The Locals

by Jonathan Dee

  Then one afternoon they were upstairs in the Valley Road place, defiling its fully staged master bedroom, when they heard a car pull into the driveway. Alina, on top of him, froze. Immediately the car backed out again and the sound of its engine receded. “Just somebody turning around,” Gerry said. “Just lost, or missed their turn.” But it got into Alina’s head and stayed there. The next day she handed him a fake phone message saying his noon appointment was canceled, and at the end of the day after that, while he sat in the lot at work letting his car warm up before heading home, she came out and knocked on his window. He lowered it and saw that she was crying. Hurriedly, folding her arms against the wind, she said she’d decided she couldn’t see him anymore. There was no future for them, so all this was doing was making her hate her husband for not figuring it out, for never noticing or suspecting a thing. He was such a fool. And she had to stop herself from feeling that way before things got completely out of hand. Plus she needed this job. She turned and ran back inside without giving him a chance to answer.

  Damn right there’s no future for us, Gerry thought, not without a little relief. She was just overreacting: nothing had happened, nothing had changed, they weren’t at any greater risk of getting caught than they’d ever been, and the sex hadn’t gotten old as far as he was concerned. But he had to be careful not to plead with her in any way that might encourage her to think he really was in love with her, that might lead to her showing up at his door some rainy night with a suitcase, beaming and saying, “Well, I did it!” The truth, which of course he could never tell her, was that much of her appeal for him, sexually speaking, had to do specifically with her being married. Turning out another man’s wife—there was nothing on earth more gratifying. He didn’t care why. He put the car in gear and decided to stop at the Ship for a drink, to contemplate these matters further.

  But the Ship was dead that night, for some reason, and it darkened his thoughts. There was not much on his horizon. He lived in a small town, and worked in a small office, with only one woman in it, whom he’d already seduced. He was trying to hang onto a job that he didn’t even like. What did any of these things mean? What was at stake for him? He and Lindsey had been engaged before he’d wised up/panicked and called it off, and in a weird way he’d feel better right now if he regretted that, if the foundering of his life was just a matter of his having taken an identifiably wrong turn; but he didn’t regret it. Less today than ever. The problem was simply that the open space in himself—the one that it would have been a catastrophic mistake, in his case, to try to fill with marriage and kids—was still there.

  Work in the aftermath was awkward. He thought for sure Alina would want him to treat her just like every other agent there treated the receptionist, but that actually seemed to offend her, so conspicuously that he was pretty sure her pouty demeanor tipped off everyone else in the office that there was something between them, ironic now that there wasn’t. He did sell a house in Egremont, $40K below asking, but still, it was nice just to get off the schneid. He tried to widen his circle of bars, at least, but the farther afield you went, the farther you had to drive home drunk afterwards. His sister Renee in Colorado Springs had started forwarding various nutty links to him and Candace and Mark: stuff about PNAC, or Operation Northwoods. Too long to read to the end, even when he sat up late and tried.

  He called his parents and asked if he could come over just for dinner, just to see how they were doing. He brought an hors d’oeuvre tray from Price Chopper. They seemed more suspicious than grateful. His father got onto the subject of immigration, and his mother went upstairs to bed. Gerry asked if his dad had heard from Renee at all recently, and he said no, why? The drive home that night was especially challenging. Heavy rain, and no moon, and three and a half of those Cutty Sarks the old man served.

  He thought everybody on TV was full of shit—the pundits, the alarmists, the conspiracy theorists—but their very full-of-shitness was like a confirmation of what he felt inside: that things right now were off their anchor, that the decline of people’s belief in something showed up in their apparent willingness to believe anything. Everyone he listened to seemed doubtful, edgy, ready for the worst. There was a drift from old standards, for which he forgave himself least of all.

  —

  Marty got another blow when he stopped by the Town Hall to check his mail the first Thursday in June. With summer approaching it might have seemed like the First Selectman of a town like Howland would have more work to do, what with the population expanded and various festivals and entertainments going on to keep all the tourists and vacationers diverted. But he’d long ago learned that wasn’t true. With all the extra workload local businesses had, and all the ingenuity they put into squeezing every dollar they could out of every day between now and September, people didn’t find as much to complain to him about as they did in the long, stingy, crabby months of winter. The town pretty much ran itself at peak times, because the economy was flush. Sometimes he was asked to come cut the ribbon on this or that new shop, or to give a little thirty-second speech to open the Friday night concert series at the bandstand, but even in a ceremonial sense there wasn’t that much call for his presence. He didn’t mind a bit. He had a theory, which was that part of the fantasy the city folk were paying for was that a town like Howland had no actual government, that it just ran on small-town values and nostalgia.

  At bottom he was a believer in Thoreau, that original Masshole, or at least in the quote a local woman had sent him in the form of a framed sampler after his first election: “That government is best which governs least.” And it wasn’t because he was lazy, or because he had central AC systems to install. But then that Monday he came in and found on his desk a registered letter from Boston—not even the courtesy or the bravery of a phone call—informing him that Caldwell House had been landmarked, added to the state’s official Register of Historic Places, which meant that the mansion and its sixteen acres of grounds and gardens would all come off the town’s tax rolls. Marty and most of his predecessors had borne this possibility in the backs of their heads for so long that at some point it had ceased to seem all that real. Whatever half-assed foundation ran Caldwell House applied for registry status every single year and never got it. But people eventually retired from the registry office, and new people got appointed to take their place, and you never knew, in the world of rich folk, who might be friends with whom. He was sure it was just somebody doing a favor for somebody else, which put the whole decision out of the reach of reason.

  Caldwell House was one of the few actual tourist destinations in Howland, though it wasn’t an attraction in the sense that people would build their Berkshire weekends around seeing it or anything like that. More often, they’d never heard of it until some rainy day on their vacation when they asked a local merchant or the woman who ran their B&B what there was to see around here, and were pleasantly surprised to be told about it. Winston Caldwell made millions in some corner of the railroad business, Marty thought it was, around the turn of the twentieth century. He lived on Fifth Avenue but in 1898 his wife Katarina developed chronic respiratory problems after a bout of pneumonia, and her doctors urged her to get out of the fetid city if possible and spend more time in the mountains. The southern Berkshires weren’t quite “the mountains,” even in Marty’s view—you could have kept going a little ways to Vermont and done a lot better—but in any event Winston Caldwell built a gigantic, Vanderbilt-style mansion on some cheaply obtained land in Howland, where he and his wife spent the next eighteen summers. They had two children, a boy and a girl, both of whom died before the age of five, the girl from scarlet fever and the boy from falling under a wagon wheel. It was a tragic story. In order to keep the childless house from seeming too empty, they had friends staying with them constantly, from New York and from all around the world. Katarina Caldwell loved nothing more than to garden, but her lungs grew too brittle to allow her to do much of the work herself. So Caldwell, grieving, reached for w
hat was at his disposal, which was money. He spent and spent in order to turn the grounds into a sort of horticultural paradise, or rather to hire others to do so, since he didn’t know the first thing about flowers. Katarina supervised all the planting from the vast patio in the rear of the mansion or else from one of a series of gazebos built for the purpose, to allow her to watch while still seated and protected from the elements.

  Katarina died at the age of forty-four; Winston lived on, childless, lonely, heartbroken, and rich, for another thirty years. Shopkeepers in Howland knew when he was or wasn’t in town, but it was a rare occurrence to see him, and friends stopped coming around. His will was defiant: every cent was to go to the establishment of a trust to keep the house and especially the gardens in pristine condition, in perpetuity, and open to the public. Over time it became part of a Great Houses trail up and down the Berkshires. People loved the grandness of it, the opulent folly, the backstory of power dignified by sadness. The separate, round, stone playhouse, built for children dead a century. People didn’t live like that anymore. The storybook wealth made both the romance and the tragedy seem larger than life.

  Marty found in his Rolodex the number of the woman currently running the Caldwell Trust—Robin van Aswegen was her name: of course it would be something like that—and called her up. “Well, congratulations,” he said. “You’ve screwed us.”

  “You should be thanking me less sarcastically,” she said. They’d never met; she didn’t sound as old as he expected. “This lets us upgrade the place a bit. It’s not like we’re turning a profit over here, you know. It’s a fight to break even. Last year we had to raise the admission price to sixteen dollars, and you want to know what that did to our gate?”

  “It’s six percent of our tax base, almost. Gone. We have no way to make that up. We can’t add land to the town. That’s money for the schools, most of it. You want to be the one to call and tell them they’re not getting it so you can grow flowers? You’re sitting on millions over there.”

  “We can’t touch principal. You must know that. Have you been here lately? It’s like a haunted house. I had to lay off staff. I am trying to run a charity over here. Your budget problems are not in my purview. You’ve got a ton of nerve calling me greedy, sir. I’m just trying to maintain a little of this town’s history, while you’re out bending over for Walmart or whoever, offering them tax breaks to build here.”

  How did she know about that? “If your operation was a charity,” Marty said, “then it would be helping somebody. It’s a whim. Flowers! It’s a tribute to his self-pity, not his wife. If he’d ever gotten laid again, that place would be a hotel now.”

  She hung up on him. He had to admit, even though the sense of catastrophe was undiminished, it did make him feel a little bit better just to have gotten under that pale van Aswegen skin. He had some bookkeeping to do at the store, and then he’d been invited up to Tanglewood for their season opener that evening. Nothing official, just a picnic with some friends. Now, there was a place that brought in some money. Half the Berkshires ran off of Tanglewood. Tonight they’d all spread out a blanket and eat some gourmet finger food, and when Marty’s back started to bother him he’d get out of the camp chair and lie flat on the grass, half-hammered on white wine, and watch the sky change color over his head. That was something to look forward to. He’d forgotten what the program was tonight, not that it mattered. He didn’t know shit about music, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t allowed to enjoy it anyway.

  —

  Joanna Whalen was a seventh- and eighth-grade science teacher at Howland Elementary, married, no kids of her own. Her husband Jack, married once before, was a farmer who had gone all-organic a few years prior and made a decent living, as he liked to put it, selling five-dollar tomatoes to weekenders who knew the value neither of a tomato nor of five dollars. There was way more to it than that, of course—he supplied restaurants all up and down Route 7, and some of the smaller markets and co-ops as far east as Springfield or Holyoke—but he was prone to modesty and was always faintly embarrassed by that turn to the “organic,” even though it was a move born of economic desperation and had nothing at all to do with any political views.

  Jo had taught at Howland Elementary for nine years, which didn’t seem that long—Candace remembered being taught in the Pittsfield public schools by women who’d taught her parents—but when you looked at the school’s payroll records, that made her the third-longest-tenured teacher there. Plus she seemed like a fixture, because everyone loved her. She was short, fiery, not pretty but magnetic, and seemed powered less by love of earth science (she’d originally applied for a job teaching math) than by love of a challenge, specifically the challenge of getting children to pay attention to anything long enough to get interested in it. The principal called her the Queen of the Field Trip—or Field-Trip Marshal Goering, which was less funny—because she was always petitioning them for money they didn’t have to take a busload of hormonal kids to tramp around in some bog or other. Candace was formerly a science teacher herself—in fact she’d been promoted to vice principal from the teaching job Jo now held. She secretly suspected Jo wasn’t all that smart—“secretly” only because she liked Jo too much to say anything unkind about her, and because the woman was an object lesson in the truth that intelligence wasn’t profoundly connected to how good a teacher you made. A lot of fine minds had been brought low at the front of an eighth-grade classroom.

  In June, barely two weeks before the end of the school year, Jo had the whole fifth-period class watching a film about the rain forest when she passed out. No one noticed right away because she was sitting in the back of the darkened room, beside the projector; it was only the sound of her sliding out of the chair and hitting the floor that caused any of the kids at their desks to turn around.

  Two of them ran down the hall to the principal’s office, a third to the nurse’s office, but one girl who stayed behind in her seat produced from deep within her backpack an outlawed cell phone and dialed 911. Howland’s resident trooper, whose last name was Constable—a joke he hated because not everyone got it, so he always introduced himself with a sort of pugnacious flinch—was the first on the scene; he had very limited medical training (Ms. Whalen was breathing fine and didn’t need CPR or her airway cleared), but his presence was enough to calm the students, at least, many of whom were crying. When a crew from the Stockbridge firehouse got there, Trooper Constable let them push him out of their way as they stretchered her, put a mask over her mouth and nose, and wheeled her quickly through the dumbstruck hallways of the school.

  She’d had a stroke, unlikely as that seemed, or maybe just unfair, in a woman so young and energetic. Her insurance was good—she was a government employee and a union member, so she was well covered—but money wasn’t everything: her husband’s farm suffered, and he wasn’t the kind of man used to taking care of himself in the basic ways, much less taking care of someone else in the ways Jo needed taking care of. The fact that she was covered for a home health-care aide didn’t mean she liked having a stranger there every moment, or ever got used to it; the nurses were helpful enough but she couldn’t bear their matter-of-factness about her inability to walk or speak clearly or write or eat anything that required two hands. And it was too hard to give in to the urge to break down and cry, as Jo did about once a day, when she was never alone, when some strange woman was always a few feet away, a constant dispassionate reminder of the ordinariness of what had happened to her.

  But this was the great thing about living in a small town—especially in those times, when everyone was still in the grip of an urge to show themselves in their own best light, looking for an outlet for their most charitable impulses. Everyone brought food, of course, until Jack had to politely start mentioning to people that their freezers were full, that there was no more room for anything. At which point two mothers with some computer savvy started an online Care Calendar, which quickly booked up through July. There was a separate calendar
for driving Joanna back and forth to the doctor and to physical therapy, and a fundraiser to buy them a van with a wheelchair lift, and a turnout like an Amish barn-raising to help make the inside and outside of the old farmhouse wheelchair-accessible, and even a signup sheet for current and former students of Jo’s to go over and mow their lawn. Jack uncomfortably accepted all of this charity, because he couldn’t think of a way to reject such an outpouring of love for someone he loved too, and because, the shameful truth be told, he sometimes found it hard to be alone in a room with his paralyzed wife, whose physical needs, while sometimes humiliating to attend to, were nothing compared to the helplessness and inadequacy he felt whenever she would look at him out of that half-frozen face, as if to say, is there really nothing you can do? Why couldn’t you stop this from happening? You swore we’d be happy, and it was true, he had sworn that to her, and he felt so weak in her eyes that it was hard for him not to avoid her gaze.

  As for Candace, she went back into the classroom and taught the rest of Jo’s classes for those final weeks of the school year. The district and the union had both okayed it as an emergency measure. She didn’t get much accomplished. Teaching kids anything in June was always a futile effort, and the fifth period in particular seemed to have gotten it into their heads that even trying to move on and learn something from somebody else was like an expression of disloyalty to Ms. Whalen. Still, she got them through their final, and graded it generously, to take into account all they’d been through. They had the whole summer now to find a replacement. But it wasn’t easy—it was never easy—to find qualified teachers willing to relocate or even to commute to Howland. As the summer wore on it seemed more and more possible that they might ask Candace to keep teaching in the fall, if only out of necessity, just until Joanna could make it back, which everyone had firm faith she would do. It was technically a demotion: Candace didn’t know how to feel about it. She didn’t want to ask selfish questions. She was hoping that somehow the decision could be taken out of her hands.