“My dear, you saved your own,” Silas insisted. “You were fantastic.”
“Be that as it may,” Happy said. “You have done more than your share of hard work tonight—please, go to your room, draw the curtains, sleep until noon.”
“G’night,” Sheila said, almost incoherent with exhaustion, and up the stairs they trudged.
“Now, you,” Happy said, and Jims looked up from the chairs, startled.
“Huh?”
“I’m not finished with you. Get your laptop and make me something that looks like a pension plan or something. Predate it. Then go over to the old lady’s house and put it somewhere for the cops to find.”
He gaped at her, breathing air through chapped and bitten lips. “How will I do that?”
She shrugged. “Open a window. Jimmy a door. I don’t know, Jims. It isn’t Fort Knox.”
“Huh,” he said again, to the floor, and in a moment he looked up again as well. “Don’t you think the police have already been through there?”
“Put it under a table or something. Half behind a bureau. Just make it look good, is all I’m saying. Go ahead, write it up, I’ll sign it and you can go plant it.”
Poor man—thought it would be all nookie and beard-scratching this week. But at last it got through to him. He left the room.
And then the house was silent. It was past three—the sun would soon come up. Still, a fine night’s work—driving the old bag to suicide, Happy thought, was the smartest thing she’d done in a long time.
Part Two
10. So much for honor
Every town needs a mayor—at least that’s what Archie Olds was told by the people who’d wanted him to become one. Mostly, these were people who bought apples from him by the roadside, or people who kind of knew him when he worked, years ago, at the college—people who saw in him the kind of egalitarian, small-town friendliness and self-possession that they liked to imagine in themselves. These were mostly educated people, professors and administrators at the college, people who knew that Archie had once been a lawyer, yet had nevertheless chosen a working-class occupation, albeit one (that is, orchard-keeping and apple-peddling) that conjured up rosy images of nonexistent bygone days, gleaned from television and the movies. They liked that Archie lived alone, and had a tragic past he wouldn’t discuss; they liked that he was rugged and energetic, and had fought in Vietnam without turning into a grizzled lunatic. They liked the idea that, if he ran and was elected, they could call up their friends in the city and tell them that they were pals with the mayor.
Archie knew this about his supporters, but he ran for mayor anyway. To be honest, he liked being all the things he was to them; he liked being a little bit mysterious and a little bit lonely and a little bit good-looking. He ran unopposed, and then ran unopposed for re-election three years later, and had discovered exactly one thing about the village of Equinox in all that time: that every town does not, in fact, need a mayor. The attendance at the town’s monthly meetings was testament to that: that is, hardly anyone came. The village clerk, Kathy, was always there, and Ruth Spinks generally came as well, notebook and pencil in hand. Beyond that, it was never more than somebody who wanted a curb or a stop sign, or someone with a complaint about a neighbor or dog—issues the clerk could easily have dealt with herself.
But people liked him anyway. Or the idea of him. And he liked the idea of them liking the idea of him. He got five hundred dollars a year to sit in the town hall for an hour every month, and he was happy with the arrangement. He spent the money, disbursed every January by his own pen, on saplings and seeds and rare varieties, which he mixed and matched, grafted and bred, in his ongoing search for something good and beautiful and new. He’d discovered such a thing once before and it whet a lifetime’s worth of appetite.
Archie bought the orchard with his wife, Mary, in 1970, the spring of Kent State. They had met in college in 1963 and had just started dating when Archie’s number came up and he went to Vietnam. When he got back to college a couple years later (and the less said about the intervening years, the better), he took up again with Mary, got a law degree and got married. For a honeymoon they went backpacking in England, and there they met a farmer who had an orchard. They’d been walking for hours that day without having eaten, and the farmer offered them apples. Archie had never seen an apple like the one the farmer gave him: it was dull, mottled, and squat, and didn’t taste like anything he’d ever eaten. Wincingly tart, with an undertone of full and rounded sweetness. It was called Ashmead’s Kernel.
They moved to Nestor, Mary’s Finger Lakes home town, and Archie got a job teaching introductory law at Nestor College. But they weren’t happy there. Mary didn’t like her mother stopping by, and they had fantasized a life in the country, and maybe a couple of apple trees. When Archie was offered a job as legal counsel for Equinox College, forty miles up the lake, he took it, and they bought the house and the orchard behind it. They were able to afford it because it was supposedly haunted, and none of the locals wanted to live there.
When they first moved in, the orchard was overgrown, the fruit stunted and worm-infested, the trees lopsided, half-dead. Most of the original trees were gone, of course, and new ones had grown up from the seeds of the old, crowding together in awkward clumps, stealing one another’s shade. Initially, it had seemed a folly to attempt any sort of rescue. But once the brush was cleared, once the weakest trees had been culled and the good ones pruned, they could see what the orchard might someday become—a working antique, a piece of living history. It was one of those things they were going to get around to.
Then, in the winter of 1971, Mary got sick. She lost her appetite and twenty pounds. Four months later she was dead of stomach cancer. Archie put a sign up to sell the house, then he refused all offers.
That summer, he rarely spent more than a few waking hours inside the house. His skin darkened to the color of bark. His hands grew callused and scarred from handling branches. He drank too much whiskey. He ran his car into a ditch. A student who had worked in his office at school came to see him one night and they trysted in the potting shed where he had once made love with Mary. He was disgusted with himself and with everything else, and could think of few reasons to go on living.
And then, that fall, the apples came. Every tree produced. Nonesuch, Cox’s Orange, Maiden Blush. Rhode Island Greening and Roxbury Russet. He identified them in a book. All the old varieties, and a few the book didn’t know. The original landowner—it was Thomas Crim, the town founder, and it was supposed to be him haunting the house—had been something of a connoisseur. The day before school reopened Archie built a roadside apple stand and attached an honor box to a post. The next morning he loaded up the counter with apples and labeled each bushel with a marker. He locked the honor box and headed off to work. When he came home, all the apples were gone. So much for honor. But when he opened the box, there it was—money. Folded and crumpled dollar bills, and change. People had actually paid. Every day, on his lunch hour, he visited the bank to deposit his apple cash. He soon realized that he would never leave. The only ghost he ever saw in the house was him. By the following year he had quit the college and plowed all his energy into the orchard.
Eventually the unidentified varieties were identified—all but one, to which Archie gave a name. Mary’s Pearl. Mild, yellow, crisp. Harvested in late September and early October. If kept in a cool place, the picked fruit lasted past Christmas. Right up until the anniversary of Mary’s death, in fact. The apple was registered with the American Pomological Society as a chance seedling. Nowadays it was sold by a few mail-order growers as a rare variety.
He never loved her like he had when she reached up to pluck an apple from a tree. Tiny and pale, his wife had had to stretch, her ankles trembling, her elbow dimpling like a knot. But he didn’t think about her much, if he could avoid it. He didn’t think about the war, or the law, or being mayor. He thought about apples.
That is, until Happy came to town.
>
He hadn’t ever heard of her, hadn’t been aware she’d arrived, until he went to the hardware store for screws and found Dick Huber gone, replaced by a chubby-cheeked college kid; the walls repainted robin’s-egg blue; the familiar sound of AM talk radio supplanted by discreet hillbilly fingerpicking. What happened here? he’d asked the college girl. Happy Masters had been the answer. He didn’t meet her in person until the first town meeting of the fall—forty people had attended, including Happy. He watched in dismay from his folding chair behind the fake-wood buffet table he presided over, as his once-apathetic townspeople chattered, debated, stole glances at the interloper in their midst. Happy, for her part, sat in the front row, jotting something on a legal pad. Around her hummed a repulsive force field approximately three feet thick, through which nobody dared venture. She seemed oblivious to the attention.
“This is the 287th Equinox town meeting,” Archie announced, when it looked like everyone who was coming had come. “I don’t have any new business. But I guess some of you do.”
A general chuckle. Archie could see a few people pulling folded papers out of their pockets, readying themselves to speak. Happy, however, beat them to it.
“Mr. Mayor, I have several pieces of business!” she said, loudly. The paper-pullers deflated. Their hands fell to their sides.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m Archie Olds, Ms. Masters.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Mayor,” she said, and winked, and the corner of her mouth twitched up just a fraction of an inch, and Archie had the sensation, unfamiliar except in distant memory, that he was being flirted with.
She turned around to face the crowd, leaving Archie to look at her behind, gently and flatteringly clad in a pair of black wool slacks. She said, “I simply want to thank you all for making me feel so welcome here.” A spate of titters. “Your many helpful comments about the hardware store and market have been extremely gratifying. I intend to enter into more business arrangements in the near future, and the needs of this community are my number one concern, so please keep those comments coming.”
Archie could see Ruth, seated in the back row of chairs, trying to fight the sneer off her face. She looked up, meeting his eyes, and her expression softened. Archie tried to smile, but Ruth didn’t bother.
“Some of you may be wondering about my intentions here in Equinox. I wish to assure you that they are nothing short of the best. You will see changes here, but I promise that you will like them. I chose Equinox because of its beauty, its people”–she paused, as if to find the words–“its classic Americanness, and I intend to enhance those qualities in the coming year.”
A murderous grumble. Someone managed to get out “Fine the way it is!” before Happy drew a sharp breath and forged on.
“I realize that it’s fine, sir, but my intention is to make it great. It will continue to be the town you know and love, but better—”
“Who invited you?” came another voice
“If I’m not mistaken, it is still a free country, and my choice to live here was—”
“Go back to New York!”
And suddenly Happy’s foot shot out and kicked her chair, silencing the room with a piercing clank. The chair jumped, striking an Equinox student on the knee—one of the first Archie had ever seen at a town meeting. “Ow!” the girl said, her face registering a piggish, if justified, indignance.
“I beg your pardon!” Happy bellowed. “I am trying to speak! You will have ample time to talk in a moment, isn’t that right, Mr. Mayor!” She turned and gazed at him, half-lidded, with a peculiar intimacy, as if no one else were in the room.
Archie coughed. The student was rubbing her knee with an exaggerated, theatrical motion. He stammered, “Ah, just finish up please, Ms. Masters.”
“Thank you,” she said with a smile, and turned back to the crowd. “Now. All I was trying to tell you is that there are two ways to get along with me. You can sit in the back of the room and hate what I do and shout insults at me, or you can talk to me like a decent human being and participate in my work here. The choice is yours. I know which is more productive, and I think that you do too.” She paused, for exactly as long as the crowd would allow. Then she looked down at her watch and snatched up her jacket. “Now,” she said, “I hope you’ll excuse me. I have to catch a flight to the city and unfortunately my ride is already waiting. Thank you, the floor is yours.” And she darted out the fire door before anyone could stop her.
The room erupted. A few people actually chased Happy, shouting at her to come back. When they returned, dejected, all attention shifted to Archie. Accusations were made: why’d you let her speak? Whose side are you on, anyway? Impeachment! someone shouted, to nervous laughter.
Or resignation, Archie thought in the days to come, as the meeting lay ever heavier on his heart. If that was the way town meetings were going to be, he didn’t want anything to do with them. He even went as far as asking Ruth if he ought to quit. This was over coffee and cigarettes in his kitchen, a few days later. They’d just screwed, as they had been doing from time to time for several years, and she was in as sympathetic and relaxed a mood as it was possible for her to be. But she still shook her head in evident disappointment.
“When the going gets tough, the tough resign?” she asked. She gazed at him over the tops of her large plastic-framed glasses, librarian’s glasses that were smoke-browned and thumb-smudged, and pointed with her cigarette.
“That’s not fair,” was his reply. “I didn’t bargain for this kind of controversy.”
She shrugged. “Who gets what they bargain for?” she said. “Did you expect to be single and childless in your fifties? Did you expect to go fight that stupid war?”
He frowned. “I don’t appreciate that characterization.”
“I know, I know,” she said, and stubbed out her smoke. It wasn’t even halfway finished. She pushed back her chair as if to leave: Books to read, she often said, time to waste. “I was picketing the ROTC while you were getting shot at in the jungle, I know.” She heaved herself up out of her chair with a groan. “But you know what I mean.”
“I know,” he admitted.
“I don’t like that woman,” she said. “But I like this town, and you’re the mayor. When duty calls, you have to answer. Right, soldier?”
He scowled. She headed for the door.
“Sixties,” he said as she reached it.
She glanced, puzzled, over her shoulder.
“I’m not in my fifties anymore. I’m sixty-one.”
That got a smile, though it wasn’t really a smile he was after. “Sorry, Archie. I forgot.” And she left.
A few days later the mob descended on Happy’s house and she won it over. He didn’t hear so many complaints after that, even from Ruth. But there was a sense that everybody was waiting for something, and he feared that, when that something came, it would be to him, to Archie Olds, that everyone would look for a response. And he was not sure at all that he would be able to give them what they wanted.
11. A disturbing fervor
The rest of September saw the expansion of Happy’s empire proceed unchecked. Nobody seemed to mind—indeed, the talk at the bar, in the Inn, at the town’s two restaurants, and on campus was that things were looking rather nice in the village, and what was it exactly that people had been so worked up about? Glenda’s Village Market reopened to great acclaim—staffed by buxom undergraduates in checked gingham, stocked with palatable food at reasonable prices, and suffused (by way of a collection of vintage grocery advertising signs and a soundtrack of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey) with nostalgia, it drew visitors even from Unionville and Nestor, prompting a local-business feature in the Nestor News. The hardware store, burnished and bluegrassed, was also a hit, and soon the better-heeled women in Equinox (there were a few) began to be seen around town with extraordinarily attractive-looking fingernails, which they seemed pleased to report were the product of Serene Attractions, the hair-and-manicure place with the Japanesey theme.
And more was in the offing: Happy had bought a restaurant, the former Wing King, and promised that it would soon reopen as an elegant but affordable bistro, offering a wide range of gourmet soups, sandwiches, and pizzas. The liquor license that Wing King had long tried, without success, to obtain, came to Happy with dubious ease, and a copy of it hung in the front window, which was otherwise obscured by masking-taped pages from the New York Times (itself now available, as promised, at Glenda’s). Dave Dryer, asked what he thought of the certainty of competition directly across the street from his bar, merely shrugged and rubbed his jaw.
But Happy’s most ambitious conquest, one that few townspeople would have thought likely, was her apparent acquisition of the Inn at Equinox, that venerable institution of decoratively middlebrow taste, which had served as a temporary haven for so many Equinox College parents. Some became alarmed when it was announced that the Inn would be closed, effective immediately—where, after all, would the parents stay, over the Parents’ Weekend scheduled for the beginning of November?—but Happy promised that the renovations she planned would more than make up for the temporary inconvenience. What precisely these renovations entailed, however, remained secret, and Equinoxians were left with little more than a promise that all would be made clear in good time.
This arrangement was fine by Equinox: the village and Happy Masters were honeymooning. There were, of course, the persistent rumors that there was more to Glenda Parsons’s suicide than met the eye—rumors fueled by the hasty police wrap-up, the severance package “discovered” after a second sweep of her house, and certain students and townspeople known for their credulity and big mouths. But such rumors were muttered under citizens’ breath, in dark corners, and under the influence of alcohol. In general, there seemed little that could happen now to break the general mood of mutual affection and excitement.
Happyland Page 10
