“And this is my son, Jeffrey.”
“Cute baby,” she said laconically.
I remained all smiles. “And you are . . . ?”
“Jesse Miller.”
“Very nice to meet you, ma’am.”
By the time I left the shop twenty minutes later, Jesse Miller was acting civilized toward me. No, we hadn’t become best friends, nor was she suddenly behaving in a gregarious, approachable manner (my powers of persuasion weren’t that good!). But she was, at least, being courteous and pleasant—and that pleased me.
Over the next few days I kept up the charm offensive. I made certain I was friendly and open with everyone I met. Just as I also reacted with good grace if there was a setback—like the carpenter being delayed several days on finishing the kitchen cabinets.
“Hope you won’t be too cross with me about that,” Billy said when he broke the news.
“Why would I be cross with you?” I asked. “It’s not your fault.”
“Jesse Miller really bawled me out when the carpenter was late building new cabinets for her shop.”
“I’m not Jesse Miller.”
This provoked a big laugh from Billy.
“Can’t say I disagree with you there.”
Nor did he disagree with me about the flintiness of Nurse Bass, or the fact that everyone I met seemed to be so wary of outsiders.
“Well, I guess it’s kind of the way things work here: until they get to know you, they’re a little bit suspicious.”
“And when they finally get to know you?”
“They’re really suspicious.”
Whenever Billy made a funny comment, not only would his strange laugh become explosive, but he’d also turn his back on you—as if he couldn’t bear the scrutiny of anyone else seeing him so convulsed. Then again, Billy had trouble making eye contact with others. Whenever we talked he always turned away, staring down at his shoes, focusing his attention on the nearest wall . . . anything to avoid looking at you. But he wasn’t at all slow on the uptake. In fact, he was much more in tune with everything going on around him than most people. For all his outward diffidence, it was clear that he had an empathy for other people’s problems—and even wanted to help put things right.
One night, around a week into the renovations on the apartment, I couldn’t surrender to sleep, so I got up around midnight and, having checked that Jeff was totally conked out, I left a note on the pillow next to Dan, telling him I’d gone out for a walk. I wandered out of the motel and walked up Main Street. A full moon was out. As I passed by Miller’s Grocery, and the municipal library, and the one-room schoolhouse, and the Pelham Baptist Church, and the Pelham Episcopal Church, and the Pelham Third Church of Christ, Scientist, I couldn’t help thinking about that day six months earlier when Dan and I had driven up here to meet Ben Bland and look around town. Dr. Bland was a very laid-back guy, and though he had shoulder-length hair and a big mustache, he seemed to be an accepted member of the community. And he painted such a great visual picture of life in Pelham—a small, tightly knit but accepting community; the sort of place where everyone left their doors open, where everyone went to church (but nobody made a big deal about it); where it was only a fifteen-minute drive to Sebago Lake—one of the most beautiful inland waterways in New England—and less than a half hour to the ski slopes of Mount Bridgton. I remember sitting in Miss Pelham’s, thinking: This is so rustic, so unadorned, the real America . . .
Now all I could think was, I could have been in Paris.
My anxious reverie was interrupted by the sight of a light in the near distance . . . specifically, a light in the window of the apartment over the doctor’s office. Approaching it, I saw the outline of Billy up on a ladder, a paint roller in one hand, a cigarette between his teeth. I glanced at my watch: twelve-thirteen a.m. I suddenly felt a massive stab of guilt as I realized he was working so late for us . . . for me.
I walked over to the back staircase behind the office and climbed up it, tapping quietly on the door. I could hear a radio playing in the background—what sounded like a play-by-play commentary of a baseball game. I opened the door. Billy was still up on the ladder, his back to me. I was terrified of surprising him, so I simply called his name softly. He seemed befuddled for a moment, turned around, and smiled when he saw it was me.
“Hey, Mrs. Buchan . . .”
“Billy, do you know what time it is?”
“No. Do you?”
“It’s after midnight.”
“So the Red Sox must be playing the Angels.”
“What?”
“The Red Sox are out in California tonight—that’s why the game is on so late. You a Red Sox fan? I’m a real Red Sox fan. My dad was supposed to be a real Red Sox fan too.”
“You never knew him?”
“I showed up, he disappeared.”
Another shy smile.
“Smoke?” he asked, fishing out his crumpled pack of L&Ms from his paint-splattered overalls.
“Thanks,” I said, taking one. He took out a book of matches and lit one. After touching the tip of my cigarette, he lit his own, and started wolfing it down. After three deep drags, nearly half the cigarette was gone.
“Do you really like working this late?” I asked.
“I’m not much of a sleeper. And a job . . . it’s something to do, right? And you need to get out of that motel fast, ma’am . . .”
“Billy, as I’ve told you before, my name isn’t Mrs. Buchan or ma’am . . . it’s Hannah, okay?”
As I said this, I reached out to touch his arm—in what I thought was a simple act of reassurance. But as soon as my fingers made contact with his wrist, Billy flinched and pulled away.
I was thrown by this.
“Sorry if I . . .”
He shook his hand, signaling me to say no more, then walked around the room in a little circle, puffing heavily on his cigarette, trying to calm himself down. I wanted to say something but sensed it was better to remain silent. After a few moments, he tossed the now-dead cigarette on the floor, lit another, and said, “I’ve got to get back to work now.”
“Billy, I didn’t mean to . . .”
Another frantic wave of his right hand.
“I’ve got to get back to work now,” he said.
“Fine, fine,” I said, even though everything wasn’t fine, and I didn’t know what to do to make things fine, except leave. So that’s what I did.
“See you tomorrow, Billy.”
He looked away and said nothing.
The next morning, I wheeled Jeffrey back down to the apartment. It was around eleven, and Billy was already working. When I walked in, Billy nodded shyly, climbed down off the ladder, fished out his cigarettes, and offered me one.
“You haven’t been here all night, have you?” I asked as he lit my cigarette.
“Oh, heck, no,” he said. “Got home around . . . I dunno . . . sun was just coming up.”
“But that was probably around six-thirty. Surely you need more than four hours’ sleep.”
“No, four hours just about does it. Anyway, you need to get out of that motel, and all going well, you might just be able to move in here next weekend.”
“That would be great, but not if you’re going to lose more sleep—”
“You really should talk to Estelle Verne,” he said, cutting me off.
“Who?” I asked.
“Estelle Verne. She’s the town librarian, and she needs an assistant.”
“Oh . . . right,” I said, just a little confused by the change in the conversation’s direction.
“I told her about you, and how you want a job.”
“Did I ever say that to you?”
“Uh, I dunno . . . but you do want a job, right?”
“I don’t know . . . I’m still taking care of Jeffrey during the day . . .”
“But Betty Bass’s mom will look after him while you’re at the library . . .”
God, everyone in Pelham really did know everything a
bout everyone else.
“. . . and you really don’t have to worry about Mrs. Bass’s mom. I know she don’t keep the neatest house, but she’s real good with kids . . .”
“I’ll talk to Nurse Bass’s mom today, okay?”
“And you’ll talk with Estelle Verne too?”
“Billy, you’re really organizing my life,” I said.
“Just want you to be happy here, ma’am.”
“But I am happy here.”
“No, you’re not,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette on the floor.
Then he turned away from me, picked up his roller, and went back to work, letting me know our conversation was now over.
I went downstairs, feeling numb and confused. I walked into the doctor’s office. Nurse Bass was behind the reception desk. She gave me a nod, then turned back to some papers she was filing and said, “Doctor’s busy right now.”
“Fine,” I said. “Tell him I stopped by—and that it’s nothing important.”
I turned the baby carriage around. As I started to leave, Nurse Bass asked, “You going to take the job at the library?”
I forced myself to smile.
“We’ll see,” I said.
SIX
EVERY SO OFTEN, you run into someone with whom you instantly click, who, from the outset, becomes your friend. This was the case with Estelle Verne. From the moment I walked into Pelham Public Library, she put me at my ease.
“So you’re my new assistant,” she said, as I approached her desk.
I was thrown by this. “Am I coming to work here?” I asked.
“Looks that way to me.”
“But don’t you want to interview me first?”
“No need—even before you walked in here I knew you’d be just fine.”
“How?”
“Pelham’s a small town, and everyone kept telling me that you were an independent-minded cookie, which immediately made me think: that’s my new assistant.”
Estelle Verne was around fifty. She was a slight woman—she couldn’t have stood more than five feet two—with sharp features and a short mane of salt-and-pepper hair. But it was her eyes that told me she wasn’t merely a flinty, small-town New England type. They radiated mischief, intelligence, and a fiercely independent point of view.
She was a real Maine girl. Raised in Farmington, where her father had taught at the local teacher training college, Estelle had gone to the University of Maine in Orono, where she majored in English and library science. Then she’d found a job at the Carnegie Library in Portland, where she met a man in his mid-thirties who came in one day and asked her if the library had a copy of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt.
“I thought that showed good taste—and the fellow was pretty reasonable-looking: well dressed, polite, seemed to be curious about things, because he started asking me for recommendations of other books to read. That’s when I met George Verne. Turned out he was a banker in a town I’d never heard of called Pelham, where his dad had been the banker before him. He came to Portland once a week on business, and he wasn’t married, and he asked me if I was doing anything for lunch.
“He took me to a little luncheonette near the library, and though I found him a little dry, I did like his intelligence and his curiosity about books and current affairs and ideas. He was full of stories about the three years he served in the Army during the war, helping liberate Italy, actually serving under General Patton.
“The next week, he came back into the library, returned the Sinclair Lewis, asked me for James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, and invited me out again to the same luncheonette. That was the beginning of things between us. And I was pleased—because I was thirty, still living in a rooming house, and had pretty much given up on the idea of marriage or having kids. All the other men I’d met in Maine seemed to be put off by my waspish tongue, but George Verne never seemed to be bothered by that. On the contrary, I think, back then, he thought my sarcasm was worldly. Which, to a boy from Pelham, it probably was.”
Those weekly lunches turned into weekly dinners. After three months, he invited Estelle to Pelham for the weekend—to the big red clapboard house off Main Street in which Pelham’s only banker resided with his widowed mother. Mrs. Verne was very frail at the time, but still ran her son’s life.
“I think she liked me, because I could think for myself, and also because she knew she wasn’t long for this world—she had a very fast-acting bone cancer—and there would be another woman to step in to organize her son. Or, at least, that’s how I’m sure she saw it.
“Now, believe me, if you think Pelham’s a nowhere place now, you should have seen it in 1953. But Mrs. Verne was a shrewd old operator—she could tell I thought Pelham was about as appealing as a life sentence. But on the afternoon before George was going to drive me back to Portland, she told her son to take a powder for an hour, then sat me down in what she called ‘the parlor’—she was that kind of nineteenth-century New England lady—and cut me a deal. If I’d marry George and move to Pelham and have his babies and keep the Verne name alive, she’d give me a library. That’s right—my very own library. Up until then, Pelham had just three stacks of books in the basement of the Episcopalian church. What she proposed was renovating the building you’re in right now, which used to be a feed store, and giving me $10,000 to stock the place with books. There was a bit of family money that she had to spend or see it end up in the IRS man’s pocket—so the library was one big tax write-off. And she also got to marry off her aging son at the same time. And I guess I was thinking: He’s not the worst. I get to have kids. And I also end up with a library I can do anything I want with. And I’m going to make George buy me a secondhand car as a wedding gift, so I can drive off to Portland whenever I need to make an escape.
As it turned out, Estelle discovered that day-to-day life with George was something of a bore. He was tight with money and turned out to be one of those secret drinkers who put away a bottle of booze during the course of the day. The kids she wanted never arrived (“I often wondered if all that rye whiskey he drank caused the problem”). They quickly drifted apart, and when Old Mrs. Verne died two years after their marriage, they started leading completely separate lives.
“Still, it really didn’t bother me. Because Mrs. Verne had been true to her word when it came to the library. She even used her influence with the local district council to get ongoing funding for its upkeep and its staff. And this year, when the Democrats finally won the council elections for Bridgton and environs—and that’s what they consider us, environs—I was finally able to convince the cheap bastards to pay for an assistant. And you’re it.”
Estelle quizzed me about a wide range of subjects—beginning with my taste in books. She approved of my love of Flaubert and Edith Wharton, and surprised me by saying that my dad’s book on Jefferson was one that she always recommended to anyone who ever asked for “something about the Founding Fathers.” She wanted me to know that, when she first moved to Pelham, she too had found it hard to fit in. “I was an interloper who was corrupting young minds in Pelham—not that there are too many of those—by stocking Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead in the library. It probably took me the better part of two years before anyone here began to consider me part of the woodwork.”
“Well, that means I might as well accept my outsider status until we leave next summer.”
“Now I don’t want to sound unduly pessimistic about things, but that does strike me as a prudent way forward. Because everyone in Pelham is suspicious of anyone who’s not from Pelham until they’ve lived there long enough to be finally considered from Pelham . . . if you follow my logic here. But at least you’ve got one ally here now.”
The job suited me perfectly—nine-thirty until two, five days a week, for which I’d receive a whopping $60. I didn’t care. A job was a reason to get up in the morning, a source of focus beyond the all-encompassing business of minding a baby. I knew now that I wasn’t cut out to be the stay-at-home little wif
e-and-mother—and, without work, I felt adrift, housebound, resentful. Oh, how my mother would have laughed.
“Of course, you’re going to need someone to look after the baby while you’re at the library,” Estelle said. “And though I know she’s not the warmest person on the face of the planet . . .”
I laughed.
“How could you say such a thing?” I asked.
Later that morning, I stopped by the doctor’s office with Jeffrey. Nurse Bass was behind the reception desk. Per usual, she was chilly.
“I’ve taken the job at the library,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” she said, all enthusiasm.
“And I’d like to talk to your mom now about looking after Jeffrey.”
“Come by tonight,” she said.
Barbara London liked to be called Babs. Unlike her daughter, she was a gregarious, friendly woman with an easy laugh. She was around sixty: tall, hefty, and (as I came to discover) always dressed in a housecoat that was dappled with baby food and cigarette ash. Though I was now smoking almost a pack a day, my intake struck me as downright moderate compared to Barbara London’s habit. She seemed to have three Tareytons on the go at any one time.
Still, from the outset, she won me over with her no-crap charm.
“Now that’s what I call one gorgeous baby,” she said, reaching down to pick Jeffrey up. Surprisingly, my son didn’t seem to mind these alien hands clutching him.
“We’re gonna get along real fine, you and me,” she said to Jeff. “And you’re gonna have fun here.”
“Here” was the living room of the house that Babs shared with her daughter, her grandson, and her son-in-law, Tony. He ran the local garage and, like his wife, he was the strong, sullen type. As I was chatting with Babs, he came into the room—wearing overalls and a T-shirt, carrying a can of Schlitz. Though he was thin—with a wispy mustache and hangdog eyes—his biceps were noticeably bulky. So too was the Marine Corps tattoo on his left arm, the words Semper Fidelis dyed red.
“Hey,” he said quietly.
“This here’s the doc’s wife,” Babs said. “And that’s her little boy, Jeffy.”
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 121
