearly unseated her dog, who turned around
quickly, almost in midair, before seating himself.
“Not very far,” Francis said, to all their inquiry. “I’m going into the paramedic course in at the
Community College in Troy.”
There were oohs and aahs and smiles of acceptance and congratulations. Rod stood and shook
his hand. Yonnie, with the dog under her arm, stood and kissed him. “I’m so glad you’re not going to
New York,” she said.
Patsy Thwaite, who was grinning, put one hand under her cheek and leaned on it. “You to have
done that long ago,” she said, but that will do.
“You aren’t leaving politics because of the election?” Claire said. “I mean, I hope not?”
Francis shook his head. The election seemed like such a long time ago. “Well,” he said, “of
course if I won, I wouldn’t be doing this, but I guess I was a little relieved not to win. It was kind of all
over for me before that.”
“And you’ll meet a nice girl in college,” Yonnie said. “I foresee it.”
Francis laughed. “Maybe not a girl, Yonnie.”
Outside in Duyktown, the evening darkened into night. The big windows became opaque.
Somewhere a siren keened and somewhere else a car horn sounded. Someone had put money in the
music machine and Patsy Cline’s voice reminded them for the thousandth time how sorrowful emotion
can be. Across the table Rod was saying something to Claire and she was looked bemused. Next to him,
Yonnie was feeding her dog the last of her French fries. Patsy Thwaite winked at him.