Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  A slow turn then past the high school, where the sixty-member Hornet band is wandering off the practice field, sweltering red tunics slung over their sweaty shoulders, trombones and trumpets in hand, the brawnier instruments—bass drums, sousaphones, cymbals, a bracketed Chinese gong and a portable piano—already strapped atop their waiting school bus, ready for the short trip to the Shop Rite.

  On down Pleasant Valley Road along the west boundary fence of the cemetery, wherein tiny American flags bristle from many graves and my first son, Ralph Bascombe, lies near three of the “original signers,” but where I will not rest, since early this very morning, in a mood of transition and progress and to take command of final things, I decided (in bed with the atlas) on a burial plot as far from here as is not totally ridiculous. Cut Off, Louisiana, is my first choice; Esperance, New York, was too close. Someplace, though, where there’s a peaceful view, little traffic noise, minimum earthly history and where anyone who comes to visit will do so just because he or she means to (nothing on the way to Six Flags or Glacier) and, once arrived, will feel I had my head on straight as to location. Otherwise, to be buried “at home,” behind my own old house and forever beside my forever young and lost son, would paralyze me good and proper and possibly keep me from maximizing my remaining years. The thought would never leave me as I went about my daily rounds of house selling: “Someday, someday, someday, I’ll be right out there….” It would be worse than having tenure at Princeton.

  The strongest feeling I have now when I pass along these streets and lanes and drives and ways and places for my usual reasons—to snapshot a listing, dig up a comp for a market analysis, accompany an appraiser to his tasks—is that holding the line on the life we promised ourselves in the Sixties is getting hard as hell. We want to feel our community as a fixed, continuous entity, the way Irv said, as being anchored into the rock of permanence; but we know it’s not, that in fact beneath the surface (or rankly all over the surface) it’s anything but. We and it are anchored only to contingency like a bottle on a wave, seeking a quiet eddy. The very effort of maintenance can pull you under.

  On the brighter side, and in the way that good news can seem like bad, being a realtor, while occasionally rendering you a Pollyanna, also makes you come to grips with contingency and even sell it as a source of strength and father to true self-sufficience, by insisting that you not give up the faith that people have to be housed and will be. In this way, realty is the “True American profession coping hands-on with the fundamental spatial experience of life: more people, less space, fewer choices.” (This, of course, was in a book I read.)

  Two, make that two, full-size moving vans are parked prominently in front of two houses, side by side, on Loud Road this late holiday morning, just around the corner from my old once-happily married house on Hoving. One, a bullish green-and-white Bekins is open at all ports; the other, a jauntier blue-and-white Atlas, is unloading off the back. (Regrettably there’s no green-and-yellow Mayflower.) Signs in front of each house have identical YOU MISSED IT! stickers plastered over FOR SALE. Neither is our listing, though neither are they Bohemia or Buy and Large or some New Egypt outfit, but the reputable local Century 21 and a new Coldwell Banker just opened last fall.

  Clearly it is a good day for a fresh start, coming or going. My new tenants must feel this spirit in the air. All neighborhood lawns mowed, edged and rolled, many facades newly painted, trimmed and bulwarked since spring, foundations repointed, trees and plantings green and in full fig. All prices slightly softened. Indeed, if I didn’t rue the sight of them and didn’t mind risking a facedown with Larry McLeod, I’d drive down Clio Street, see how things have progressed since ten and wish the Markhams well all over again.

  Instead I make my old, familiar turn down fragrant, bonneted Hoving Road, a turn I virtually never make these days but should, since my memories have almost all boiled down to good ones or at least to tolerable, instructive ones, and I have nothing to fear. Appearances here have remained much the same through the decade, since it is in essence a rich street of hedges and deep, shadowed lawns, gazebos in the rear, well-out-of-sight pools and tennis courts, slate roofs, flagstone verandas, seasonal gardens somehow always in bloom—country estates, really, shrunk to town size but retaining the spirit of abundance. Farther up at #4, the Chief Justice of the NJ Supreme Court has died, though his widow stays actively on. The Deffeyes, our aged next-door neighbors from day one, have had their ashes mingled (though on two foreign shores). The daughter of a famous Soviet dissident poet, who arrived before I left, seeking only privacy and pleasant, unthreatening surroundings, but who found instead diffidence, condescension and cold shoulders, has now departed for home, where she is rumored to be in an institution. Ditto a rock star who bought in at #2, visited once, wasn’t welcomed, didn’t spend the night—then went back permanently to L.A. Both listings were ours.

  The Institute has done its very best to keep alive a homey, lived-in feel at my former home, now officially the Chaim Yankowicz Ecumenical Center, and straight ahead amid my old and amiable beeches, red oaks, Japanese maples and pachysandra. Yet as I pull to a halt across the street for a long-overdue reconnoitering, I cannot help but register its more plainly institutional vibes—the original half-timbers replaced and painted a more burnished mahogany, new security windows and exterior low lights on the neater, better-kept lawn; the driveway resurfaced, leveled and converted to semicircular; a metal fire escape on the east side, where the garage was but isn’t now. I’ve heard from people in my office that there’s also a new “simplified” floor plan, a digital sprinkler-and-alarm matrix and glowing red EXIT lozenges above every exterior door—all to insure the comfort and security of foreign religious dignitaries who show up, I’m sure, with nothing more weighty in mind than a little suburban R&R, some off-the-record chitchat, and a chance to watch cable.

  For a while after I sold out, a group of my former neighbors laid siege to the planning board with complaints and petitions about increased traffic flow, spot zoning, “strangers on the block” and weakened price structures should the Institute put its plans in gear. An injunction was even briefly obtained and two “old families” who’d been here forty years moved out (to Palm Beach in both cases, both selling to the Institute for choker prices). Eventually the furor burned down to embers. The Institute agreed to remove its barely noticeable sign from the head of the driveway and install some expensive landscaping (two adult ginkgoes trucked in and added to one property line; my old tulip tree sacrificed). As a final settlement, the Board of Overseers bought the house of the lawyer who filed the injunction. After which everyone got happy, except for a few founder types who hold it against me and bluster at cocktail parties that they knew I couldn’t afford to live here and didn’t belong way back in ’70, and why didn’t I just go back to where I came from—though they’re not sure where that is.

  And yet and yet, do I sense, as I sit here, a melancholy? The same scent of loss I sniffed three nights ago at Sally’s and almost shed a tear over, because I’d once merely been near there in a prior epoch of life and was in the neighborhood again, feeling unsanctioned by the place? And so shouldn’t I feel it even more here, because my stay was longer, because I loved here, buried a son nearby, lost a fine, permanent life here, lived on alone until I couldn’t stand it another minute and now find it changed into the Chaim Yankowicz Center, as indifferent to me as a gumdrop? Indeed, it’s worth asking again: is there any cause to think a place—any place—within its plaster and joists, its trees and plantings, in its putative essence ever shelters some spirit ghost of us as proof of its significance and ours?

  No! Not one bit! Only other humans do that, and then only under special circumstances, which is a lesson of the Existence Period worth holding onto. We just have to be smart enough to quit asking places for what they can’t provide, and begin to invent other options—the way Joe Markham has, at least temporarily, and my son, Paul, may be doing now—as gestures of our God-required
but not God-assured independence.

  The truth is—and this may be my faith in progress talking—my old Hoving Road house looks more like a funeral home now than it looks like my house or a house where any past of mine took place. And this odd feeling I have is of having passed on (not in the bad way) to a recognition that ghosts ascribed to places where you once were only confuse matters with their intractable lack of corroborating substance. I frankly think that if I sat here in my car five more minutes, staring out at my old house like a visitant to an oracle’s flame, I’d find that what felt like melancholy was just a prelude to bursting out laughing and needlessly freezing a sweet small piece of my heart I’d be better off to keep than lose.

  Now look here, would you buy a used house from this man?” I hear a sly voice speak, and bolt around startled out of my wits to find the flat, grinning moon face of Carter Knott outside my window. Carter’s head is cocked to the side, his feet apart, arms crossed like an old judge. He’s in damp purple swimming trunks, wet parchment sandals and a short purple terry-cloth cabana jacket that exposes his slightly rounded belly, all of which means he’s gotten out of his pool down at #22 and snuck this far just to scare the piss out of me.

  I would in fact be embarrassed as hell if anybody else had caught me twaddling away out here like a nutcase. But Carter is arguably my best friend in town, which means he and I “go back” (to my solitary, somber year in the Divorced Men’s Club in ’83) and also that we regularly bump into each other in the lobby at United Jersey and discuss bidnus, and that we’re willing to stand in most any weather outside Cox’s News, arms folded around our newspapers, yakking committedly about the chances of the Giants or the Eagles, the Mets or the Phils, whatever exchange won’t take longer than ninety seconds, after which we might not see each other for six months, by which time a new sports season and a new set of issues will have taken up. Carter, I’m positive, couldn’t tell me where I was born, or when, or what my father’s job was, or what college I attended (he would probably guess Auburn), though I know he attended Penn and studied, of all things, classics. He knew Ann when she still lived in Haddam, but he may not know we had a son who died, or why I moved from my old house across the street, or what I do in my spare time. It is our unspoken rule never to exchange dinner invitations or to meet for drinks or lunch, since neither of us would have the least interest in what the other was up to and would both get bored and depressed and end up ruining our relationship. And yet in the way known best to suburbanites, he is my compañero.

  After the Divorced Men disbanded (I left for France, one member committed suicide, others just drifted off), Carter put together a good post-divorce rebound and was living a freewheeling bachelor’s life in a big custom-built home with vaulted ceilings, fieldstone fireplaces, stained-glass windows and bidets, out in some newly rich man’s subdivision beyond Pennington. Somewhere about 1985, Garden State Savings (which he was president of) decided to turn a corner and get into more aggressive instruments, which Carter couldn’t see the wisdom in. So that the other stockholders bought him out for a big hunk of change, after which he went happily home to Pennington, got to tinkering with some concepts for converting invisible-pet-fence technology into sophisticated home-security applications. And the next thing he knew, he was running another company, had fifteen employees, four million new dollars in the bank, had been in operation two and a half years and was being wholly bought out by a Dutch company interested in only one tiny microchip adaptation Carter’d been wily enough to apply for a patent on. Carter once again was only too happy to cash out, after which he took in another eight million and bought an outlandish, all-white, ultra-modern, Gothic Revival neighborhood nightmare at #22, married the former wife of one of the aggressive new S&L directors and essentially retired to supervise his portfolio. (Needless to say, his is not the only story in Haddam with these as major plot elements.)

  “I figured I’d caught you out here pullin’ on old rudy in your red jacket and gettin’ teary about your old house,” Carter says, hooding his lower lip to look scandalized. He is small and tanned and slender, with short black hair that lies stiffly over on both sides of a wide, straight, scalp-revealing part. He is the standard for what used to be known as the Boston Look, though Carter actually hails from tiny Gouldtown in the New Jersey breadbasket and, though he doesn’t look it, is as honest and unpretentious as a feed-store owner.

  “I was just doping out a market analysis, Carter,” I lie, “getting set to take in the parade. So I’m happy to have you startle the crap out of me.” It’s evident I have no such appraisal paperwork on the seat, only the Harrises’ junk mail and some leftovers from my trip with Paul, most of which are in the back: the basketball paperweight and earring gifts, the crumpled copy of Self-Reliance, his Walkman, my Olympus, his copy of The New Yorker, his odorous Happiness Is Being Single tee-shirt and his Paramount bag containing a copy of the Declaration of Independence and some brochures from the Baseball Hall of Fame. (Carter, though, isn’t close enough to see and wouldn’t care anyway.)

  “Frank, I’m gonna bet you didn’t know John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the very same day.” Carter mimps his regular closed-mouth smile and spreads his tanned legs farther apart, as if this was leading up to a randy joke.

  “I didn’t,” I say, though of course I do, since it came up in the reading for my just completed trip and now seems ludicrous. I’m thinking that Carter looks ludicrous himself in his purple ensemble, standing actually out in Hoving Road while he quizzes me about history. “But let me try a guess,” I say. “How ’bout July 4th, 1826, fifty years exactly after the signing of the Declaration, and didn’t Jefferson say as his last words, ‘Is it the Fourth?’”

  “Okay, okay. I didn’t realize you were a history professor. And Adams said, ‘Jefferson still lives.’” Carter smiles self-mockingly. He loves this kind of stagy palaver and kept us all in stitches in the Divorced Men. “My kids let me in on it.” He flashes his big straight teeth, which makes me remember how much I like him and the nights with our bereft compatriots, hunched around late tables at the August Inn or the Press Box Bar or out fishing the ocean after midnight, when life was all fucked up and, as such, much simpler than now, and as a group we learned to like it.

  “Mine too,” I lie (again).

  “Both your rascals in fine fettle up in New London or wherever it is?”

  “Deep River.” Carter is more in the know than I’d have guessed, though a retailing of yesterday’s events would cloud his sunny day. (I wonder, though, how he knows.)

  I look up Hoving Road as a black Mercedes limo appears and turns right into the semicircular driveway of my old house and passes impressively around to the front door, where I have stood six thousand times contemplating the moon and mare’s tails in a winter’s sky and letting my spirits rise (sometimes with difficulty, sometimes not) to heaven. A surprising pang circuits through me at this very mind’s image, and I’m suddenly afraid I may yield to what I said I wouldn’t yield to over a simple domicile—sadness, displacement, lack of sanction. (Though by using Carter’s presence I can fight it back.)

  “Frank, d’you ever bump into ole Ann?” Carter says soberly for my sake, sticking his two hands up his opposite cabana coat sleeves and giving his forearms a good rough scratching. Carter’s calves are as hairless as a turnip, and above his left knee is a deep and slick-pink dent I’ve of course seen before, where a big gout of tissue and muscle were once scooped violently out. Carter, despite his Boston banker’s look and his screwy cabana suit, was once a Ranger in Vietnam, and is in fact a valorous war hero and to me all the more admirable for not being self-conscious about it.

  “Not much, Carter,” I say to the Ann question and blink my reluctance up at him. The sun is just behind his head.

  “You know, I thought I saw her at the Yale-Penn game last fall. She was with a big crowd of people. How long you two been kaput now?”

  “Seven years, almost.”

  “
Well, there’s your biblical allotment.” Carter nods, still scratching his arm like a chimp.

  “You catchin’ any fish, Carter?” I say. It is Carter who has sponsored me for the Red Man Club, but now never goes himself since his own kids live in California with their mom and tend to meet him in Big Sky or Paris. To my knowledge I’m the only member who regularly plies the Red Man’s unruffled waters, and soon expect to do more of it with my son, if I’m lucky enough.

  Carter shakes his head. “Frank, I never go,” he says regretfully. “It’s a scandal. I need to.”

  “Well, gimme a call.” I’m ready to leave, am already thinking about Sally, who’s coming at six. Carter’s and my ninety seconds are up.

  Where the Mercedes has drawn to a halt in front of my former front door, a small, liveried driver in a black cap has jumped out and begun hauling bulky suitcases from the trunk. Then out from the back seat emerges a stupendously tall and thin black African man in a bright jungle-green dashiki and matching cap. He is long and long-headed, splendid enough to be a prince, a virtual Milt the Stilt when he reaches his full elevation. He looks out at the quiet, hedge-bound neighborhood, sees Carter and me scoping him out, and waves a great, slow-moving, pink-palmed hand toward us, letting it wag side to side like a practiced blessing. Carter and I rapidly—me in my car, him out—raise ours and wave back and smile and nod as if we wished we could speak his lingo so he could know the good things we’re thinking about him but unfortunately we can’t, whereupon the limo driver leads the great man straight into my house.

  Carter says nothing, steps back and looks both ways down the curving street. He was not part of the injunction junta but came along afterward and thinks, I’m sure, that the Ecumenical Center is a good neighbor, which is what I always felt would be the case. It’s not true that you can get used to anything, but you can get used to much more than you think and even learn to like it.