Let Me Be Frank With You

by Richard Ford

  I am, though, questioning my wisdom this morning—with the possibility of a weather lockdown at Newark and snow up to my butt. In the world today, no one should experience a wittering urgency without knowing there’s a cause somewhere close by, even if you can’t see it.

  My Wilson Lane neighborhood, as I drive down to the Choir College and turn toward Haddam’s west end, is a far cry from the days when I flogged houses here and my kids were young. Although the casual observer might not notice much has been altered.

  Most of the small, frame, President-streets houses, on their manageable fifty-foot lots, look as they have since the boomer ’90s. Though residential stock has slowly begun passing into less confident hands—the banks, absentee owners, weekenders from Gotham, and property managements. They mostly keep things ship-shape, but not as if every owner lived in every abode the way they used to.

  And more change is already in evidence. A code variance for a chiropractor. A single-hand lawyer’s-office conversion where a widow recently lived and died. A holistic wellness center with Pilates and Reiki gurus inside. An online travel agent and copy shop. Following which, it’s a quick descent to a head shop, a T-shirt emporium, a RadioShack, and a tattoo/nail salon. Mixed use—the end of life as we know it. Though my bet is I’ll be in my resting place before that bad day dawns. If there’s a spirit of one-ness in my b. ’45 generation, it’s that we all plan to be dead before the big shit train finds the station.

  In the eight years since Sally and I arrived back from Sea-Clift, we haven’t much become acquainted with our neighbors. Very little gabbing over the fence to share a humorous “W” story. Few if any spontaneous invitations in for a Heineken. No Super Bowl parties, potlucks, or house-warmings. Next door might be a Manhattan Project pioneer, Tolstoy’s granddaughter, or John Wayne Gacy. But you’d hardly know it, and no one seems interested. Neighbors are another vestige of a bygone time. All of which I’m fine with.

  However, just after Thanksgiving, a month ago, I found a letter in my mailbox, hand-addressed in pencil to RESIDENT. On a sheet of coarse, lined, drugstore bond, in block letters was a message that said, “Sir or Madame. My name is Reginald P. Oakes. I was convicted of carnal knowledge of a juvenile in 2010. I now reside at 28 Cleveland Street, Haddam, New Jersey. 085_.”

  “They have to do that,” Sally said, finishing a client report at the dining room table. Being a grief counselor-in-training, she’s now versed in all things publicly protective and child sensitive. “It’s part of their release deal. If you petition the court, he’ll have to move. It’s pretty unfair, if you ask me.”

  I took little note, but not no note.

  Not long before that, in August, another letter turned up, this one addressed to me on official blue-and-white American Express letterhead. It contained a brand-new AMEX card in the name of a Muhammad Ali Akbar, who as far as I could find out, no one here-around knew. This letter I hand-delivered to the Haddam PD, but have since heard nothing back. Twice then in the fall, the Garden State Bank, which has foreclosed on two houses on our block, authorized the same police to stage mock hostage extractions in one of the now-empty homes, just a few doors down. We all stood in our yards and watched as SWAT units broke in the front door of what had been a former Democratic mayor’s daughter’s townhouse, until she got divorced and booted out. There was a lot of wild shouting and bullhorns blaring and lights flashing and sirens whooping, plus the appearance of some kind of robot. After which a tiny African American woman (Officer Sanger, whom we all know) was led out in handcuffs and driven away to “safety.”

  How these occurrences foretell changes that’ll eventuate in a Vietnamese massage becoming my new neighbor is far from clear. But it happens—like tectonic plates, whose movement you don’t feel ’til it’s the big one and your QOL goes away in an afternoon.

  All signs bear watching: how many visits Animal Control makes to your block in a month; whether the lady across the street marries her Jamaican gardener to secure him a green card; how often a barking dog appears on the roof next door—like in Bangalore or Karachi; how many Koreans of the same family grouping buy in, in a two-year period. Last week I walked out to sprinkle sno-melt on the walk so the postman, who happens to be named Scott Fitzgerald, wouldn’t slip and end up suing me. And right in the crusty grass I found someone’s upper plate—as intimate and shocking as a human body part. Who knows who’d left it there—as a joke, out of frustration, as an act of vengeance, or just as a sign of things to come that can’t at this late stage in civilization be interpreted. My old, departed friend Carter Knott (an Alzheimer’s casualty who one winter night went kayaking off Barnegat Lighthouse and never found the shore again) used to say to me: “The geniuses are the people who spot the trends, Frank, the ones who see Orion where the rest of us assholes just see a bunch of pretty stars.” What’s trending around me now and here—my own neighborhood—I’m sure I’ll never have the time or genius to figure out.

  I DO NOTICE, AS I CROSS HODGE ROAD TO THE WELL-HEELED west side—my window down to take in the unseasonable springtime breezes—that a briny-sulfur tang now floats about, as if the hurricane’s insult has vaporized and come inland, two months on, leaving a new stinging atmosphere everyone senses but would just as soon not. Possibly the radio callers aren’t so crazy after all.

  Eddie Medley’s big, in-town mansion at #28 is, to my eye, little changed from his glory days of invention, mammon, the Swedish wife, boats, cars, voyages—the grinning, well-heeled devil-may-care-when-everybody-was-your-pal. Eddie’s is one of the old, lauded west-side ramblers, far back from the street and visible only in peeks through the privet and yews and rhododendrons the driveway winds through. Ann used to covet Eddie’s house as her “perfect house,” disparaging our old Tudor half-timber as kitsch—which it was, and which was the idea. (I loved it and mourned when it got hauled down by a family of right-wing, proto-Tea-Party Kentucky brown-shirts, who backed David Duke for President and kept a private army at the ready in the coal-mining hills, but who ultimately grew demoralized by how many Jews there were up the seaboard—plenty—and retreated back to Ironville where white people run everything.)

  Eddie’s house indeed rambles all the hell around into the trees in “wings” that extend from the pillared and pedimented Greek Revival original home place. The add-ons were built by successive generations of owners, so kids could have their own “space,” so phalanxes of new wives could have a dance-and-yoga studio, a dark room, a gallery for the mezzo-American collection, a solarium, a herbarium, a print shop, a greenhouse, and a screening room. Plus, a granny apartment, and more than one neat little place just to be quiet in and think, while the men of the house were off in Hong Kong and Dubai doing mammoth deals to bring in tons of money to pay for everything. It’s not an unusual house history on the west side. Though the unhappy result is that few who abide here now have much of a toehold on where they live—the way real people used to. Money sweeps in, money sweeps out. Only the houses—grand and still and equity-rich—testify to the lives that pass through.

  Eddie, however, is an exception, having owned his big larruping, cobbled-up pile since the ’70s, when he paid 350K and could now (Eddie’s “now,” of course, is about to transfer to “then”) bring 4 mil and maybe more. Though as I come to a stop in the pea-gravel front turnaround that encircles a lump of female-inspired bronze sculpture that could be a Henry Moore, I see his house has suffered considerable “deferred maintenance”—realtor lingo for physical decline destined to inflict wounds to the wallet. Eddie’s house could use a paint job, a new roof, new sills and soffits, and some repointing in its brick foundation and chimneys. The Greek columns could stand new pedestals. The rambling wings are also showing subsidence signs, suggesting unaddressed water issues (or worse). Four million might be optimistic. Not that Eddie gives a shit. Though if an emir or an oligarch or an African warlord with a Wharton MBA bought the place, the first thing he’d do would be to level it, the way the rabid Kentuckians leveled my old hou
se, flattening the past and all my old dreams in a day.

  As I’m climbing out of my car, Eddie’s white front door unexpectedly opens back and out toddles Fike Birdsong—a human I do not want to see, and giving an unhappy twist to the words a sight for sore eyes. Fike’s dented old Cherokee, I now see at the house side of the driveway, where I hadn’t noticed it but should’ve.

  Fike is a minister-minus-portfolio; an eager-beaver balls-of-his-feet Alabama Princetonian and Theological Institute grad, who’s always popping up when you don’t want him to, and who nobody in his right mind would trust with a congregation of goats. Fike’s lurked around Haddam for years, doing the morning devotional on WHAD, filling in at Newark airport as a “Delta chaplain” (plane-crash duties), and officiating at funerals and weddings where nobody has any beliefs but wants a church send-off anyway. He’s also an egregious Romney-Ryan supporter (his car bears their sticker), and since the election behaves as if “Mitt” actually won, only the rest of us are too stupid to know it.

  Fike’s also a preposterous in-line skater. I often see him whizzing down Seminary Street in an electric green zoom helmet, dick-packer tights way too small for his bulgy dimensions, and orange-and-black Princeton knee pads. He’s been married multiple times, has kids scattered all over, lives in a dismal little bachelor rental in Penns Neck, and always acts as if he and I are old friends. Which we’re not. Fike never ventures near spiritual matters with me, preferring to steer as near as possible to right-wing politics, where his heart is, and which he may believe we share. You know people in a town this size, whether you know them or not. I’m certain Fike’s never come closer to a “godly experience” than a duck has to driving a school bus. He is a typical southerner in this way. Seeing him here makes me want to jump in my car and speed away.

  “Our old friend’s not doin’ real good in there, Frank. I’m sorry to say it.” Fike begins nodding in his world-weary way before we’re close enough to converse, given the hushed tones he considers appropriate. Fike knows I’m a southerner and enjoys putting it on, as if it makes me feel at ease. It doesn’t. “He’s sorely sufferin’. I tried to render myself available to hear his confession. But he’s standing firm there.” Fike, of course, is not a Catholic. He’s Pleistocene C-of-C’er, but wouldn’t let that get in the way. There’s a creepy tone to everything he says—a flicker in the fleshy, twitchy corners of his mouth signals it: all this spirituality bidnus is really pretty goddamn funny, only I and you are the only ones who understand it: God. Death. Grief. Salvation. A hoot when you really think about it. Fike’s morning devotionals all have this tickle-your-funny-bone, cloyingly Christian pseudo-irreverence calculated to paint God Almighty as just one of the boys. “It’s not always gay being gay.” (I listen in if I’m up at six, just to piss myself off.) “How close is square one to cloud nine?” “Don’t make me come down there!” (One of his few indistinct references to the deity.) “It’s a slippery slope to the moral high ground.” I’m sure Fike thinks these make people like him and be more apt to let him perform non-denominational grave-side services. Ultimately, though, Fike’s no more sincere about god than an All-State agent.

  “How do you happen to be here, Fike,” I say, disguising my distaste with the semblance of curiosity. Fike’s barely medium stature, wears black horn-rims, a cheap black suit, has his hair side-parted in an ear-lowering brush cut, and carries a black ministerial briefcase containing, I’m sure, the shabby tricks of his trade—holy water vial, a few stale hosts, an aspergillum, an assortment of crosses, a maniple, an exorcist kit, plus a value-pak of spearmint and a copy of Men’s Health. Just for today, he’s also wearing a one-faith-fits-all purple priest’s collar camouflaging whatever mischief he’s up to here.

  “Frank, you might know, I’ve been Eddie’s spiritual adviser for some time. At his invitation.” Fike elevates visibly on the balls of his feet, as if what he’s said has made him taller.

  “Why does Eddie need a spiritual adviser?”

  “That’s a question you have to ask your self, Frank.” Fike’s mouth-corners twitch with seamy significance. He’s gotten fatter since I last saw him. His round cheeks are pink and unsatisfyingly glowing, as if he’s pinched himself just before stepping outside.

  “I won’t be asking myself that, Fike. I watch a good bit of TV now. That’s enough.”

  “I see your good wife over in Mantoloking, Frank. I perform some counseling over there. She’s doing sovereign work, I can promise you. A lot of grief’s left unexpressed after the storm. You probably know that.”

  “So she tells me.” If Fike says my name one more time I may grab him by his idiot collar and drag him to the ground. Much more than I dislike Fike, he embarrasses me. Though I’m aware embarrassment owes to the fear that some quality in him is identical to some quality in me that I like. The appearance of tolerance. I’m sure Eddie only keeps Fike around for laughs.

  A pair of big black crows up in Eddie’s giant elephant-skin copper beech begins cawing noisily down at us. Out on Hoving Road I hear the grumble of the TRASH-8-8-8 truck the Boro now outsources our garbage to. Service here is better than where I live. I again hear the bells Eddie heard—gong, gonging, Joy to the world, the Lord is come . . .

  “Tell me something, Fike.” I say this because I can’t not. “What the hell’s wrong with just grieving by yourself? When my son died, I managed my own grief.” Misery, I’ve learned, doesn’t really love company, just like nature doesn’t abhor a vacuum. Nature, in fact, accommodates vacuums pretty well.

  “Frank, do you know Horace Mann?” Fike’s pink tongue tip makes a roguish tour of his lips. He’s not going to answer me. I don’t really want him to, anyway.

  “Not personally. No.”

  “Well. Horace Mann, Frank, said—or wrote—I was just reading his biography last night, trying to write a Christmas devotional with some meat on its bones. Horace Mann said, ‘Unless you’ve done something for humanity, you should be afraid to die.’ I thought that was interesting. Doing something for humanity.” Fike crosses his chubby arms over his fat briefcase and hugs it like a life preserver, then makes his mouth into a little peachy pucker as if he’s waiting for what I might say next. Fike’s fingers are slender and pretty like a girl’s and have trimmed, pink, well-tended nails. He is a rare breed of asshole.

  The big crows caw at us again where we stand on the damp pea gravel. Each of us, I’m sure, wants the other to go away.

  “I’ll think about that, Fike. Thanks.”

  “You know, Frank. When I think about Governor Romney versus this President we currently have—which I do a lot—I think I know which of them fears death the most. As I’m sure you do.” Fike nods. His moist mouth corners flicker up then down then up. He’s registering, he believes, a delicious little victory. I look at the bumper of my Sonata to see if I still have my Obama sticker. I mostly do. I started scraping it off after Thanksgiving then forgot. Fike, the little pastoral weasel, has observed it—which is why he brings up “this President.” It is his only religion. Politics and dough. God’s just the day job.

  I say nothing, just stare back at him. If “this President” fears death it’s because he knows the Fike Birdsongs of the world are gunning for him. I once saw Fike stepping out of the Vietnamese massage establishment out on Route 1—a flat-roofed, windowless, cinder-block bunker—formerly a Rusty Jones—with its lighted sign-on-wheels out front. KumWow. I could make a cheap reference to it now. Fike could work it into his Yuletide message. What Horace Mann would say about KumWow? A solace for our unexpressed griefs? Only, it’s Christmas Eve. And even for a non-believer, desist is easier than engage. Though I wonder what Fike’s father thinks of him, down in Fairhope. Fike’s about my son Ralph’s age—or would be.

  Above his little purple priest’s collar, Fike stares at me hungrily. Silence is the best defense against non-entities—let them become insubstantial, like a retreating fog. I sniff the sharp-sulfurous sea tang blown inland from the shore. Hazards ride its whispering wav
es.

  “Frank. Don’t act too shocked when you see poor ole Eddie. Okay? He’s looking rough. Underneath he’s still Eddie, though. He’ll really appreciate you coming.” Fike’s become confident again—all by himself. To prove it he sets his mouth into a downward-curving parabola, like a banker nullifying a loan extension. Bong, bong, bong. Let e-e-e-vry hear-ar-art, pre-pa-re hi-um roo-ooo-oom, and heavin ’n nachure sing . . .

  “I’ll try to steel myself, Fike.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you on the radio, Frank?” Fike hugs his briefcase tighter, backing away from me, as if we were in a narrow alley out here. “I like that Narpool you’ve been reading on the air. Though not that much happens there, wouldn’t you say?”

  “That’s the point, Fike. You have to be available to what’s not evident.”

  “Look out, now! That’s my line of work, Frank. Evidence of things unseen, etc. Hebrews Two.” This pleases him. He brightens supremely, backing away still. We’ve found our point of assent—in the unseen—a sacred accord that will let us go our separate ways to Sunday—which we do. Blessedly.

  EDDIE’S FRONT DOOR IS ONCE AGAIN PULLED OPEN, this time by a big, pillowy black woman in tight red toreadors with little green Christmas trees printed all over them. She gives me an indifferent look and stands back for me to come in. She’s wearing a green scrub-in smock and cracked white nurse’s shoes her big feet have badly stressed. A stethoscope hangs off her neck. A yellow sponge is in one hand, as if she’s been doing dishes. She smells of peppermint.