John Finn

by Vincent McCaffrey

  ​It’s funny how you can recognize other people at a distance before you can think about it. It’s not always the hat, or the voice. Sometimes it’s the angle of a leg when they sit. That’s the way I knew who it was sitting on the bench down by the pond. It was a cold day. The sun was still out but the cold was left over from the night. There was a gray shell of ice on the water by the shore. Out beyond that, the water looked black and blue, battered by a small wind.

  ​I had to think about how to approach the situation. It seemed to me that I should get it right for once.

  I could see she was smoking. That was my fault, I suppose. I was a bad example when she was a little kid. She leaned forward on the bench, her arms folded, her legs crossed in a way guys can’t do and with the hood of her coat pulled up over her head, looking out over the water. What was going in that head? I ought to have some idea.

  Only after the fact did I see the lesson in it.

  ​Not in the smoking, which I still do sometimes, though I first quit long before Matty was born. Not in the small stuff. But in the bigger things. And there was no coincidence to my turning up there at that particular moment. I didn’t know exactly why I needed to be there, but I did. It gave me some needed perspective on things.

  ​It occurs to me that is the way novels should be written. They ought to be made up of the things that needed to be there. And that was exactly the kind of thinking that was filling my head that morning.

  Someone once told me there were really only two reasons to write a story. The first is to imagine making love to the woman or man we will never have because of our own faults. The second is to imagine doing the thing we would never do, out of our own fear.

  That was from Gary Apple. Another one of his Chekhovian ideas.

  I don’t think I believed him when he said it years ago, because he’s so full of that kind of thing. Instant wisdom. Prescriptions for living. By his own testimony, at school he was the student of Montaigne in philosophic contemplation over the matters of a simple life. That was while I was studying the broader part of the fool, proscribed by the very words I wrote, my ignorance on full display, as I fruitlessly sought the larger purpose to things.

  ​Gary was correct, perhaps. I think a good story is a pursuit, as it was with Ahab and his whale. Some part of a quest. But there must be something more to write about than your own predicaments. Such self-obsession is not healthy. There should be a philosophy to the things we do, though there seldom is. True or not, the greater meaning to things was always beyond my grasp while I screwed up the parts that mattered more to me—the small things that later filled my head at night. Of course, this works itself out in time, doesn’t it? In time, we are all dead.

  Whatever the case, I believe Gary is wrong about this much, because a novel without a philosophy is a meaningless series of actions and reactions. And philosophy is not personal, else it’s no philosophy at all. Navel contemplations are not what Montaigne was about either. He sought the universal from the personal and the particular. This doesn’t mean that Gary was wrong about everything. I think his understanding of the novel was right enough if you are only talking about mechanics.

  For instance, it is true that I am not in love with my Mary Andrews. Maybe that’s my problem now. I thought I knew her. I’d fashioned her from the scraps in letters and the household histories of her time. But I don’t love her. Is that because I don’t know her well enough to understand her? Perhaps. But I’m not sure understanding is always an impediment to love.

  And I can’t ignore the obvious fact. I may be wary of imagining myself in love with her because I see her too much as a daughter. I have taken the emotional role of Izaak Andrews in all of this and I’m unable to imagine what might be beyond that.

  To understand my yellow-haired Mary I would need to watch her doing those small things that make a life. I need to see her through the eyes of someone close enough to care to watch her. Someone who might recognize her at a distance just by the way she sits. Someone who might have loved her. Who did love her. I wanted to understand what might make someone else care enough to spend a part of his own life in pursuit of her—which is what love would do.

  My pursuer, my Ahab, would not be a peg-legged stalker, though he could be that. It is not just Melville who resorted to wooded legs for menacing support, but Stevenson as well. Long John Silver is the heart of Treasure Island. And it might be an interesting handicap to use in my own novel. The loss of fingers and limbs was common enough in those times. Infections were the curse of life. Better to cut off a smashed foot than take the chance it might fester. That is the way that Mary Andrews might have lost her finger. But I wanted an Ishmael more than an Ahab, and I wanted him whole. I wanted him young and full of himself and his own visions of better things. I suppose I wanted him to be more like I imagined myself to be once.

  Because it seemed to me he could not be the indentured boy who was killed and thrown in the well on top of Mary Andrews, I’ve made my pursuer the neighbor’s son instead. He is a tradesman. A leather worker and a patriot. What better way to define the conflict between himself and Mary’s father—between the rebel and the Loyalist. The patriot’s love must have been forbidden. Otherwise, they would have already been married and on their own. And though they were not married, it does not mean they had not been intimate.

  I’ve started again from scratch this past Wednesday morning. I have my Ahab and my Ishmael all-in-one. His name is Thomas Browne. James had told me I needed a whale. Well, I have some of that, at least.

  We know about Marco Polo. We know nothing of the Thomas or John who made the journey before but did not survive the fifth or tenth attack by bandits or were captured and suffered shortened lives as slaves. We know nothing of the traveler who died of thirst along the way. But we do know of the brave Dervla Murphy and Patrick Leigh Fermor, because they had the wits to survive and the wit to write about it. We know nothing of the unlucky adventurer who turned the wrong corner in the dark. And of the ones who survived their ordeals, we know nothing of those who did not write it down.

  It is Tom Browne, then, who will be the one who loved our Mary Andrews—who waited for her return after that fateful day in April, 1775. Brave and silent Thomas.

  But this was not what got me back to the scene of the crime. I drove out to Arlington yesterday morning because Mary Ellen called, while I was on duty at Connie Mac Security, to tell me that Matty had not shown up at school. This was a problem I did not want to deal with at that moment, but Mary Ellen wanted to talk, and that was that. The deal had been made with the divorce—if she needed help with the kids, I would be there. She taught an English class which let out at 11:45. She wanted me there at 12:15. I arrived early with a little time to kill, so it couldn’t hurt to look at the site of Mary Andrews’s death one more time on the way.

  Spy Pond fills the space at the bottom of the range of hills that form Arlington Heights. Below these hills, the rich soil spread by the Mystic River once grew crops to supply the markets of the city of Boston only a few miles away. It was from Spy Pond that a nineteenth century entrepreneur once made himself the “Ice King” by selling those pure frozen waters, cut into movable block each winter, all around the world, and even employing clipper ships to get his product to warmer climates. But it was the simple fall of water, close by, that originally made this place valuable—certainly not the rising of the rocky land above the pond. The old Concord Road twisted upward through the slopes there, following a natural break in the hills formed by the well-used Mill Brook. It was called Menotomy then, an Indian name for the falling waters, a path followed since ancient times by the very Algonquin tribe that gave Massachusetts its name.

  Today, the rise is hidden beneath the houses of surrounding neighborhoods. The structures themselves are large and close, their small yards and narrow streets are bordered by old and over-arching trees. The wide swath of Massachusetts Avenue marks the same Concord Road once traveled in the dark of night by Paul Revere, and no
w guarded tightly at the center of town by small shops and oversized municipal buildings. The string of water mills that ground flour from the grain of the fields below and cut the wood for the frames of the first houses can only be imagined amidst the modern congestion.

  And below this, about a half mile beyond where Revere’s path veered from Medford in the east, the Concord Road completes the bend of its more southerly route around the shores of Spy Pond from Cambridge and Harvard. It is right there that the Black Horse Tavern once stood at a junction of old paths. Now a discount gas station squats in its place.

  Across from the gas station there is an aging church with a handsome New England style steeple. But in 1775 there was only one church in the old precinct, and that one was back up the road, to the northwest, where Revere’s path from Medford joined the main thoroughfare, and the old “Highway’ to Watertown broke away along the far shore of Spy Pond to begin its run to the south-west.

  Except for the wide path of what is now Massachusetts Avenue, the confusion of streets and all this later construction made my appreciation nearly impossible—even the open swath created by Spy Pond does not allow for an unobstructed view amidst trees and school buildings and a tight knit rim of houses.

  Where the Andrews house once stood alone, the sound of Massachusetts Avenue traffic now swallows any real feel of the past I wanted. What had been farmland and pasture has long been crowded with homes built just before the turn of the twentieth century, when streetcars finally made a suburb of the place.

  I parked my car and walked into a side street, once a wagon path of rutted mud branching from the larger Concord Road that had become Massachusetts Ave. I stood there on the sidewalk in front of the house where the abandoned well had been discovered the year before. These newer houses now faced the convenience of the street, but the Izaak Andrews house had faced directly south, overlooking the end of Spy Pond and away from the main road. The barn behind it would have blocked some of the view toward the main thoroughfare, and the water well was about half way between the two, perhaps thirty feet from the back door and additionally shielded from public view by other outbuildings. These acres were Andrews’s land then, the land of his father, and his house was built when Izaak was just a boy.

  A passing car on the side street slowed, the driver obviously wondering at my interest. I smiled and said nothing. But the break in my thoughts brought the question to me once more about why then Izaak Andrews was known as a tavern keeper? Had one of his brothers taken over the task of working the soil? I had no clue to that yet. There was no Andrews Tavern in my books. The Andrews house had been known as an inn during his father’s time. That might have continued. And an additional living would have been made in any way possible, especially to serving drink.

  It occurred to me suddenly, with the sharpened edge of a cold hard sun bearing through the naked tree limbs above, that Izaak Andrews may have only worked as a tavern keeper, and that his actual job was at the Black Horse Tavern, it being the closest. And with that simple realization, came a flood of new insights into a distant moment.

  On the morning of April 18, 1775, members of the local Committee of Safety, leaders among the Minute Men, met at the Black Horse to discuss the stirring of activity reported from Boston, where the British General Gage was clearly preparing to put an end to the nascent revolt.

  John Hancock had been at the meeting, as well as Doctor Joseph Warren, Sam Adams, and Elbridge Gerry. It was there that lines of communications were planned with two riders, and Warren had sent word to Revere and Dawes to make an alert if necessary. If Izaak Andrews had worked there at the Black Horse Tavern, he might have heard of these arrangements. That could explain why he had left his home later that day, despite the impending events. General Gage had sent a small contingent up the road from Boston in advance of the punitive expedition, to scout the way, and they had stopped at another Inn near Harvard College. Izaak Andrews might even have known this, as word spread up the road concerning the British activities.

  When the girls were young, Mary Ellen and I often took them to the park and playground at the edge of Spy Pond. It was a favorite place. Especially to Matty. Now I wanted to think through my new realization concerning Andrews and how it might be used in my story. Walking further down what had been the old wagon path to the pond was unconscious. Of course, I might even have visited that place again without this inspiration, just for old times sake. Watching the girls play there amounted to some of the best moments of my life.

  The road passes now below the nineteenth-century railroad grade where flour was once hauled from the mills and ice carted from the pond. The tracks have been replaced by a bike path. The short tunnel that runs beneath this opens on the park. And it was right from there that I saw her sitting near the playground. Almost as if I should have expected it.

  Just as my cell phone rang.

  ​Mary Ellen is efficient. “Where are you?”

  I told her, “A few blocks away.”

  ​She said, “I’ll be outside, waiting for you. It’s cold. Don’t make me wait.”

  ​I told her, “I can’t just yet. Stay inside. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” and closed the phone.

  ​I couldn’t just stand there and watch from the shadows. I walked to the huddled figure, debating about what words to use. What to say.

  ​As I approached I could see that she was shivering. I stopped about ten feet from the bench and looked in the direction of her eyes.

  ​“You used to sit over there on the swing and do that. You used to stare out over the pond just like that.”

  ​She started with surprise and then frowned.

  ​“How did you find me?”

  ​I lied. “A guess.”

  ​She shook her head and looked away with a sigh and obvious disgust.

  ​I said, “We were worried.”

  ​She flicked her cigarette away. It seemed like a very adult gesture to me for a sixteen-year-old. “Sure. If you’re worried now, what’s it going to be like when I leave home for good? Geez.”

  ​I sighed a bit heavily myself before I could speak. The girls all kid me about that. They all do a wicked imitation of me sighing when I’m not sure what to say.

  I said, “It’ll be difficult. Like it was when your sisters left. Maybe worse with you. You’re the last. You’re the end of the line for us. We won’t be parents anymore. Not the same as we were. And we both liked that. Being parents and all. It was the best part.”

  ​She rolled her eyes under the assault. “Geez.”

  ​I asked, “Can I sit down?”

  ​She scooted over a bit. Not enough. I had to sit pretty close, so I put my hand around her shoulder. The shivering suddenly turned into a couple of quick sobs. Matty is not much of a crier. She complains quickly and loudly enough, but she doesn’t often cry. She did then. I waited a moment.

  Then I said, “What happened? Is it something you can tell me?”

  ​I took a tissue from my coat pocket for her nose. She never has tissues.

  ​“Eric!”

  ​“What did he do?”

  ​Her whole body shook with the words, “We broke up!”

  ​“Why?”

  ​She looked at me like I was stupid. Then she gave me an exaggerated shrug. “He’s a boy. He’s stupid. You told me to be careful because all boys are stupid.”

  ​I had to smile a bit at that.

  ​“What I said was, that all boys can be stupid.”

  ​“Well, he’s stupider than most.”

  ​“I suppose that must be true if he broke up with you. Whatever the reason.”

  ​She ignored that and started to jiggle her leg with impatience. I know that move. She does it just before she gets ready to run.

  ​I needed something to make her stay.

  ​I said, “You aren’t pregnant, are you?”

  It was the first thing that occurred to me. I suppose it’s the kind of thing every daughter’s father thinks about.
r />   ​Her leg stopped moving, and her jaw dropped open.

  ​She said, “What?”

  ​I said, “Good. That would make things a little more difficult.” And right then a thought occurred to me that had never really crossed my mind before. What about Mary? Maybe Mary Andrews had been pregnant. But what I said was, “Because in the old days, you would have to marry him, and I wouldn’t want you married to a guy who was stupider than most. Maybe even stupider the me.”

  ​Matty has her own way. She has learned her mother’s techniques and improved upon them. I had shocked her, and she was going to hit me back.

  ​She said, “I’d get an abortion.”

  ​Now we were on her ground. By the current rules, this was all her territory. I had no say in the matter. I was just a parent.

  ​I said, “That would make me pretty unhappy. You know what I think about that.”

  ​She clinched her teeth against another shiver. “I hate him. I wouldn’t have his baby.”

  ​I said, “A stupid father isn’t the baby’s fault.”

  ​She turned away. Then she said, “A stupid daughter isn’t the parent’s fault. Except for the blonde part.”

  ​Matty has dyed her hair black at least three or four times just in the last few years. Right now it is an odd red color.

  ​I said, “Thanks for that. But I’m not so sure. Sometimes I see your mother in you and then other times you start acting as dumb as your old man.”

  ​She stared back out at the water. “What he said was a lie. He told me he loved me. It’s the worst thing.” Then she turned on me with a hard-eyed glare. “You know, I remember the first time you lied to me.”

  The sudden change of villains caught me off guard. I must have lied to her a thousand times. There are so many things a parent says that are not true but make the moments easier to live with.

  I said, “Which one was that?”

  A smile captured her face, and I felt some sort of victory.

  She patted at my hand and then held it there where my fingers wrapped around her shoulder.