The Widower's Tale Read online

  I beheld a sudden mental projection of my heirloom beech wearing, like a turban, a miniaturized Guggenheim Museum.

  I rolled over and swam the length of the pond, back and forth several times. I tried to concentrate on the pleasure of my increasing fitness rather than the treacly human birdsong that was, I feared, to taint a ritual whose importance to me no one else could ever know.

  As for my running routine, that was exercise pure and painful. I had decided to make it a daily obligation in April of that year, on the day after my seventieth birthday, a month after my retirement from Widener Library: a time in life when it’s easy to see yourself as headed downhill fast. And so, though I would vary my route in other ways, I always turned left at the foot of my driveway, aiming myself up the long hill toward the old meetinghouse and the town green.

  Not long after settling into my regimen of touring the nearby streets on a regular basis, I began to notice a number of onerous signs that the character of my town was under siege. Especially disturbing was that I did not know whether these changes had been going on behind my back for years or had arisen recently, even suddenly; whether I could hope that, if the latter was true, the changes might somehow be reversed.

  I noticed the first affront in May, the day I decided to turn onto Fox Farm Lane—a road I had not taken in years, since it is a self-referential loop serving only its residents. I’d passed but a handful of houses when I noticed that several wore new coats of paint in highly untraditional colors, that a cobbled drive had been laid where I remembered a long dirt track, that two dozen young maples had been planted at robotically regular intervals along the boundary of a lawn, each one cabled and braced, replacing a good length of the tumbledown antique stone wall flanking the road. I was thinking what a pretty penny those trees must have cost, what a tasteless shame it was to have dismantled that wall, when I rounded the first sharp curve and saw it.

  I would have been no more shocked to come upon a trailer park than I was to behold the addition on the Harris Homestead: a vast, malignant cube of clapboard and glass jutting abrasively into the surrounding woodland. It was nothing short of a cardinal sin against the soul of that fine, stoic saltbox.

  The Harrises have not lived in their eponymous house for nigh on two centuries, but this was the sort of town—or had been the sort of town—where people who bought such a house, formerly the sole dwelling on your typically rugged New England farm, regarded themselves not as owners but as stewards, keepers of the historic flame. The addition featured an aggressively shiny picture window and bulbous skylights—three!—as well as a new chimney in a rough stone that clashed with the center chimney of faded brick.

  Had our relationship been true to its cordial façade, I would have rushed home and called my next-door neighbor—Laurel Connaughton, chairwoman of the Historical Forum—to inquire about this atrocity. The opening of Elves & Fairies in my barn was hardly the crux of our covert feud; there was her Nosey Parker quest to open a wall in my own ancient house (in which she believed there was a “secret passageway,” based on her furtive, inebriated knockings at a Christmas party many years past) and, dating even further back, our endless dispute over the maintenance of shoreline on our side of the pond.

  Year after year, Mistress Lorelei insisted on “grooming” the tall grasses and thickets on her part of the perimeter, imperiling the communities of bullfrogs and birds that relied on this tangle for habitat. Without my permission, however, she could not spray for mosquitoes. In part just to irritate her, I had installed half a dozen bat houses on the trees that divided our two lawns. (Actually, my grandson Robert installed them.) She was terrified of the creatures and tried to make an official protest. Hal Oxblood, director of the Conservation Commission, informed her that bats consume several times their body weight in mosquitoes on a daily basis, thus fulfilling her ultimate objective. I did not correct him on this point, though Robert had told me it’s a modern myth: a useful myth, he pointed out, since bats need all the good PR they can get. (In fact, he told me, their appetite tends toward moths and beetles.)

  Alarming discovery number two occurred a week or so after my unsettling tour of Fox Farm Lane. The first premature heat wave had struck, and the sky was clear, yet all of a sudden I felt rain as I ran onto Wharton where it forks away from Quarry. Puzzled, I stopped. I held out my hands. Lo and behold, the people who’d bought the Weisses’ house (people who lived a quarter mile from me but on whom I had never laid eyes in their year-plus of residence) had installed an in-lawn sprinkler system. Where did they think they were living, Grosse Point? Yet I had seen no complaints about this—or about the architectural ravaging of the Harris Homestead—in the pages of the Grange. Was I the only citizen who regarded these developments as vulgar and outlandish, a sign that the end of Matlock as I knew it was surely at hand? Perhaps the absence of outrage in the letters column was in itself another sign of the end.

  I began to hunt for further aesthetic offenses—and therefore saw one nearly every day that summer, from the faux Williamsburg streetlamps planted in front of our nineteenth-century meetinghouse to the sudden, stunning absence of the magnificent alluvial boulder that had rested literally forever at the bottom of Cold Pond Way. (Who in the world had removed it? Where in the world had it gone?) Yet what convinced me we had crossed a line was something far less monumental: my sighting in July of two Bernese mountain dogs, a pair of opulently pampered creatures as black and shiny as limousines—and good Lord, nearly as big—fancy-pantsing along my road with their nymphet owner, her derriere barely the size of a grapefruit, her mane a cunningly gilded fleece, her T-shirt flecked with rhinestones.

  Clover had mentioned the dogs earlier that month, gushing on about what gorgeous animals they were, but my gut response on seeing them in the flesh was not so admiring. I looked at their collars—green bands printed with rows of red lobsters—and at their owner’s cantaloupe-colored loafers and in a synaptic flash recalled what old Ben Stewart had whispered to me at the candlelight service two Christmases past, just before his final heart attack. “Percy, mark my words: our lovely village has become, alas, an enclave.” I had humored him with agreement, though at the time I thought he was merely bitter about his sons’ insistence on selling his house, the surefire real estate bonanza outstripping all fondness for their childhood home, with its wide lazy porch and its pocket orchard of eight wizened apple trees that bore fruit without any coddling.

  As soon as I got home that day, the day of the dogs, I went straight to my OED (which Robert irreverently calls my “big dic”). I did not even pause to shower; sweat dripped from my bushy eyebrows onto the magnifying glass as I scowled down at the page. Enclave: a portion of territory entirely surrounded by foreign dominions. Ben was an English teacher at our top-notch elementary school, so he used words like surgical instruments.

  I sat down and began to take a mental tour of Matlock’s sinuous roads. Our one gas station, manned for decades by Vince Kaliski, a veteran of Okinawa whose wife ran the Girl Scout troop, had closed ten years before. Even the nearby house where Vince and Mary brought up their boys had been razed. More recently, Coiffure Cottage, a beauty salon dating to Cretaceous times, had morphed into a modern art gallery. Buck and Calvin, the plumber and the electrician I engaged to keep my house in working order, had sold their own houses and retired to Florida, none of their numerous sons willing to succeed them—or able to afford our rapidly bloating taxes. Since their departure, I had been forced to employ tradesmen from several towns away, fellows I would never encounter with pleasure at the P.O. or the deli counter at Wally’s. Some might have referred to Vince, Buck, and Calvin as “ordinary fellows” or “salt of the earth.” Such terms are merely code for men who’ve led lives in which boyhood dreams become a luxury, a whim, before boyhood even comes to an end.

  Where were these men now? Were they still alive? Even our elementary-school teachers, the Bens, could no longer afford to live among us.

  When I e-mailed Robert about the dogs,
I typed into the subject line Scylla and Charybdis. During my evening swim, I had a grandiose vision of myself as a lone, graying knight in his drafty castle, surrounded on all sides by Philistines of a novel variety: well schooled, well nourished, well informed (with information convenient to their collectively blinkered conscience), and sure of the ergonomic traction with which their stylishly countrified shoes met the ground.

  I was so worked up that night, I could not resist calling Robert’s mother as well. Trudy listened—she’s a good listener, which I’m sure makes her popular with patients—but she was hardly sympathetic. When I told her how much I missed Vince, Buck, and Calvin, she pointed out that I’d never socialized with them.

  “Socializing is not the only sign of kinship,” I said. “You women are not so aware of this. We knew what it was to have a meeting of the minds without some knitting circle. And now it seems as if whatever men I do see about town—and let me tell you, it’s rare to spot a man under sixty by daylight!—these men hold down hocus-pocus jobs. They’re ‘derivatives traders’ or ‘IT consultants.’ They have squeaky-clean nails and flannel shirts that came straight out of a mail-order parcel from L.L.Bean—which of course now belongs to some retailer run by the mob in Bayonne, New Jersey.”

  “Dad, those guys are prosperous, and so are you. You hate to hear it, but you have more in common with them than you ever did with Mr. Kaliski or the guys who cleaned our oil tank.”

  “No, I disagree with you there, my dear. And if you want to discuss income—isn’t that what you mean when you refer to prosperity?—I’m sure I never made half what Buck did! I understand he bought quite the boat after selling his house and cashing in his retirement savings.”

  “I’m not talking numbers, Dad, and you know it. It has to do with … station in life.”

  “Class, is that what you mean?”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  “But that’s my point. This used to be a town with many classes.”

  “Barely.”

  “We lived comfortably together, so you wouldn’t have noticed. We did not need ‘great rooms’ and three-car garages and central air and—”

  “Now you’re talking values,” said Trudy. “Which have changed since the days you’re talking about. You think Mr. Kaliski, if he were still around, wouldn’t want a hot tub?”

  “I wish you could have seen this town when your mother and I found this house—for a song! The roof was about to cave in, and anyone else would have given up on that barn. But not your mother. She said we would make this a ‘house for the generations.’ Some of our neighbors, people who didn’t know us from Adam, volunteered to pitch in. It was like an old-fashioned barn raising.”

  “Dad, I’ve heard all this before. It’s sweet. You and Mom lived in a different time, believe me. But you know what? Let it go. Because listen, can I tell you something, Dad? You are turning into a crank! You’ve always been on the verge, but now it’s finally happening.”

  The tour of my barn that was no longer a barn left me restless, despite my swim. So there I stood, just a few hours later, in The Great Outdoorsman. This establishment is the linchpin of business in motley downtown Packard, a town twenty minutes from Matlock that might as well be on the other side of an ocean. At its center, threatening to topple into a sluggish forgotten waterway, huddle three vast, mostly abandoned brick buildings that once housed shoe factories and a mill; only one has been renovated, bravely declaring itself to be the Packard Arts Center. The town’s houses, though old, are weary, not stately; its woods are more weedy than sylvan. Packard is like a poor relation to Matlock, invited to share a cup of grog at the gift-giving holidays; which is to say that Matlock residents fill The Great Outdoorsman and Packard’s other modest shops when their pockets are feeling a mite shallow. It also boasts a DMV office with a blessedly short line, a consignment shop whose furniture is perfect for your children’s first dormitory rooms, and a small, struggling cinema with third-run movies and lumpy velvet chairs from which the occasional spring protrudes to rip an unmendable hole in your trousers.

  But TGO, as it’s known, is one of my favorite stores, because it’s bright, filled with unpretentious useful things (from long johns to snowshoes), and still run by the family that founded it sometime around the Great Depression.

  My mission that day was to procure the swimming trunks with which I had promised Clover I would henceforth gird up my loins. I must have looked a little lost as I ran my hand through a rack of repellently slinky, skimpy garments, because a young woman came over and asked if I needed help.

  “Let’s see,” I said. “If you have access to a time machine that could transport me back to an era when men wore bathing suits that actually concealed something, the answer would be yes.”

  She laughed. “Oh, these are just the Speedos.”

  “As opposed to the Slomos?”

  She laughed again, her amusement genuine. I felt pleased with my sly little quip. “That’s very funny,” she said. “But follow me.”

  For the second time that day, an attractive woman was leading me forward toward the future. This one took me all the way across the store, through aisles filled with clothing for climatic conditions at the opposite end of the seasonal spectrum. TGO was not air-conditioned, and I began to perspire at the mere sight of all that fleece and flannel.

  “Here are the more traditional trunks,” she said when we reached a rack near the fitting rooms. “There’s not a lot left, I’m afraid. But all the swimwear’s half off now.”

  “Doesn’t anyone get a yen for a new suit in the midst of a heat wave like this? And do you honestly believe that someone’s going to purchase anything made of suede?” I pointed to a row of jackets lined with sheepskin.

  “The world is a strange and often illogical place,” said the young woman. “The answer to both of those questions would be yes.”

  This was not your typical sales gal.

  I turned my attention to the three swimsuits left in my size. At least they were cut to my expectations—and dirt cheap—but there was nothing subdued or solid. Two were faux Hawaiian, the third printed with a madras plaid I associate with people who join country clubs. I pulled out the two Hawaiians.

  “Well!” I turned toward a full-length mirror outside the fitting booths.

  “Don’t you want to try them on?” asked my handmaiden.

  “Not necessary. But lend me your opinion.”

  With a comic flourish, I struck what I imagined to be a surfing pose, legs akimbo, knees bent. Waistband stretched between my thumbs, I held one and then the other suit in front of me. “Devil? Or the deep blue sea? Pull no punches.”

  She stood back and narrowed her eyes. I noticed that she did not look like one of the freckled Irish wives from the large family that usually staffed the store. She was about Clover’s age, deeply tanned, and her hair was strikingly dark. I wondered if she cared that anyone could see it was dyed.

  “Hmm,” she said. “The pink pineapples would be a daring choice. You would turn heads in that one.… The hula girls are actually more conventional.”

  The pink pineapples (depicted on an aqua background) were indeed quite gaudy but ornamented a suit with a longer cut. Perhaps it would seem irrational to make the demure choice after having swum buck naked for so long, yet such was my preference. “Daring it shall be,” I concluded.

  “You won’t regret it.” My handmaiden held out her hand, and I extended mine to shake it. But she was merely reaching for the hangers.

  “Silly me,” I said when our hands collided awkwardly. “I thought I was to receive your congratulations. I will have you know that this is the first swimsuit I have purchased since I was in college.”

  “Well then, I’m glad you’re headed back to the water,” she said.

  I was about to explain my situation to her when I stopped myself. I laughed and shook my head.

  “What’s so amusing?” she said.

  “I’m having one of those—what youngsters so blithely
call ‘a senior moment.’ I thank you for your cordial assistance.”

  “A genuine pleasure,” she said, and she seemed to mean it.

  At the cash register, I counted out exact change and told her I didn’t need a bag. I also remarked that I had not noticed her working there before.

  “I started last month,” she said, “and I’m just part-time.”

  “Well, I hope to solicit your sartorial discretion in the future.”

  “What a charming thing to say.”

  “Likewise,” I told her. “There is a dearth of compliments in the world these days.”

  She expressed her agreement and handed me my new suit, neatly folded, along with the sales receipt. Then she said, “It’s always nice when the last customer leaves me smiling. Thank you for that.” I glanced at the large school clock on the wall; it was nearly a quarter past five. Almost any other clerk would have rushed me out by now.

  She locked the front door behind me and waved through the glass as I settled myself on the red-hot vinyl upholstery of my car. Whatever refreshment I’d gleaned from my earlier swim was moot. All the way home, I kept the windows wide open and drove as fast as I dared along the country roads. (Daring, yes that’s me! I thought, laughing at the image of myself all decked out in oversize magenta pineapples.)

  As I approached my driveway, I was chagrined to see the bunch of balloons tied to the much larger mailbox now adjacent to mine, the one that blared elves & fairies (purple letters, sans serif, lowercase). I groaned. “Now it begins,” I muttered. In two hours, the place would be crawling with E & F’s eager-beaver parents. I’d rented the movie Cape Fear (I was on a Mitchum kick) and planned to watch it, with my dinner, in front of a fan in Poppy’s dressing room. Never mind the heat up there; no one would spy on me.