by Jacob White
I would end up down there often, those first weeks—resetting breakers, installing a new hot-water heater, tracing the bowels of some piece of plumbing—feeling with each trip down the wobbly stairs some release from the quiet crush above, some cool collapse. A few things lingered from the lives before ours. Against the dark back wall leaned two bald tires, and I’d found behind the old water heater a damp cardboard box with arrowheads scattered across its bottom. But it was the old library desk I’d found that first day—pushed against a brick column, close enough to the washer and dryer to suggest it had served as a folding table—that made me feel, suddenly, that I was in someone else’s space. A wooden chair sat shunted back from it, as if someone had just gotten up to check the mail. I sat; I ran my hands over the desk. It was large enough to serve as a small dining table, its wood dark from moisture, and its single drawer wide and shallow. The wood barked as I pulled it open.
A chaos of yellow legal paper littered the drawer, as if flung there in some drunken fury and shut away. A dark and deliberate cursive filled every page. Over the next half hour I collated the numbered pages. They stank bitterly from old cigarette smoke and dried out my eyes. I set them on the desk finally in a neat inch-high stack. Heading the first page was A History of River Heights.
When we look around us today, the text began, it is hard to believe that these houses were not always here, that the elegant fairways of green did not always wend through our hills like a river. . . .
And that was enough. It was pamphlet fodder for some historical society like those that littered the hill counties across northern Pennsylvania. But this neighborhood—it wasn’t thirty years old! I mean, A History of? I neatly replaced the manuscript and shut the drawer. I sat there for a moment before heading back up to the patio. Pushing myself up, I couldn’t help muttering, “Sad bastard”—words I would remember with great particularity a few months later when I sat down there trying to recover a history of my own, finding coolness aplenty on those long winter days.
Jean and I spent much of May working together on the house, trying to wrest it from its dreadful spirit of failure. The linoleum was peeling up under the cabinets, lumped with old golf tees and coins: we scraped it up and laid down some faux blond-oak paneling. We spent a week tiling the kitchen counters, another replacing two rotted-out window casings. We painted, replumbed, rewired. On days Jean felt tired I worked alone while she napped on the couch, occasionally calling my name to make sure I was still in the house. We weren’t used to being together all day. After I put up my tools, we’d share a drink on the back patio, watching the last of the evening golfers trundle by. Sometimes we waved, and they’d wave back, confused. You have to picture us: two pale sixty-somethings, me with my painter’s cap and plaster-flecked forearms, Jean in her by-now-usual sweat pants and snap-front pajama top (both smudged from weeks of work), together presiding from our chaise longues over a swampy moat of algae and leaves and up-clawed limbs. We never got around to the pool.
“I’ll go by the hardware tomorrow and pick up a mulcher,” I said one afternoon toward the end of May. Limbs lay piled across the yard before us, where we’d left them that first day.
“Not buy, I hope.”
“No, they rent. We’ll get this place palatial yet.”
“Well, don’t buy anything else, Ham. I mean, there’s no sense in . . . in killing ourselves . . . at this point.”
“We’ve put a lot into it already,” I said, refusing to miss a beat. “Everything, really. We might as well get it exactly how . . . you know, finish it.” We found ourselves dodging certain phrases, that summer.
“Yes. You’re right.” The pajamas and sweats guarded Jean against some private, persistent chill.
“Zach, though,” I said, trying to draw her into more perennial projects.
“Mm?”
“No kids his age here, you know.” It was a concern that had been hers, not mine—a concern that, like so many lately, she seemed to be letting go of.
Her hand lifted for a moment, limply took in the neighborhood, dropped. “They send them off to college.”
A week after we’d arrived, Zach had gotten a job manning the gas dock at the club’s marina. He worked every day and soon began arriving home at dusk shirtless and incredibly tan, dropping his old skateboard in the mudroom. We didn’t see him much. I pictured him sitting alone all day in that shack, staring out over the lake. Sometimes when he came in, his cutoff jeans and hair were damp as if he’d been swimming.
A scrap-winged robin broke from the branches of a sweet gum.
“I think you need to find something to do during the day,” she finally said to me.
“To do?—oh, we’ve plenty to—”
“I mean on your own. Out of the house.”
“What, like fishing?”
“Stop it. Didn’t Ted offer to sponsor you? For the club?”
“Hell.” I waved it off. “I ain’t club material, girl.”
“Just play some damn golf, Ham. Or go to the pool. You’ll . . . you need to get out of the house.”
“I do, huh?” I looked down at the funky pool water, shaking my head, and felt my face slacken with the stupidity of defeat, my lips pouting out some nonsense—“That’s silly.”
We sat silently through the final pinch of sunset, as we often did, waiting to hear the idle rumble of Zach’s skateboard coasting down our street. How smooth the streets are here. When we did hear him, I looked at my watch, sighed, and dropped my feet to the porch.
Before I could stand, Jean stayed me. “Hey,” she said, jostling my arm. “Hey. We might all be alive tomorrow, old goat.”
She’d said this often over the previous few weeks—whenever, kneeling together over some project or other, she sensed my chest stiffening against an unexpected stab of grief. I don’t think she believed the words, but I loved her for saying them. We might, I’d nod, yes, we might, as if that’s what I’d been trying to tell her all along.
That night Jean went straight to bed after dinner. Zach dozed in front of the television, looking healthy and exhausted. I went downstairs.
Above the desk a work light dangled by its orange cord. Under its hot bulb I opened the drawer and again set the stack of papers before me. Within five minutes my scalp had begun to sweat.
Even as flatbeds filled the pines and ravines with gravel dust; even as the valleys echoed with the hammers of framers, and dozers ripped up the monstrous roots of oaks, three men with golf spikes and clipboards were teeing up on the red-clay fairways to test the course’s playability, their vision for our community a clear and simple thing, finally. Fred Byrd was a renowned golf course architect who’d worked with Bruckheimer in nearly all of his previous developments. With him was Gary Kantz, the Charlotte Country Club pro, and L. B. Bruckheimer himself, who’d flown up from his home in West Palm Beach to walk the course with them, though he was seventy-six at the time. He was a small man.
Currently in the club’s Roundhouse Lounge there hangs a photo depicting the three men standing on what seems a Martian landscape (actually the hole six tee-off!): it’s 1969, and Byrd and Bruckheimer stand by with binoculars as Kantz’s body unwinds, his one-wood flying down in a ghostly fan.
Golf was a disaster. I’d played Scranton’s county course fifty times in half as many years. I had my own clubs, even. But I was bad at it.
After Ted put my name on a fill-in list at the club, I was called out of bed one Tuesday morning to square up a foursome in danger of losing its seven o’clock tee time. At the cart pickup, the largest of three white-haired men stepped forward, grabbed my hand, and said with the good-ol’-boy drawl of the self-made, “There’s my partner.” But this would be the warmest moment of our camaraderie. Throughout the day my drives veered into forests and yards and creeks, and twice my increasingly stoic partner had to circle the cart back because my skinny canvas golf bag had slipped loose fro
m the back. We got clobbered so badly no one could enjoy it, so after eighteen holes all I could do was wander around the pro shop as the other men leaned on the glass counter talking and chuckling with the young club pro.
Along a wall at the back of the shop hung a succession of group photos from various tournaments over the years, going all the way back to 1974. In each, two dozen pleasant, jowly men gathered on the eighteenth green, the lake visible behind them. I moved backward through the photos, watching many of the same men grow younger, thinner, regain hair. I scanned the names and of course found the old man’s beneath the 1980 photo. The name had haunted a number of forms the realtor sent to Scranton. I counted across the back row. He was taller than any of them, his head listing merrily with a wide, thin smile. His hair was mussed from a breeze, or from the long day of play. He looked then about my age. Younger maybe. I found him in all the preceding pictures, even in the inaugural 1974 group—he’d won, that year. First-ever club champion. He stood up front, thumb raised.
I could now see clearly his body flying off that bike—or collapsing, more likely, crumpling. Perhaps he’d put out a leg but found the last strength of his body shattered.
Outside, the men sat on the back bumpers of open-trunked Lincolns, pulling off their spikes. The one who’d been my partner, Orin, walked me to my car, obviously remarking to himself the rust-pitted fender. He put his hand on my shoulder and smiled down at me, even as his blue eyes hung with the morning-sogged fury of the elderly, and he said, “Next time, ask Ted to post your handicap. This isn’t what we pay our dues for, friend.” With a pat, he turned and walked back up the parking lot, his spikes grinding across the asphalt with plodding and dutiful cheer.
I dropped my clubs in the trunk and stood there. I needed to walk off some steam, so I headed back across the parking lot and up hole eighteen toward the house.
“How was it?” she said as I pushed like a prowler through the red tips. She sat propped in a chaise, wearing a blouse tucked into some jeans. She, too, had tried to make a day of it.
“Exhilarating.” I walked past her and through the open sliding door, and in the kitchen fixed a drink. I leaned on the counter for a while, staring at the glass, then took it up and walked down the hall.
Again I found myself in the basement, sitting before the desk. But when I pulled out the drawer I saw matters had altered. My neat stack of paper had become two, side by side. The left stack was facedown, the right a solid block of text: page 26.
By 1970 the peninsula’s trees had been thinned out for surveying lots. Asphalt roads had been laid down. The official groundbreaking for River Heights took place in the spring of that year down at Commodore Point and consisted of the demolition of an old paint-shorn lake club, the Goujon, and its two rows of half-sunk boat slips. On top of this site began the construction of the River Heights Marina. The Marina’s completion in 1973 was attended by a grand ceremony of four hundred people and concluded with a pontoon parade.
The dryer spun behind me, our work clothes collapsing and recollapsing upon one another. A penny or a button skittered about.
The sight of Jean in her old jeans and blouse upstairs had depressed me. The denim sagged over her abdomen. We’d been here over a month now, and I could no longer ignore the change in her body, in her eyes even. I began to think more and more often of our doctor in Scranton who, unable to dissuade us from moving down here, had taken me aside at the last minute and, clearly angry, urged me to make hospice arrangements as soon as we moved in. I hadn’t, of course.
The drawer wouldn’t go back in, so I had to pull it out and jiggle it. In doing so I dislodged a quarter-smoked cigarette from its depths: it came rolling forward across the cursive script, a relic of some ancient deception, browned and hollow at the tip where its ember had been tapped out. He’d come down here to smoke, to be alone. To work on his little history. Couldn’t bear it up there, the poor bastard.
I swatted the cigarette back into its darkness and jammed the drawer back in.
Back on the patio I sat next to Jean, told her it had been nice to get out and hit the ball. I was ashamed of feeling depressed about her appearance, and of my petulant anger earlier about, of all things, golf. I told her she looked crisp. But as I looked over at her, I felt I’d missed some larger point, because her smile seemed, as it did more often now, miles and miles offshore.
I began going to the club pool several mornings a week. It was by now late June. In the bathhouse I would change out of the golf trousers I’d left the house in, and then sit at an umbrella’d table in trunks and a golf shirt and try to read a novel from the pool’s paperback library. From high-hung speakers soft rock wisped over the pool like cirrus. Small, reed-chested kids ran off the diving board, their midair yelps snuffed by the water, leaving the board’s dying clap. There was the tired, lumbering flop of old women’s arms in the lap lane, the hourly pall of adult swim. And sure enough, here were Jean’s mourning doves, pouring through the trees at noon as she remembered—mixed now with the faint whine of boats coming in from the lake, the drowsy waver of invisible planes in the empty blue sky, comfortable cars hushing by at thirty, shots from the practice range, the clicking brake release of golf carts, their ascending whir.
There I sat, often into the afternoon, while Jean lay at home on the couch. Dying. Dying right now: part of my mind could never quite reconcile itself to this fact. Sometimes, too, I imagined her sitting at the library desk, reading. Periodically, over the past weeks, I’d ventured downstairs to check her progress. Page 36; page 59; page 72. What miserable hours those must have been for her, wading through that dismal history, its registry of property owners and public works. By now I’d begun to suspect that we had not come down here for her, that all this time she had been working to renew not her own past but my future. I tried driving her around, looking for certain oaks or hollows she’d known as a girl, but we never found anything. There was nothing left here for her to recognize. Perhaps the place even frightened her, in its strangeness. Yet she continued to feign nostalgia for my benefit: even the look in her eyes as we first crossed that bridge, how she clasped our arms—even that had been a gift. Once again, everything had been about me. Once again, I’d gotten it wrong.
Such were my thoughts at the brink of that piercing blue pool. The humidity nauseated me; I’d sit there all afternoon, my chest filled with a coldness despite the heat—Jean thinking I was out golfing. This was what awaited me. This, my life after Jean. Birds, boats, Buicks. This plashing pool, this idiotic lullaby. Whatever you leave behind when you come to a place like this, you had best leave utterly, and not look back as it sinks out of sight. You golf, damn it. You swim.
Standing at the edge of the pool one afternoon, shirt still on, I found myself leaning forward, thinking: I’ll take brains in the gutter, thank you.
Dale Duster Bridge was built in 1923 and named after the North Carolina cotton farmer who lobbied it into existence. Erected at the site where eighteen years before there had been a river fjord, the bridge would rejuvenate local farmers by cutting thirty-five miles from their interstate commute. When the bridge finally opened to traffic in April, several thousand turned out along the banks for barbecue and speeches. The ceremony concluded with two young men from Charlotte, J. P. Miller and Red Powell Jr., flying a Curtiss biplane beneath the bridge. “The trucks of the plane kicked up a thin mist as they touched the surface,” reported one of the many spectators lined above.
The Foresters invited us over to watch the Fourth of July fireworks from their dock. Jean hadn’t left the bedroom all day and said she didn’t feel like going. But later I found her dicing up a fruit salad in the kitchen, and we all walked over. Zach and I carried a cooler between us. His hair was by now sun-browned and summer-shaggy.
Around back! read a paper plate tacked to the Foresters’ front door. We followed a white-pebbled path around the house and worked our way haltingly down the steep backyard, ice
sloshing from the cooler. Barb hollered up greetings from the dock below, bounding fitly up the railroad-tie steps to help Jean with the salad. Jean told her not to be silly, it was just a salad.
The dock sagged under our weight as we filed on, one corner dipping under. There were too many of us. The Foresters had set out some plastic deck chairs, and as we sat we took care not to knock one another over. The dock jounced under us as the girls ran up and down the soggy pier waving sparklers and keeping a shy, lovesick distance from Zach.
Ted took the burgers off the grill, and we worked to balance the paper plates on our knees as we talked. Soon Barb caught Jean up in a lengthy discussion of her salad. Ted, Zach, and I watched boats gather around the bridge, their anchor lights coming on in the dusk. I felt good sitting there with my son, sipping beers out on the strange edge of our lives. An odd warmth filled me, and it hit me that soon there would be just me and him. I think Zach felt this, too. This was the first time we’d all been out of the house together. Whenever I handed him a beer he said, “All right, Winston.” I drank more than usual.
By dusk the lake had become a floating city of gridlocked boats. The murkily brilliant sprawl reminded me of our hillside view of Scranton. The flotilla spread almost to the shore, and four or five warmly lit boats floated within speaking distance of the dock.
“Some yahoo killed out there every Fourth,” Barb said, already heady with wine. “All come down here from Charlotte”—she swept an arm out at the nearby boats—“so we can’t even take our own boat out.” Their boat, tarped over, nudged urgently against the dock every time rollers came through.
