Let Me Be Frank With You

by Richard Ford

  “I hoped that about my husband,” Ms. Pines said. “But then we divorced, and I wasn’t always sure. And then he died.”

  “I’m divorced,” I agreed. “I know about that.”

  “It’s not always clear when your heart’s broken, is it?”

  “It’s a lot clearer when it’s not.”

  Ms. Pines turned and unexpectedly looked both ways around her, as if she’d heard something—her name spoken, someone entering the room behind us. “I’ve over-worked your hospitality, Mr. Bascombe.” She looked at me fleetingly, then past, out the sliding-door windows at the misty snow. She frowned at nothing I could see. Her body seemed to be about to rise.

  “You haven’t,” I said. “It’s only eleven thirty.” I consulted my watch, though I eerily always know what time it is—as if a clock was ticking inside me, which it may be. “You haven’t told me the climax. Unless you don’t want me to know.”

  “I’m not sure you should,” Ms. Pines said, returning her gaze solemnly to rest on me. “It could alienate you from your house.”

  “I sold real estate for twenty years,” I said. “Houses aren’t that sacred to me. I sold this one twice before I bought it myself.” (In arrears from the bank.) “Somebody else’ll own it someday and tear it down.” (And build a shitty condo.)

  “We seem to need to know everything, don’t we?”

  “You’re the history teacher,” I said. Though of course I was violating the belief-tenet on which I’ve staked much of my life: better not to know many things. Full disclosure is the myth of the fretting classes. Those who ignore history are no more likely to repeat it than anyone else but are more likely to feel better about many things. Though, so determined was I to engage in an inter-racial substance-exchange, I clean forgot. It wouldn’t have been racist, would it, to let Ms. Pines leave? President Obama would’ve understood.

  “Well. Yes, I certainly am,” Ms. Pines said, composing herself again. “So. Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1969 . . .” (neuropsychically, a spiritual dead zone, when suicides abound like meteor showers) “. . . something disrupting apparently took place between our parents. I possibly could have found out what. But I was young and simply didn’t. My brother and I didn’t talk about it. It could have been that our mother told our father she was leaving him and going away with the music teacher. Mr. Senlak. I don’t know. It could have been something else. My mother could be very dramatic. She could have said some wounding and irretrievable thing. Matters had gotten bad.”

  For the first time since Ms. Pines had been in my house, I could feature the lot of them—all four Pines—breathing in these rooms, climbing the stairs, trading in and out the single humid bathroom, congregating in what was then the “dining room,” talking over school matters, eating PB&J’s, all of them satellites of one another in empty space, trying, trying, trying to portray a cohesive, prototype, mixed-race family unit, and not succeeding. It would do any of us good to contemplate the house we live in being peopled by imperfect predecessors. It would encourage empathy and offer—when there’s nothing left to want in life—perspective.

  Somehow I knew, though, by the orderly, semireluctant way Ms. Pines was advancing to what she meant to tell, that I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear, but would then have to know forever. My brain right away began sprinting ahead, rehearsing it all to Sally, an agog-shocked look on her face—all before I even knew what it was! I wanted to wind it back to the point, only moments before, at which Ms. Pines looked all around her, as if she’d heard ghostly old Hartwick pounding up the stairs from the basement with bad intentions filling his capacious brain. I could lead her to the front door and down to the snowy street, busted wrist and all; let her go back to where she’d come from—Gulick Road. Lavallette. If in fact she wasn’t a figment—my personal-private phantasm for wrongs I’d committed, never atoned for, and now had to pay off. Am I the only human who occasionally thinks that he’s dreaming? I think it more and more.

  I badly wanted to say something; slow the onward march of words; win some time to think. Though all I said was, “I hope he didn’t do something terrible.” Hope. There, I’d hoped something.

  “He wasn’t a terrible man, Mr. Bascombe,” Ms. Pines said meditatively. “He was exceptional. I have his coloring. And she was a perfectly good person in her own way, as well. Not as good or exceptional as he was. As I said, he was like a wonderful idea, but labored under that delusion. So. When life turned un-wonderful, he didn’t know what to do. That’s my view, anyway.”

  “Maybe he didn’t tolerate ambiguity well.”

  “His life was a losing war against ambiguity. He knew that about himself and hated it. The essence of all history is contingency, isn’t it? But it’s true of science, too.”

  “So did they have a terrible fight and everything got ruined? And it all happened in these rooms?” (In other words the way white suburbanites work things out?)

  “No,” Ms. Pines said calmly. “My father killed my mother. And he killed my brother, Ellis. Then he sat down in the living room and waited for me to come home from debate club practice—which we were having through the Christmas holidays. Debating the viability of the UN. He was waiting to kill me, too. But I was late getting home. He must’ve had time to think about what he’d done and how ghastly it all was. Being in this house with two dead loved ones. He took them down to the basement after they were dead. And either he became impatient or extremely despondent. I’ll never know. But at around six he went back down there and shot himself.”

  “Did you come home and find them?” Hoping not, not, not. I was full of hope now.

  “No,” Ms. Pines said. “I would never have survived that. I would’ve had to be committed. The neighbor next door heard the two earlier gun reports and almost called the police. But when he heard another report an hour on, he did call them. Someone came to the school for me. I never actually saw any of them. I wasn’t permitted to.”

  “Who took care of you? How old were you?”

  “About to turn seventeen,” Ms. Pines said. “I went to stay with the debate-club sponsor that night. And after that my father’s relatives came into the picture—though not for very long. They didn’t know me or what to do with me. The school, Haddam High School—the guidance counselors and the principal and two of my teachers—made a special plea on my behalf to be admitted midyear to the Cromwell-Aimes Academy in Maynooth, New Hampshire. A local donor was found. I was made a ward of our debate-club sponsor and lived with her family until I started Barnard. Which saved my life. These are the people I’m staying with. Their children.”

  Ms. Pines lowered her soft chin and stared at her lap, where her un-injured hand held her injured one in its grasp. Her green tam held its perch. A thin aroma of Old Rose escaped from somewhere. I heard her breathe, then emit a sorrowing sigh. Her posture was of someone expecting a blow. (Where was I when all this mayhem transpired? Happy on Perry Street in Greenwich Village, as worry-free as a guppy, high on the town every night, in love-and-lust with a canny, big-boned, skeptical Michigan girl, and trying my hand at the “longer form” for which I had no talent. Living the life of the not-yet-wounded. Though why didn’t I finally hear about all this? I was a realtor. Towns keep secrets.)

  “Does it seem beneficial to come back now?” I am muted, grief counselor-ish, skipping over twelve consolatory, contradictorily inadequate expressions of what? Empathy more complex than words can muster? Grief more dense than hearts can bear? I’ve never sought the services of a grief counselor. A dwindling group of us still holds out. Though from Sally I know what the basic mission entails: first—avoidance of the plumb-dumb obvious; second—the utterance of one intelligent statement per five-minute interval; third—simple patience. It’s not that difficult to counsel the grieving. I could’ve said, “Roosevelt was a far better choice than Willkie back in ’40.” Which would be as grief neutralizing as “What a friend we have in Jesus,” or “Mercy, I can’t tell you how bad I feel about
your loss.”

  But was it actual grief? The spectacle-grim-oddness of the whole bewilderment might require an entirely new emotion—a fresh phylum of feeling, matched by a new species of lingo.

  “Yes, I think it is,” Ms. Pines said softly, relative to my house and being in it and its helping. “I was never allowed back as a girl. I left for debate club that day, then nothing was ever again as it had been. You don’t think things like that can happen. Then you find out they both can and will. So, yes. It’s revealing to come here. Thank you.” Ms. Pines smiled at me almost grudgingly. This was the grainy, human, non-race-based contact our President has in mind for us. Too bad the collateral damage has to be so high.

  I knew Ms. Pines was now searching for departing words. She was too savvy to deal off the “c” card—abominable closure. She was seeking she knew not what, and would know she’d found it, only afterward. If she could’ve framed a question for me, it would’ve been the age-old one: What should I now do? How should I go on with the rest of my life now that I’ve experienced all this? Natural disaster is adept at provoking that very question. Though why ask me? Of course she hadn’t.

  “Umm-hmm,” Ms. Pines was heard to “say,” having recovered from the brief séance she’d induced in herself, in my house, in me. She was ready to go—spryly up and out of her café chair, big patent purse swagged in her un-injured hand, a flattening-neatening pat given to secure her tam. She looked down to her green suit front, as if it might’ve been littered with something. I wasn’t at all ready for her to leave. There could be more to say, some of it never said before. How often does that happen? Still, I jumped up and grabbed her coat. She’d performed and received what she came for, relegated as much of her burden as possible to the house. And to me. Su casa es mi casa.

  “Many times I thought of killing myself, Mr. Bascombe. Very many. I wasn’t brave enough. That’s how it felt.” She turned and let me help her coat on, careful with her hurricane-damaged wrist. I handed over her gloves. “Maybe I had something else yet to do.”

  “You did,” I said. “You do.”

  “Umm-hmm,” Ms. Pines said.

  Another zephyr of Old Rose passed my nostrils. I patted her cashmere shoulder the way you’d pat a pony. She acknowledged me with a confident look—the way a pony might. It’s a solid gain to experience significant life events for which no words or obvious gestures apply. Awkward silence can be perfect. The whisper of the gods, Emerson says.

  “I read, Mr. Bascombe—I think it was in Time . . .” Ms. Pines was leading me toward my front door, past the murderous basement, as if she’d neutralized it. “It said there’s a rise in world corruption now. Everyone’s taking bribes. Narcissism’s on the increase. We’re twenty-third in happiness in America. Bhutan is first, apparently. Somebody said there’s been a systematic extermination of joy in the United States.” Her green-topped head was bobbing in front of me. I couldn’t see her pretty face. “Isn’t that something?”

  “I read that.” I had. “It was some gloomy Eastern European in a smelly suit. Those guys don’t like anything.”

  “Exactly.” Ms. Pines turned to me, restored to who she’d been, possibly better. She smiled—confident, self-aware—and extended her small, chestnut hand for me to shake. I gently did.

  Out through my front door’s sidelights, where there was no longer snow falling, I glimpsed across Wilson Lane the Bitticks’ frosted front lawn. A short, round white woman in a quilted coat and quilted boots was hammering a GOOD BUY REALTY “FOR SALE—NEW PRICE” sign into the stiff grass—the equivalent of a buzzard landing in your yard. Fresh realities had dawned there, a grainier view of the situation (bank push-back, almost certainly). Mack had taken down his Romney-Ryan poster, just today, and struck his flag. New neighbors would be arriving (a Democrat, if I had a choice; married, no kids, earnest souls I’d be happy to wave to on my morning trip out for the paper, but not much more. I ask less of where I live than I used to).

  “Do you find it hard to be here, Mr. Bascombe?” Ms. Pines said as I opened the front door for her. The air space between the storm and the coffered oak door was still and chilly. “You lived in Haddam prior to now, I know. I know some things about you. I kept up with who subsequent owners were, after we left. It’s what I could do.”

  The round woman driving the GOOD BUY sign into the Bitticks’ yard stopped and looked our way: two people, a man and a woman, talking about . . . what? A new job as a housekeeper? An FBI reference check on a neighbor in line for a government job? Not a family tragedy of epic proportion, requiring years to face, impossible to reconcile, with much left to accomplish and not much time to do it.

  “No,” I said. “It’s been the easiest thing in the world. Most everyone I knew from before is gone or dead. I don’t make much of an impression on things now—which is satisfying. We just have so much chance to make an impression. It seems fair. It’s the new normal.” I smiled a smile I hoped would be one of mutual understanding—what I hadn’t had words for before, but believed we felt together.

  “All right,” Ms. Pines said. “That’s a good way to put it. I like the way you say things, Mr. Bascombe.”

  “Call me Frank,” I said, again.

  “All right, Frank, I will.”

  She smiled and let herself out the storm door, took her careful steps down the still-icy steps and was gone.

  The New Normal

  OUT THE HADDAM GREAT ROAD, JUST PAST five, freezing rain has turned the blacktop into after-hours, dodge-em cars. Only a few of us are braving it, our headlights glaring off the pavement like sheeny novas. A Ford Explorer (why is it always a Ford Explorer?) has already gone in the ditch, its driver waving me on with a shrug. A wrecker’s on its way.

  Off in the trees on both sides, immense, manorial houses twinkle through. Yuletide spruces framed in picture windows blaze outward, sharing Christmas cheer with the less monied. Years ago, I drove out here on just such a gloomy-wintry night to hand-deliver a two-million-dollar, full-price offer on a slant-roof, architect-designed monstrosity that’s long since been torn down, and calamitously hit a dog, precisely next door to the house I was hoping to sell. As with the Explorer, I went straight in the ditch, but clambered out, up, and across the black-ice road to bring whatever helpless help I could to the poor wrecked beast, who’d made a whump when I hit it, boding ill. (I, of course, feared it was my clients’ dog.) There the poor thing lay, in the ice-crusted grass in front of number 2605, breathing deep, rasping, not-long-for-this-world breaths, its sorrowing eyes resigned and open to the snowy night—its last—not offering to move or even to notice me beside it on my knees, my cold hand on its hairy, hard ribs, feeling them rise and fall, rise and fall. It was a hound, a black and tan, somebody’s old lovebug—a wiggly crotch sniffer and shoe muncher bought for the kids yet surviving on after they’d gone, and prime now to be hit. “What can I do for you, ole Towser?” I said these absurd words, knowing their answer—“Nothing, thanks. You’ve done enough.” After minutes, I hiked up to the house I was selling, shamefaced and in shock. I informed my clients what I’d terribly done. We all three walked down to the road in the snow, but the old boy had passed beyond us and was (because it was damn cold) grown stiff and peaceful and perfect. They didn’t know whose dog it was—a hunter’s, strayed away in the night, they thought, though it was past the season for that. My clients—the Armentis, long since beyond life’s pale themselves—felt a sorrow for me and my plight, and let me go home with the promise to “do something about the dog” in the morning. I shouldn’t worry. It was a terrible night to be out—which it was. In my realtor’s memory they accepted the offer following some testy back-and-forths with the young Bengali buyers—I often recollect such matters more positively than was true. It was a long time ago. Twenty years, at least. The dog, of course, lives on.

  I’M ON MY PILGRIM’S WAY TONIGHT—IT’S ONLY 5:10 but could easily be midnight—to visit my former wife, Ann Dykstra, a resident now of the Beth Wessel Wing at the Communit
y at Carnage Hill, a state-of-the-art, staged-care facility, out here in what was once, when we were married, forty years ago, the verdant Haddam hinterlands. The “Community” today borders a Robert Trent Jones faux links course, hidden from the road by a swatch of woods, the leaves now down. A birch-bark canoe “institute” sits off to the left in deeper timber, its lights busily yellowing the snow-flittery night. Other grand houses are semivisible, accessible by gates with uniformed protection. Once it was possible to cast my eye over almost any piece of settled landscape here-around and know how it would look in the future; what uses it’d be set to by succeeding waves of human purpose—as if a logic lay buried within, the genome of its later what’s-it. Though out here, now, all is frankly enigma. Probably it’s my age—which explains more and more about me, like a master decryption code. In New Jersey we’ve now built to the edge of the last million acres of remotely developable land. We’re on track to use it up by midcentury. Property taxes are capped, but no one wants to sell, since no one wants to buy. All of which keeps prices high but values low. (I’ve seen only one lonely Sotheby’s sign the whole way here.) Householders of many of these expensive piles are now renting their eight-thousand-foot trophy villas to Rutgers students with rich parents—taking the long view about upkeep and wear and tear when the lease comes up.

  Meanwhile Haddam itself is countenancing service cutbacks. Too much money’s “lost” to wages, the Republicans on the Boro council say. The budget gap’s at fifteen mil. Many old town-fixture employees have been pink-slipped in these days before Christmas. The previous manger scene, mothballed a decade ago, the wise men all portrayed as strapping Aryans instead of dusky Levantines and Negroes, has been revived—the rental company for the race-appropriate manger having upped their prices. Holly boughs now adorn only every third lamppost on Seminary Street. Santa’s magic sleigh on the Square now has a smaller driver at the reins—the original, life-size Santa was stolen, possibly by the Rutgers students. Three prime storefronts are currently sitting empty (unthinkable in earlier days). Townhouse construction—a well-known morbid sign—goes on apace across from where my son Ralph Bascombe lies buried in the cemetery under a linden tree, lately broken off by the hurricane. Rumor has it a Dollar Store and an Arby’s are buying in where Laura Ashley and Anthropologie once thrived. “The middle isn’t holding” was The Packet’s Yeatsian assessment.