"Unfortunately, progress is a law of nature. Economic progress is even more coercive because, as any businessman knows, if you're not actively developing, you're stagnating, if you're stagnating, you're dead. Glen Creek is a sentimental icon can't continue to afford." (An excerpt from Mayor Dwayne Hewson's at the unveiling of the lavish Glenside Mall which Dwayne, Jon Rindfleisch, Roger Zwaart and a few others had built. ) We were saddened to see the Village Tartan Shoppe gone, replaced by a stylish Banana Republic.
and Jonathan Logan were gone, replaced by Gap and Hermes.
Thebookworm had been taken over by the Village Sport Shop which had section devoted to skiing and mountaineering. The Haven, totally renovated, was now an elegant French restaurant, LAUBERGE. The had long ago been razed and was now Village Video Sales & Rentals.
Muller's Drugs had vanished, we weren't certain where it had been.
distressing to us was the gentrification of what we'd known as the lower village, sometimes called the
"Italian zone." Water Street handsome twostory brick office buildings, medical suites and hair salons.
Wherever Glen Creek had been, all was pavement, meticulously maintained green grass and ground cover, the old row houses must have remained, behmd facades and freshly painted shutters and front doors, but were totally transformed. "My God, where's John Reddy's old apartment building? How can it be gone?" Pattianne Groves whispered. "It's gone," Trish Elders said, "and the North China, years ago. I wish I'd come over and taken some before the block was demolished but I had an art exhibit, I was distracted.
Kate took some, I think. Ask Kate." Pattianne said, "If Verrie comes this weekend, I hope she won't see this. She'll be heartbroken. She's had a difficult time lately, I've heard. That nasty piece in the Enquirer.
And she seemed, what? --drunk, or drugged, on the Late Show.
this is so sad." "More than sad," Mary Louise Schultz said, rubbing at eyes, "--tragic." We parked Trish's pale yellow Acura which reminded us of Verrie's beautiful canary-yellow Olds convertible of our girlhoods. We stood on Water Street at the approximate location of the North China Take-Out and gazed upward, not at the bland, boring brick facade of a new of fice building, but at, how vivid in our memories, the smudged old sandstone building in which the seventeen-year-old John Reddy Heart had lived in what we'd come to see, in retrospect, was his year of exile, expiation, a bereft of his family in our village of families and good, decent, law-abiding citizens. "Remember? --John Reddy's silhouette on the window shade? My God."
"His window would be open. Those October nights. We'd hear music--his.
He'd stand there in his undershirt, maybe bare-chested, smoking. God.
"John Reddy! --just think, he was younger, then, than our own sons are now. It doesn't seem possible." Pattianne who'd come to our reunion from Oslo, Norway, where her ambassador husband of whom she rarely spoke at the American embassy, cupped her hands to her mouth and slyly, "Killer-boy! Oh Killer-Boy!" Mary Louise, since her months ago inclined to random surges of emotion, laughed wildly, her hands to her mouth, too, and calling, "Killer-Boy! Hey!
Are you home, are you ready John Red-dy? John Red-dy!" Two youngish men in suits, looking likc lawyers, passed us by with quizzical looks. Trish cautioned her friends with a forefinger to her lips, "Shh!" but they'd had a glass or two of wine on the way over, they were laughing, arms around each other's and clumsily grasping at Trish too, they paid her no heed. "'John we're ready! John Reddy we're rea-dy! Mmmmm JOHN REDDY WE'RE REA-DDYY!" Veronica Myers was in fact expected at our reunion if her "complex schedule," as her assistant called it, making arrangements with over the phone, allowed. We hoped, if she wanted to make a pilgrimage to Street, it wouldn't push the poor woman over the edge.
Like his old friend and rival Clarence McQuade with whom he'd lost touch twenty-seven years before, Dexter Cambrook, though a former Princeton professor and more recently director of the National Foundation in Washington, D. C. , had gotten absurdly lost on his to the BEER FEST in Tug Hill Park--"And my folks used to live on Beechwood.
This just makes no sense." Three hours late for the gathering, mounting, Dexter decided to go directly to Jon Rindfleisch's cocktail party but was having difficulty now finding Brompton Road, he didn't recall Willowsville so mazelike, the street signs so obscured by shadows and foliage.
"What did they call us--'A bastion of privilege. So our world appears to an outsider." Growing desperate, he drove for a while by instinct, his was a personality perhaps overly determined by logic, rationality, analysis, but he found himself now approaching a staid colonial house with dark shutters, on Sedgemoor Lane--"God damn. Jon's family's old house.
Am I in a time warp?" Was he going to miss this party, too? This was Dexter's reunion--was he fearful of meeting his old classmates? Or too hopeful? (His excitement was mounting at the prospect of seeing, after so many years, her. ) The Nissan Altima he'd rented at the airport, unable to get a Honda Accord like the car he drove at home, handled stiffly and he was terror of having an accident. Like Clarence McQuade he'd been overwhelmed by traffic on Transit Road and had in fact been swept miles out of his way, north on that thunderous highway, thwarted from making a left turn.
at last he managed to find Main Street, Willowsville, he hadn't any landmarks--there were no landmarks, only minimalls and fast-food restaurants--and wondered if this
"Main Street" was in another unknown to him. The wisest thing would be to stop and telephone
directions--"But they'll laugh at me. Hewson, Bozer, Siefried.
Lutz. Nordstrom. That clique. At least Smoke Filer and Steve Lunt are dead.
They can't laugh." He felt a thrill of satisfaction that Smoke Filer in particular wouldn't be at the reunion weekend. That jeering-snorting laugh of Filer's he'd heard since the Academy Street School (most cruelly in the locker room, as commentary on smaller boys' genitals) had echoed through the like-a premonition of Hades. He was forty-eight years old yet seized with a emotion of the kind that routinely overcame him in adolescence.
"Fucker!
Glad you're dead. I'm director of the National Science Foundation in Washington, D. C. , and you're dead." The pale sickle moon, an icon of romance, was rising in the night sky. A muffled roar as of malevolent thunder wafted in our direction from HOMES DAY TUG HILL PARK where thousands of young people had gathered. Seeing her husband staring wistfully across the crowded terrace at the middle-aged girls of the Circle, Nanci Rindfleisch who was years younger than anyone else at the party, except the caterer's assistants, said in a lowered voice, "For God's sake, Jon--what's so special about those women? That black-haired woman over there, talking to the bald the carnation in his lapel--she's truly beautiful. A Botticelli.
Who is she?" Jon looked away reluctantly, wiping his face with a paper napkin.
At first he couldn't comprehend whom Nanci meant. "Oh--her? Janet Moss." Jon's voice was pleasant enough, yet dismissive. Nanci said impatiently, "What do you mean--'Oh, her. I said, that woman is beautiful, and interesting. I was talking to her a few minutes ago, did you know she's a research geneticist? At the Rockefeller Institute in New York? Working on a cure for certain kinds of brain cancer? She and her teammates are rumored to be on the shortlist for a Nobel prize? And she's an amateur pilot, just got her license?
And she has four children of whom three are sled-dog racers? Her husband's a and the entire family goes to Alaska every winter for the sled-dog tournament?" But Jon found it difficult to concentrate on his wife's remarks. We knew that Janet Moss was only Janet Moss, her family had lived in a small wood-frame victorian house on lower Mill Street and her father was management at Niagara Trust, the Mosses belonged to none of our and no one had missed them. What did it matter who Janet Moss was now?
In a horn-honking flotilla of shiny cars we would wend our way to Leroux Pifer's home in Amherst Dells three and three-quarters miles as, years ago, after football and basketball victories, we would wend our way through Willowsville wild and intoxicated and
disturbing the peace, doubting the peace was ours to disturb. It's true some of us had been drinking steadily since the BEER FEST at four p. m. in Tug Hill Park and most of us wcre stuffed to the gills--that fantastic seafood bar, giant shrimp, raw oysters, crab legs and chunks of Maine lobster, spicy Buffalo wings, salty cashews and grape leaves, the Greek caterer's specialty. And Rindfleisch's generous bar. "It's so hard to say no. These reunion weekends are wombs."
"Wounds?"
"And it's so hard to hear." Half the men in were hard of hearing in their left ears, and the other half were hard of hear' f ing in their right ears. "It's my rotten luck always to be seated between two X of these guys, on their bad ear' sides." But where was Bart Digger, the distinguished criminologist now advisor to the Attorney General whom glimpsed frequently, proudly on CNN, and were eager now to remeet?
where was our film star Veronica Myers who'd promised to join us, at least for part of the weekend? And where was E. S. Fesnacht our most if controversial) literary light, "Vangie" to her dearest, oldest friends?
Where was broody Ritchie Eickhorn our class poet? Where was sharptongued Elise Petko our valedictorian, and where was her sweet-gawky prom date Dexter Cambrook our salutatorian? Where was computer science theorist P F. Merchant whom we fondly recalled as little Petey Merchant, shy to the poillt of muteness, practically a midget, with watery spaniel-eyes and acne-skin? --another high-tech cyberspace explorer in the hire of HARTSSOFT of Palo Alto, CA? (We'd been hearing, too, a rumor for the past fifteen years that the mysterious founder of HARTSSOFT, by the time of our thirtieth reunion one of the most successful computer software companies in the world, was none other than Farley Heart, John Reddy's younger brother not one of us could remember! ) Where was cosmetic surgeon Dr.. Scott Baskett, and where was his friend Wells, our class's single college president, who'd played the clarinet so well? -"Whenever I hear a clarinet, or it could be a trombone, I suppose--I'm no expert on these things--I think of Blake, and wish I'd tried to be nicer to him." Effervescent Suzi Zeigler, the WBEN-TV Nightly News anchor, just arrived--"You guys! I couldn't stay away from you! You're only people on earth who know me as I am, not as I appear! "--but where was friend Sandy Bangs we'd heard had become a feminist documentary filmmaker? And where was Suzi's old exotic boyfriend Norm Zeiga who'd Suzi away from Roger Zwaart in our senior year? "Sure, I was angry.
Suzi and I planned on getting married since first grade practically. It wasn't that I loved her, though I guess I did, or even that I wanted to get married at all, but, like, it was fate. And fate was thwarted." Roger, of course, was here in Willowsville, he'd married one of our pretty, rich-girl classmates, Thrun, with his father-in-law's financial backing and his own dad's legal advice he'd become one of the Niagara Frontier's premier real developers, a rival and sometime partner of Jon Rindfleisch with whom he played squash and golf at the Willowsville Country Club--"For what's developing' but a way of countering, that's to say thwarting' fate?
Taking revenge, you could say, on nature." Roger and Jon!
Zwaart and Rindfleisch!
And in high school they'd hated each other's guts since Jon had pulled a fast one on Roger, rigging a Student Council election so he was elected treasurer in Roger's place. Of course our Willowsville mayor Dwayne Hewson was among us, rakishly good-looking as he'd been at the age of eighteen, though forty pounds heavier, with a blood-dark high-cholesterol face and hoarse smoker's voice. In fact, Dwayne was honorary chair of the Thirtieth Reunion Committee and had been involved in our reunions from start. Senior Prom King Ken Fischer who'd killed himself for some personal or professional reason years ago couldn't be among us of course, but where were his old buddies Bo Bozer, Tommy Nordstrom? There Art Lutz, another local CEO, gazing across the crowded terrace at chic, stillterrific-looking Mary Louise Schultz who stood laughing amid a circle of male admirers oblivious to him, but where was his old friend Dougie Siefried?
Ginger McCord who'd divorced Dougie three years ago had become unfeeling, we felt, on the subject of poor Doug. "Why ask me?
We're out of touch. I never think of him. I have grown children, I have my life now. I'm a human being not Dougie Siefried's girl. ") And where was John Reddy Heart after all these years?
"After the age of forty, deja vu is as good as it gets." At our lavish twentieth reunion, too, there'd been the giddy, excited expectation that John Reddy would turn up at the pig roast.
As Kate told us breathlessly--"Probably for just an hour or so. He'd be driving from somewhere upstate on his motorcycle. Yes, John Reddy is his old, self, you know--damned hard to pin down. But he smiled at me when I introduced myself--remember that smile? --he hasn't changed. Or, hardly at all--his hair is threaded with silvery gray, and he still wears it long. He's still good-looking, sexy. He said, My name is John Heart. That was a long time ago. But I was flattered--he remembered me! Pushing me in wheelchair, I suppose. He seemed surprised that I was walking, I explained about remission. The mystery of remission. Our lives in remission, I said. Our lives are in a perpetual state of grace. We are no more lepers than Jesus Christ was a leper--or, if we're lepers, was Jesus Christ. You taught me that, John Reddy. I didn't mean to him but I figured, we're adults now. Adults talk frankly to one another.
could see he wanted to talk more but the circumstances weren't quite right, so I invited him to visit my gallery, which he hasn't yet done, and I invited him to our reunion as a special guest. He said he'd try to make it, he practically promised, and I believe him."
"Oh, Katie. Did you shake hands with--?"
"Katie, is he married?"
"Did he ask anything about--any of us?" Kate touched a forefinger to her smiling lips as if to chide us.
Like a magician pulling tricks out of the air, marvels to astonish, she began passing around a dozen or more remarkable photographs of The Glass Ark, Aaron Leander Heart (oh, we remembered him! ) had constructed out thousands of bottles, and two intriguing if blurred photos of a man in biker's black-leather gear and a crash helmet, his back to the camera, on a motorcycle speeding away. "You can't see his face, unfortunately, but it's unmistakably John Reddy." We wiped our pork-greasy fingers on napkins, examining the photos long brooding minutes. Finally, one of us said quietly, "Yes.
It's him."
"Are you serious? You expect him to come to this party, after thirty years, when he's snubbed every party we've ever had, including even our prom? It's just too improbable." Yet, we persisted. For it was just possible.
We stared, astonished. Who?
Conversations faltered. She was standing at the edge of the Pifers' elegant redwood deck cantilevered over a sparkling-waterfall ravine in the portaled, privately policed Village of Amherst Dells, due west of the Village of Willowsville, gazing at us, her old classmates, with a look of defiance, and deference. Her hair was a handsome shade of gray, fastened neatly at the nape of her neck. She was taller than we recalled and, though hardly slender, no longer fat. In fact she'd become, in our absence, a woman of and presence. A woman of professional achievement. One of us whispered- "She's a New York State family court judge. Lee Ann Whitfield is a judge." Incredulous, we recalled our fat girl hunched at the misfits'
in the cafeteria. Her twin breasts ballooning against her cafeteria tray. Her blushing cheeks. The shyly hopeful movement of her lowered gaze as swung by, a pack of us, ignoring her, in fact not seeing her, as we didn't see the trash bins and the colored cafeteria workers behind the counter. Lee Ann Whitfield whom we'd had to vote into the Honor Society, Miss Bird our advisor insisted, she had the grades. Lee Ann Whitfield. You see she was new to our reunions, she'd hauled a husband with her, a professional-looking man in a suit and tie, who was hanging back, already dazed.
We'd all ceased bringing our spouses to these reunions. Not one of them had survived more than the first two hours. ) We'd gone silent, the noisy pack of us, smiling at the Honorable Lee Ann Whitfield as she forced a smile, a brave smile, at us.
In that instant we moved to greet her,
to make her feel welcome in rowdy midst.
"Why, Lee Ann!" gracious Millie Leroux warmly cried, lifting her for an embrace, "--it's been too long."
" The poor woman was afraid we'd snub her. Imagine. A New York judge, forty-eight years old. As if we aren't all adults now. ") High thin cries as bats cry in the depths of a haunted cavern in that House of Death where the burnt-out wraiths of mortals make their home.
And I trembled inwardly, knowing I was of that company and could not turn back.
"What a crowd! Who are all these middle-aged people? --us?" There were nervous jokes about the redwood deck cantilevered with architectural bravado over the rocky ravine.
When Scottie Baskett arrived, direct from the airport, his old friends applauded and rushed to greet him for we'd read with pride, or we'd been told, of an article on Dr.. Baskett of the Westchester Clinic for Aesthe ic Plastic Surgery and other New Wave cosmetic surgeons in Vanity Fair, we had urgent questions to ask of our old classmate, of a semipersonal/semiprofessional nature, the most aggressive was, to our surprise, glamorous McCord who pulled Scott off into a lighted area inside the Pifers' house before he'd had a chance even to get a drink so that he could scrutinize her face--"I just had collagen injections last week and they're lumpy.
Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues Page 44
