by Lauren Groff
No wonder, then, that over our hamlet there had fallen a blue-gray pall, even on the hottest, sunniest days. Even on the days when the tourists were loud and thick on Main Street, we scooped the ice cream, we watered the ferns on the lampposts, we sold the caps and balls and bats in a sort of fuzzy dream state. In the fine old hospital, Vi found the sick less crabby, more misty, dying more quietly than they used to, fighting less against the dark tide of death. Pomeroy Hall—once an orphanage, now an old-person home—stank less of incontinence and smelled more of the air coming up from the lake. In every open window there were old people, sniffing the wind to try to smell the change they sensed in their bones.
That week, we heard nothing about the monster from the authorities. There was a long, puzzled silence. The newspapers with their wild speculations about the beast’s origins: “The World’s Last Dinosaur” and “Scientist Says: The Missing Link?” and “The Fish from Mars!” began to move on to other matters. There was war in sad and gray parts of the world. There was a virus killing people on cruise ships. There was an adopted woman meeting her birth mother for the first time, pulling her car into the parking lot where the mother stood, weeping, when a semi ran over her and killed her. The ordinary rot of the world. When I read about these things that week, I sometimes found my hands stealing over my still-flat navel, as if covering the eyes of the Lump, keeping it safe. On nights when I couldn’t sleep and the ghost ringed my room in a haze, I imagined the Lump as a spinning nucleus, splitting and splitting in red cell-corpuscles, until it resembled nothing more than a halved pomegranate. This put me off fruit for some time.
Every night, I checked the answering machine, hoping to hear the soft round sounds of Primus Dwyer’s accent, even if all he said was “hello” and hung up. Every night, I stood listening to the frog pool’s rising chorus after the tape beeped off, feeling empty.
I had avoided Ezekiel Felcher twice that week, once in line at the Farmers’ Museum café, as I was waiting for lunch and he was chatting up a townie I didn’t recognize at the register; once as he was towing a van plastered with Phillies paraphernalia, hooting to himself with joy. He, I took it from the bobble-headed toy on the dash, was a Pittsburgh Pirates fan. And I was growing fond of Peter Lieder and the caprine sleeping woman because I spent most of my day in the library looking for—and rejecting—ancestors. Claudia Starkweather’s mother and aunt were my next targets, but Ruth and Leah Peck had been sent off to wealthy relatives in New York City when they were ten and eight, respectively. Only Ruth returned, and she returned only when her own daughter Claudia—my great-grandmother—was eighteen and ready to marry. By then, Ruth was already an old widow, devoted to her weeds. Ruth and Leah Peck were the daughters of Guvnor Averell’s second daughter, Cinnamon, the products of her fifth and final marriage.
“Just checking,” I had said to Vi. “But Ruth and Leah Peck weren’t the source of my father, were they?”
“Who and Who Who?” she said.
“I didn’t think so,” I said.
Ruth and Leah were on the Averell side; their compeer on the Temple side was Henry Franklin Temple, Sarah’s father. But he seemed a quiet, sober soul, and though you can never tell about ancestors, I had a strong feeling that he would never have committed adultery. For a few days, however, I did believe in his guilt; I was charged with energy and a feeling I was coming close to the secret when I learned that Henry had set up Finch Hospital in Templeton for his old friend Isadora H. Finch, the first lady-doctor in upstate New York. After much searching, however, I discovered that Isadora lived in a “Boston marriage” with a woman she had met when she was thirteen and a student at Miss Porter’s all-girls school. Everyone called the woman she lived with “mannish,” and I found a letter addressed by her to Isadora, affectionately calling her “my wife.” My suspicions died at that moment.
It was a hot day when I moved to the next generation up, on both sides. Ruth and Leah’s mother was Cinnamon Averell Stokes Starkweather Sturgis Graves Peck, Hetty’s granddaughter, five times a widow. And Henry’s adoptive mother was Charlotte Franklin Temple. She was a spinster who never had children of her own, and had seven sisters, all of whom dispersed elsewhere when they were married, young. Charlotte was the only one left in town, the daughter of Jacob Franklin Temple and a minor literary figure herself; I relished the idea of digging up mud on such an exemplary virgin, finding some secret pregnancy that she hid with her money and influence. She was the one to start Pomeroy Orphanage. The little brown mouse in her watercolor was the first lady of the town from the time her father died and almost into the twentieth century.
I had just dug into my books and was absentmindedly chewing on a pen when Peter Lieder came by with the squeaky cart and guffawed. I looked up, frowning. His Adam’s apple danced a jig above his bow tie.
“That’s a great look, Willie Upton,” he said. “Vampire-Slash-Angel-of-Death. Very à la mode.”
“Huh?” I said.
“Here,” he said and took out a foldable pocket mirror, and the fact that fey Peter Lieder actually carried around a pocket mirror startled me more than his comment. But when I looked into the mirror and saw that the pen I was chewing had exploded over my face, even dripping under my chin and onto my neck, and my teeth and tongue were stained, and that I, in my ignorance, had smeared the black ink all over my cheeks and forehead, I understood.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “It’s a medical condition. Unfortunate, really. Sometimes my cynicism about this big ugly world of ours builds up pressure and bursts all over me. Nothing I can do. Sorry.”
“Oh,” said Peter Lieder. “I, too, suffer from explosapenitis.”
“Really?” I said. “And what do you do about it?”
Peter gave a little glance around the hot library, and I saw with him the way with each pass the rotating fan lifted the wisps of the ancient woman’s hair, then returned them to their places. I saw two unfortunate houseflies beating against the window in panicky parabolas. I saw the dark and cool-looking lake outside.
He turned to me and raised an eyebrow. “I usually wash it off,” he said. “Lake water does the trick beautifully.”
I looked at him with narrowed eyes and then I, too, raised an eyebrow.
He gave a shrug. I shrugged back.
He nodded and stepped back into the stacks, where the old woman couldn’t see him. He walked off toward the back entrance, and in about ten seconds, I saw him emerge in the window and break into a run down the long green sweep of lawn toward the shore. It was so incongruous—his starving chicken run, the way his legs almost tangled each other—that I laughed. Then I too hurried out the door, and tossed off my shoes and let my own legs loose and free, so fast that I caught up to Peter and passed him in a moment, and had a few seconds to cool my feet in the shallows as he panted down the hill. He had already untied his bow tie and was taking off his shoes. He stripped down to a black Speedo, and then ran clumsily into the water, diving in and swimming out a bit.
“Peter,” I said, “what in the heck are you doing with a Speedo under your clothes?”
“I swim every day at lunch,” he shouted, spitting water at me. “Up until the first ice, and then it gets too cold for me. Only thing that makes my job bearable.”
“Ah,” I said, looking at the water with regret. “Well, I don’t have a bathing suit.”
He swam closer and said, “You have a bra on? And underwear?”
“Yup,” I said. “I do indeed. But they’re white. Unfortunately.”
“So what,” he said.
“White goes transparent when it’s wet,” I said.
Peter Lieder dove under, and when he came up, he was grinning. He smoothed the moisture out of his caterpillar mustache, then said, to my enormous surprise, “Well, Willie, it looks like today is my lucky day.”
THE LAKE FELT cool and hospitable on my skin, the sky unfolded itself wide open, almost daring a person to look for evil omens lurking over the hilltops. And yet, when we walked up the long g
reen lawn toward the library, as Peter Lieder shook water out of his ear and I held my shirt out so I wouldn’t have a wet bikini stamped on the cotton, I said, “It was odd, wasn’t it, Peter? The lake, I mean. I have never wanted to get out of it so fast in my life. Maybe it’s just me.”
“It’s a fact,” Peter said. “Not just you. Any other year in August, you’d have water-skiers so thick out there they’re almost murdering one another. Clotheslines, collisions, you name it. Not this year. Nobody out there. There’s something creepy now about the lake, at least after Glimmey died.” He gave a little sigh and said, rather abruptly, “Not that we know that Glimmey was a bad monster, or anything, and I don’t remember anybody coming up out of the lake with bite marks all over, you know? But he could’ve been. He could’ve eaten babies, for all we know. And all those times we went swimming, there he was, looking at our little tiny legs, salivating. And so though the lake looks all pretty and simple and almost blank now that Glimmey’s gone, there’s still some sort of menace, I think, just lurking there. It’s very, very scary.”
I stopped walking, feeling worse.
“Peter,” I said. “This is terrible. The world is falling apart faster than we can catch up, and the one place, the one place in the world where it’s not supposed to fall apart seems to be rotting, too. I come home to Templeton because it’s the only place in the world that never changes, and I mean never, never changes, and here’s this half-dead lake. I always thought, hey, if the ice caps melt and all the cities of the world are swallowed up, Templeton will be fine. We’d be able to make do. Plant vegetables. Bunker up, sit it out, whatever. But it doesn’t seem right anymore. Does it?”
I felt like weeping; I felt hyperbolic; I felt as if all the shadows of the earth had just fallen over Templeton. Peter put his hand on my shoulder and made me turn to him. “That is totally psychotic, Willie,” he said with admiration. I looked up into his face, and it was cracked into a wide smile, the mustache broken in the middle like a twig. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Well,” I said. “No, I wasn’t.”
“Ha,” he said, and it was less of a laugh than a phonetic recitation of the word. We had reached the back entry now and were standing by the door, where, in the glass, the lake was traced very faintly. “You’re a romantic, you know. I never thought you’d be a romantic. Always thought you’d be hard-boiled somehow. Listen, everything changes, Willie, whether we want it to or not. I mean, look,” he said, gesturing vaguely across the lake at the hills bristling with pines. “See that hill? Before this area was settled, that was all huge, old-growth hardwood. Maples, ash, oak. Not so many pines to speak of. A century later it was all hops, not a single tree. I mean, at one point,” he said, warming to his subject, turning pink, “there were passenger pigeons in the Northeast, these spectacular, gentle black and white birds who’d flock in the millions, all at once. In a few years, they were completely exterminated. Now the only pigeon you’re going to see is one of those,” and he pointed to a mottled bird plucking at a crushed Styrofoam cup on the grass. “You get what I mean?” he said.
“I see your point, Peter—” I said, and was about to say more when he interrupted me.
“Willie, all I’m saying is that worrying about it isn’t going to fix anything. The only thing we can do is keep on with our own small thing and try hard to be good and to make life better, and know that if it all ends tomorrow that we were at least happy.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “Not only is that a cliché, you’re a lotus-eating hedonist.”
“If that weren’t redundant, it might be true,” he said. “Listen, this may sound presumptuous and everything, but don’t give up on living your life, Willie. I have hope for you yet. Tell me: what is the one thing in the world that you’d be overjoyed to have, right now, even if you were to die in the middle of experiencing it?”
The first thing in my head was a vision, Primus Dwyer smiling down at me in the soft red light of our tent on the tundra, the terns outside screaming and screaming. The second were words, which shocked even me as they pulsed into my head: the Lump, I thought, then chased the thought away. It was only with the third thing that bubbled up in my mind that I spoke. “A frigid martini, dirty, with very excellent vodka,” I said, dreamily.
Peter Lieder’s eyes flashed, and he gave a shrug of his skinny shoulders. “That was not what I was thinking,” he said, “but that’s definitely second best. I am taking you out tonight, Willie Upton, and you can’t say no. Bold Dragoon. Ten o’clock. I’ll see you there.”
Before he could finish his sentence, the door swung open under his hand and the tiny old woman stood in the doorway, tottering, her cirrose protrusions on her chin still quivering from the violent updraft.
“You,” she said, shaking her finger at Peter Lieder. “Get your bony behind back to work. If I didn’t watch you like a hawk, like a dang hawk, you’d be out gallivanting all day with pretty young ladies, wouldn’t you? You would. Now stop your gawping and get going,” and Peter hightailed it inside, so fast I barely saw the tracery of the wet Speedo on his khakis. The old woman held the door for me, frowning malevolently.
“In, miss,” she said. And she began muttering so low that I couldn’t understand what she was saying. She followed me back inside and stood near my table, still muttering until I stood and stacked the books in a neat pile, and called it a day, happy to escape from the old goat-woman’s gloomy little presence.
I CAME IN that evening exhausted, expecting to smell the rich smells of Vi’s cooking or at least to see her out at the grill on the back porch, flipping shish kebabs with her tongs. But the house was empty, and on the counter there was a note for me.
Sunshine, it read. I’m at “Reverend Milky’s” as you see fit to call him. Real name’s John Melkovitch, in the phone book—I’m staying over. There’s cereal, or you could make yourself some eggs or leftovers. Clarissa called. Love you.—Vi
I chuckled when I read the note and touched my navel. “Looks like someone’s a hypocrite,” I said. “Sex before marriage. Très taboo.” And then I noticed my hand on my gut and said to the Lump, “Why am I talking to you? You’re not even a person,” and sat down to eat some cold stuffed chicken from the Tupperware.
I turned on the television, and in thirty seconds realized why I hated television. I turned off the television and stood up to do 500 jumping jacks, since I hadn’t exercised after the day I realized any man in town could have been my father, and stayed home to avoid the Running Buds; I was too afraid of literally running into them again. At 341, I thought I heard the phone ring, and ran over to it, but the dial tone only beeped, vague and impersonal, in my ear. I came back to the couch, flipped through one of my mother’s knitting books, and promptly fell asleep.
IT WAS DARK when I awoke, the moon screwed crisp as a bolt in the sky. And because the clock on the VCR was already flashing 10:21, and because I don’t believe I had ever been late in my life, I was thrown into a panic and didn’t have time to pause and reflect. I didn’t think that I probably shouldn’t drink, or that I should call Clarissa back or even take the time to consider an outfit, and instead just threw on whatever I had at hand. That turned out well enough; I wore a short old hippie dress of Vi’s, tucked my lake-stiffened hair up under a red silk kerchief, threw a couple of gold hoops in my ears and a coat of some lipstick I had on the old vanity, and stepped back to see the effect. It was far better than I had imagined; I looked like some expensive designer’s idea of gypsy fashion. I put on a pair of ancient espadrilles and was out the door before 10:25.
The Bold Dragoon was the oldest bar in Templeton, built in the earliest days of Marmaduke Temple’s settlement. The innkeeper had come at a time when there were still few people in Templeton, and built the little wooden structure with his own hands, even painting the sign that still hung up there in the lake wind. There was a curling fire-breathing dragon and the words The Bold Dragoon in neat script above. In those days of limited literacy, nobody caught that the
word dragon was misspelled, not even Marmaduke, since he had taught himself how to read, and couldn’t spell worth a whit. When the first attorney came into town and stopped on his spavined mare to read the sign, he threw his head back and laughed and laughed until he drew a crowd.
“Pray tell wot’s so amusin’, sir,” said the little badger of an innkeeper, reddening under the insult.
“A dragoon,” sputtered the attorney, “is a knight, my good man, not a dragon.”
With that, the innkeeper pushed out into the crowd with a pot of paint, stood on the vast shoulders of a settler named Solomon Falconer, and drew a hasty but handsome knight in armor spearing the dragon from below. It was that glossily restored, eerie-looking sign flapping in the lake wind that I strode under on my way into the pub. On Friday, the young people took over this pub as their own. The rest of the week, it was a Harley hangout, and Pioneer Street bristled with motorcycles all the way up the hill toward the elegant Presbyterian Church. Just outside the door, hearing the bone-crunching bass of music, I stopped to take a deep breath, to steel myself, and then I went into the pub with its smoke-lacquered beams and glistening original floorboards.
The music did not spin to a stop; not every person in the place turned to look when I entered. But enough people did pause for a moment and peer to see who I was that a palpable hush fell over the place. And then Peter Lieder was by my side, grinning in his dorky way, and I had a shot glass full of some dark liquid in my hand, and then my mouth was washed with a strong, sweet taste of liquor and my throat convulsed with heat.
“Willie,” said Peter, his breath already spiked, “to be honest, I didn’t think you were coming.”
“Peter, to be honest, I took a nap and almost slept straight through.” I put the glass down on a table nearby and smiled at him.
