by John Irving
"Oh, Raunch," she whispered, "isn't it lovely?"
"It's a lovely tree."
"Well, I mean the room too. And the window, the elevated sleeping platform..."
"Platform? I thought it was a bed."
There was a squirrel who came along a branch very near the window -- in fact, it often brushed the screen with its tail; the squirrel liked to tug at the new nuts, as if it could anticipate autumn.
"Raunch?"
"Yup ..."
"Remember the girl with seventy-five warts?" "Remember her!"
"Well, Raunch ... where were the warts?"
And der pest Bardlong gave them no trouble. All that spring and hot summer, when workmen were removing walls and sculpting windows, the aloof Mr. and Mrs. Bardlong smiled at the confusion from their immaculate grounds, waved distantly from their terraces, made sudden appearances from behind a trellis -- but always they were neighborly, encouraging of the youthful bustle, prying into nothing.
Bardlong was retired. He was the Bardlong, if you're at all familiar with the shock-absorber and brake-systems magnate. In the Midwest, you maybe have seen the big trucks.
BARDLONG STOPS YOU SHORT!
BARDLONG TAKES THAT SHOCK!
Even in retirement, Bardlong appeared to be absorbing whatever shock his new neighbors and their renovations might have caused him. His own house was an old red-brick mansion, trimmed tastefully with dark green shutters and overcrawling with ivy. It imitated a Georgian version of architecture; the front of the house was square and centered with tall, thin downstairs windows. The depth of the house was considerable; it went back a long way, branching into terraces, trellises, rock gardens, manicured hedges, fussed-over flower beds, and a lawn as fine as a putting green.
The house took up a full corner of the shady, suburban street. Its only neighbor was the Ronkerses' house, and the Bardlongs' property was walled off from George and Kit by a low slatestone wall. From their second-floor windows, George and Kit looked down into the Bardlongs' perfect yard; their tangle of bushes and unkempt, matted grass was a full five feet above the apparent dike that kept their whole mess from crushing Bardlong as he raked and pruned. The houses themselves were queerly close together, the Ronkerses' having once been servant quarters to the Bardlongs', long before the property was divided.
Between them, rooted on the raised ground on the Ronkerses' side of the slatestone wall, was the black walnut tree. Ronkers could not imagine whatever had prodded old Herr Kesler to think that Bardlong wanted the demise of the tree. Perhaps it had been a language problem. The tree must have been a shared joy to Bardlong. It shaded his windows, too; its stately height towered over his roof. One veer of the V angled over George and Kit; the other part of the V leaned over Bardlong.
Did the man not care for unpruned beauty?
Possibly; but all summer long, Bardlong never complained. He was there in his faded straw hat, gardening, simply puttering, often accompanied by his wife. The two of them seemed more like guests in an elegant old resort hotel than actual residents. Their dress, for yard work, was absurdly formal -- as if Bardlong's many years as a brake-systems businessman had left him with no clothes other than business suits. He wore slightly out-of-style suit trousers, with suspenders, and slightly out-of-style dress shirts -- the wide-brimmed straw hat shading his pale, freckled forehead. He was complete with an excessively sporty selection of two-toned shoes.
His wife -- in a lawn-party dress and a cream-white Panama with a red silk ribbon around the bun at the back of her nail-gray hair -- tapped her cane at bricks in the terrace that might dare to be loose. Bardlong followed her with a tiny, toylike pull-cart of cement and a trowel.
They lunched every midafternoon under a large sun umbrella on their back terrace, the white iron lawn furniture gleaming from an era of hunt breakfasts and champagne brunches following a pampered daughter's wedding.
A visit of grown-up children and less grown-up grandchildren seemed to mark the only interruption to Bardlong's summer. Three days of a dog barking and of balls being tossed about the pool-table symmetry of that yard seemed to upset the Bardlongs for a week following. They anxiously trailed the children around the grounds, trying to mend broken stalks of flowers, spearing on some garden instrument the affront of a gum wrapper, replacing divots dug up by the wild-running dog who could, and had, cut like a halfback through the soft grass.
For a week after this family invasion, the Bardlongs were collapsed on the terrace under their sun umbrella, too tired to tap a single brick or repair a tiny torn arm of ivy ripped from a trellis by a passing child.
"Hey, Raunch," Kit whispered. "Bardlong takes that shock!"
"Bardlong stops you short!" Ronkers would read off the trucks around town. But never did one of those crude vehicles so much as approach the fresh-painted curb by Bardlong's house. Bardlong was, indeed, retired. And the Ronkerses found it impossible to imagine the man as ever having lived another way. Even when his daily fare had been brake systerns and shock absorbers, the Ronkerses couldn't conceive of Bardlong having taken part.
George once had a daydream of perverse exaggeration. He told Kit he had watched a huge BARDLONG STOPS YOU SHORT! truck dump its entire supply in Bardlong's yard: the truck with its big back-panel doors flung wide open, churning up the lawn and disgorging itself of clanking parts -- brake drums and brake shoes -- and great oily slicks of brake fluid, rubbery, springing shock absorbers mashing down the flower beds.
"Raunch," Kit whispered.
"Yup ..."
"Were the warts actually in her vagina?"
"In it, on it, all around it.
"Seventy-five! Oh, Raunch, I can't imagine it."
They lay in bed dappled by the late summer sun, which in the early morning could scarcely penetrate the thick weave of leaves fanned over their window by the black walnut tree.
"You know what I love about lying here?" Ronkers asked his wife. She snuggled up to him.
"Oh no, tell
"Well, it's the tree," he said. "I think my first sexual experience was in a tree house and that's what it's like up here...."
"You and the damn tree," Kit said. "It might be my architecture that makes you like that tree so much. Or even me," she said. "And that's a likely story -- I can't imagine you doing it in a tree house, frankly -- that sounds like something one of your dirty old patients told you.
"Well, actually it was a dirty young one."
"You're awful, Raunch. My God, seventy-five warts..."
"Quite a lot of surgery for such a spot, too."
"I thought you said Tomlinson did it."
"Well, yes, but I assisted"
"You don't normally do that, do you?"
"Well, no, but this wasn't normal."
"You're really awful, Raunch.
"Purely medical interest, professional desire to learn. You use a lot of mineral oil and twenty-five percent podophyllin. The cautery is delicate.
"Turds," Kit said.
But summer soon ends, and with the students back in town Ronkers was too busy to lie long abed in the mornings. There are a staggering host of urinary-tract infections to be discovered in all corners of the globe, a little-known fringe benefit of the tourist trade; perhaps it is the nation's largest unknown summer import.
A line of students waited to see him each morning, their summer travel ended, their work begun in earnest, their peeing problems growing more severe.
"Doc, I think I picked this up in Izmir."
"The question is, how much has it gotten around since?"
"The trouble," Ronkers told Kit, "is that they all know perfectly well, at the first sign, what it is they've got -- and, usually, even from whom. But almost all of them spend some time waiting for it to go away -- or passing it on, for Christ's sake! -- and they don't come to me until they can't stand it anymore."
But Ronkers was very sympathetic to his venereal patients and did not make them feel steeped in sin or wallowing in their just rewards; he said they sho
uld not feel guilty for catching anything from absolutely anybody. However, he was tough about insisting that they inform the original hostess -- whenever they knew her. "She may not know," Ronkers would say.
"We are no longer communicating," they'd say.
And Ronkers would charge, "Well, she's just going to be passing it on to someone else, who in turn
"Good for them!" they'd holler.
"No, look," Ronkers would plead. "It's more serious than that, for her"
"Then you tell her," they'd say. "I'll give you her number."
"Oh, Raunch!" Kit would scream. "Why don't you make them do it?"
"How?" Ronkers would ask.
"Tell them you won't fix them. Tell them you'll let them pee themselves blind!"
"They'd just go to someone else," Ronkers would say. "Or they'd simply tell me that they've already told the person -- when they haven't, and never intend to."
"Well, it's absurd, you calling up every other woman in the damn town."
"I just hate the long-distance ones," Ronkers would say.
"Well, you can at least make them pay for the calls, Raunch!"
"Some of these students don't have any money."
"Tell them you'll ask their parents to pay, then!"
"It's tax-deductible, Kit. And they're not all students, either."
"It's awful, Raunch. It really is."
"How much higher are you going to make this damn sleeping platform?"
"I like to make you work for it, Raunch."
"I know, but a ladder, my God
"Well, it's up in your favorite tree, right? And you like that, I'm told. And anyone who gets me has got to be athletic."
"I may get maimed trying."
"Raunch! Who are you calling now?"
"Hello?" he said to the phone. "Hello, is this Miss Wentworth? Oh, Mrs. Wentworth, well... I guess I would like to speak to your daughter, Mrs. Wentworth. Oh. You don't have a daughter? Oh. Well, I guess I would like to speak to you, Mrs. Wentworth.
"Oh, Raunch, how awful!"
"Well, this is Dr. Ronkers. I'm a urologist at University Hospital. Yes, George Ronkers. Dr. George Ronkers. Well... hi. Yes, George. Oh, Sarah, is it? Well, Sarah
And with the end of the summer there came an end to the rearrangements of the Ronkerses' interior space. Kit was through with carpentry and busy with her teaching and her school work. When the workmen left, and the tools were carried off, and the dismantled walls no longer lay heaped in the Ronkerses' yard, it must have become apparent to Bardlong that reconstruction -- at least for this year -- was over.
The walnut tree was still there. Perhaps Bardlong had thought that, in the course of the summer building, the tree would go -- making way for a new wing. He couldn't have known that the Ronkerses were rebuilding their house on the principle of "inviting the tree in."
With autumn coming on, Bardlong's issue with the black walnut tree grew clear. Old Herr Kesler had not been wrong. George and Kit had a premonition of it the first cool, windy night of the fall. They lay on the sleeping platform with the tree swirling around them and the yellowing leaves falling past them, and they heard what sounded like a candlepin bowling ball falling on their roof and thudding its way down the slope to score in the rain gutter. "Raunch?"
"That was a goddamn walnut!" Ronkers said. "It sounded like a brick out of the chimney," Kit said.
And through the night they sat bolt upright to a few more: when the wind would loose one or, toward morning, a squirrel would successfully attack one, whump! it would strike, and roll thunker-thunker-thunker-thunker dang! into the clattering rain gutter.
"That one took a squirrel with it," Ronkers said.
"Well," said Kit, "at least there's no mistaking it for a prowler. It's too obvious a noise."
"Like a prowler dropping his instruments of burglary," Ronkers said.
Whump! thunker-thunker-thunker-thunker dang!
"Like a prowler shot off the roof," Kit groaned.
"We'll get used to it, I'm sure," Ronkers said.
"Well, Raunch, I gather Bardlong has been slow to adapt "
In the morning Ronkers noticed that the Bardlong house had a slate roof with a far steeper pitch than his own. He tried to imagine what the walnuts would sound like on Bardlong's roof.
"But there's surely an attic in that house," Kit said. "The sound is probably muffled." Ronkers could not imagine the sound of a walnut striking a slate roof--and its subsequent descent to the rain gutter -- as in any way "muffled."
By mid-October the walnuts were dropping with fearful regularity. Ronkers thought ahead to the first wild storm in November as a potential blitzkrieg. Kit went out to rake a pile of the fallen nuts together; she heard one cutting loose above her, ripping through the dense leaves. She thought against looking up -- imagining the ugly bruise between her eyes and the blow on the back of her head (driven into the ground). She bent over double and covered her head with her hands. The walnut narrowly missed her offered spine; it gave her a kidney punch. Thok!
"It hurt, Raunch," she said.
A beaming Bardlong stood under the dangerous tree, watching Ronkers comfort his wife. Kit had not noticed him there before. He wore a thick Alpine hat with a ratty feather in it; it looked like a reject of Herr Kesler's.
"Kesler gave it to me," Bardlong said. "I had asked for a helmet" He stood arrogantly in his yard, his rake held like a fungo bat, waiting for the tree to pitch a walnut down to him. He had chosen the perfect moment to introduce the subject -- Kit just wounded, still in tears.
"You ever hear one of those things hit a slate roof?" Bardlong asked. "I'll call you up the next time a whole clump's ready to drop. About three A.M."
"It is a problem," Ronkers agreed.
"But it's a lovely tree," Kit said defensively.
"Well, it's your problem, of course," Bardlong said, offhanded, cheerful. "If I have the same problem with my rain gutters this fall as I had last, I may have to ask you to remove the part of your tree that's over our property, but you can do what you want with the rest of it."
"What rain gutter problem?" Ronkers asked.
"It must happen to your rain gutters, too, I'm sure...."
"What happens?" asked Kit.
"They get full of goddamn walnuts," Bardlong said. "And it rains, and rains, and the gutters don't work because they're clogged with walnuts, and the water pours down the side of your house; your windows leak and your basement fills with water. That's all."
"Oh."
"Kesler bought me a mop. But he was a poor old foreigner, you know," Bardlong said confidingly, "and you never felt like getting legal with him. You know."
"Oh," said Kit. She did not like Bardlong. The casual cheerfulness of his tone seemed as removed from his meaning as the shock-absorber trade was from those delicately laced trellises in his yard.
"Oh, I don't mind raking up a few nuts," Bardlong said, smiling, "or waking up a few times in the night, when I think storks are crash-landing on my roof." He paused, glowing under old Kesler's hat. "Or wearing the protective gear," he added. He doffed the hat to Kit, who at the moment she saw his lightly freckled dome exposed was praying for that unmistakable sound of the leaves ripping apart above. But Bardlong returned the hat to his head. A walnut began its descent. Kit and George crouched, hands over their heads; Bardlong never flinched. With considerable force the walnut struck the slatestone wall between them, splitting with a dramatic kak! It was as hard and as big as a baseball.
"It's sort of an exciting tree in the fall, really," Bardlong said. "Of course, my wife won't go near it this time of year -- a sort of prisoner in her own yard, you might say." He laughed; some gold fillings from the booming brake-systems industry winked in his mouth. "But that's all right. No price should be set for beauty, and it is a lovely tree. Water damage, though," he said, and his tone changed suddenly, "is real damage."
Bardlong managed, Ronkers thought, to make "real" sound like a legal term.
"And if you've got
to spend the money to take down half the tree, you better face up to taking it all. When your basement's full of water, that won't be any joke." Bardlong pronounced "joke" as if it were an obscene word; moreover, the implication in Bardlong's voice led one to suspect the wisdom in thinking anything was funny.
Kit said, "Well, Raunch, you could just get up on the roof and sweep the walnuts out of the rain gutters."
"Of course Fm too old for that," Bardlong sighed, as if getting up on his roof was something he longed to do.
"Raunch, you could even sweep out Mr. Bardlong's rain gutters, couldn't you? Like once a week or so, just at this time of the year?"
Ronkers looked at the towering Bardlong roof, the smooth slate surface, the steep pitch. Headlines flooded his mind: DOCTOR TAKES FOUR-STORY FALL!
UROLOGIST BEANED BY NUT! CAREER CUT SHORT BY DEADLY TREE!
No, Ronkers understood the moment; it was time to look ahead to the larger victory; he could only win half. Bardlong was oblique, but Bardlong was clearly a man with a made-up mind.
"Could you recommend a tree surgeon?" Ronkers asked.
"Oh, Raunch!" said Kit.
"We'll cut the tree in half," Ronkers said, striding boldly toward the split trunk, kicking the bomb-debris of fallen walnuts aside.
"I think about here," Bardlong said eagerly, having no doubt picked the spot years ago. "Of course, what costs," he added, with the old shock-absorber seriousness back in his voice, "is properly roping the overhanging limbs so that they won't fall on my roof." I hope they fall through your roof Kit thought. "Whereas, if you cut the whole tree down," Bardlong said, "you could save some time, and your money, by just letting the whole thing fall along the line of the wall; there's room for it, you see, before the street. ..." The tree spread over them, obviously a measured tree, long in Bardlong's calculations. A terminal patient, Ronkers thought, perhaps from the beginning.
"I would like to keep the part of the tree that doesn't damage your property, Mr. Bardlong," Ronkers said; his dignity was good; his distance was cool. Bardlong respected the sense of business in his voice.
"I could arrange this for you," Bardlong said. "I mean, I know a good tree outfit." Somehow, the "outfit" smacked of the fleet of men driving around in the Bardlong trucks. "It would cost you a little less," he added, with his irritatingly confiding tone, "if you let me set this up.
