The Mt. Monadnock Blues

by Larry Duberstein

  “Your grandfather, my dad, died when you were little.”

  “We know that,” said Billy.

  “He died in the middle of the night and I was thirty-four years old when I got that phone call but I felt just like a little kid. It was the strangest thing to realize you would never see him again. It was like getting hit in the head with a log.”

  “Did you ever see him again?”

  Cindy had begun to cry and Tim drew her closer, squeezing her ribcage, kissing the top of her head.

  “I never did, sweetheart. Except in pictures, and memories. I never forget him, I mean.” The girl’s tears were catapulting from her now.

  “Are they buried?” said Billy, standing straight and manly even though he had begun to quiver. Then they were all sobbing. Tim wanted to stop, for their sake, but his face just kept doing what it wanted. He needed to wipe Cindy’s face, too—it sounded necessary—but her head was locked in the down position. Billy’s as well. Tim saw the two crowns of hair, hers curly and not so blond as it would be in a month, his a thick dark thatch.

  When he finally managed to lift Cindy’s chin, he saw that wiping was inadequate. Tears and snot and maple syrup had blended together horribly. Through the blur of his own tears, past the two clouds of hair, Tim noticed the clock. It was seven a.m. The day had not even begun.

  II

  IN LOCO PARENTIS

  So he was back to having no idea what to do; back therefore to Coolidge. He had them brush their teeth. Wash their faces. He told them it was time to go to the office.

  “I want to go home,” said Cindy.

  “Sure, everyone does. But first they have to go to work.”

  “Paid work?” said Billy.

  “Absolutely. The usual rate plus lunch at Betty’s. Are we set to hit the pavement?”

  You pretended everything was going forward according to form and then it could; that was the trick. And getting out of the apartment, starting along the southwest corridor to Copley, was a help, an immediate distraction. Billy and Cindy loved this sinuous path behind the dead-end blocks, where there were exotic dogs (not to mention the comedy of equally exotic owners with their poop-pickup gloves) and green haired punks on skateboards. There were tennis matches on the sunken court where Greenwich ended, and there were all the graces—balconies and gardens—of a Victorian row-house enclave.

  And there was Harriet. A stout, absurdly rouged woman who dressed in winter layers regardless of the season, Harriet had been a finalist for Miss Maine in 1958, or so she testified. To those who gave her money, she would display an old snapshot of a young bathing beauty. Tim more or less believed it was Harriet in the picture; Billy always said no way.

  “Can I give her the money?” said Cindy.

  “You sure can,” said Tim, handing Cindy a dollar, which she placed in Harriet’s frayed mitten.

  “A whole dollar?” said Billy.

  Lately he had begun to worry about money. Ever since he overheard his parents discussing the roof (they could not afford to replace it this year) he had taken steps on his own. Stopped asking for magazines, stopped asking for his allowance. No one seemed to notice this initiative, but Billy figured it had its impact. He was not so sure the old lady was poor—at times suspecting a con—and he was absolutely sure it wasn’t her in the silly picture, yet it always did feel good when Harriet said Bless your hearts and winked at them.

  Ellie Stern was on the line when they trooped past her desk at Trips, Inc. She raised her eyebrows in a smile and brushed fingertips with Cindy, gave a little wave to Billy.

  “Air conditioner or air?” said Tim, as they took over his cubicle. Billy, who knew the right answer, was already opening the side windows.

  “Will we be here all day, Unk?”

  “I’m not sure. You used to like it here, back when you were Cindy.”

  “I do like it, Unk, but I don’t have any of my stuff.”

  “We’re here to work, Simp,” said Billy.

  Before Tim could get them started sorting and filing the new brochures, Ellie appeared. “You brought the Hergies,” she said. “I’m delighted, even if it is a transparent coverup for being late.”

  “Not as late as Charles,” Tim pointed out. The third partner, Charles Tashian, was nowhere in sight.

  “Charming Billy,” she curtsied, as if receiving royalty. “Lovely Cindy.”

  “Cynthia.”

  “If you say so, Miss Mouse.”

  “Ell?” said Tim. “We need to go over the Venice package—at your desk?”

  “No problem,” said Ellie, hardly missing the shift in tone: the Venice package and whatever he really needed to say. “Why don’t you take charge here, Bill. If the phone rings, just tell them we’re all at a seminar on the Congo.”

  “It’s not Congo anymore. It’s Zaire.”

  “Of course it is. And you see why we put you in charge.”

  Ellie’s “office,” like Tim’s and Charles’, was simply one-fourth of the floor space they rented. They had it divided like a square pie, the fourth fourth serving as a combination coffee room and waiting area or minimalist buffer zone. Partitions rose just high enough to trim the tops of the connecting doors.

  So they whispered. Tim whispered the terrible news, and Ellie had to whisper her exclamations of disbelief. A soft explosion somewhere inside her flooded her eyes and puffed her face, after which again she whispered: “Why did you come in? You didn’t have to come here, Tim.”

  “I had to go somewhere.”

  “But you seemed so normal, the three of you. You seemed to be having a good time.”

  “We’re in shock, I guess.”

  “What will happen? Where will they go, Tim?”

  “No idea. I do have a sort of plan, though—for the next few days.”

  “You? Have a plan?” Ellie was literally smiling through tears.

  “Yes. Charlie runs the office—”

  “Assuming he can find it.”

  “He can hire a temp if he wants, at my expense. And you come with me. Just for a couple of days—”

  “My favorite role.”

  “No, it’s not my mom. I have to go to New Hampshire to sort out the official part of this. And it would be so great if you could come along to help me with the kids.”

  “Your mom must be devastated.”

  “She doesn’t know yet,” he said, as Ellie turned her head away in distress. “I mean this just happened.”

  Tim pictured his mother, alone in Berline, seventy-four and without the slightest notion of the coming blow, the grief that was about to swallow her whole. There was her son (a bachelor, at forty) and there was a hornworm attacking her tomatoes: such were Anne Bannon’s chief concerns, insofar as she communicated them.

  “What about your other sister? She’s in New Hampshire.”

  “She isn’t, actually. They are on the road, impossible to contact. That’s Big Earl’s great self-deception. He goes off in his fifty-thousand-dollar Chinook and thinks because he doesn’t carry his cell phone he’s morphed into Henry David Thoreau.”

  “I need to think.”

  “It’s just a couple of days, Ell, and I promise I’ll make it up to you. And I’ll make it up to Charlie when the ski season comes. I’ll stake him to a weekend with The Beast.”

  Charles’ fiancée Lynda McMullen was gorgeous. Just as Tim had nicknamed Joanne Bettworthy “The Beast,” he christened Lynda “cindycrawford” for her strong resemblance to the supermodel. (“Everything but the mole,” he said—“And the money,” added Charlie with his patented serpent’s leer.) Lynda was gorgeous and Joanne, to put it politely, was not. So Charlie’s winter sneakaways to Okemo and Gunstock had always baffled Tim, even before he discovered one day The Beast did not even ski.

  “No she doesn’t,” explained Charles, at last, “and yes she dresses badly. But then she undresses, capiche? And she can après-ski like the Devil’s youngest daughter.”

  “I’m not concerned about Charles,” said Ell
ie. “I have to be back here by Saturday afternoon at the latest.”

  “I promise. You’ll be back.” Something was informing Tim he ought not inquire the reason for this, and he repressed the urge. Ellie could not refuse, Ellie was not refusing, so leave it at that. But now that it was settled, reality began seeping in. He did have to make the call to Anne. Cindy was either laughing or crying at his desk, and the smart money said crying. Plus all three phones were ringing.

  “It’s too awful,” Ellie said. “Jill was just the loveliest human being.”

  Tim heard the jarring disharmony of the three phones, and the single jarring lyric ‘was.’ Jill was. And then he thought he heard himself crying, from far off somehow, as though inside another dream.

  The town of Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where Jill and Monty had settled eight years ago, wore many faces, the most famous of which appeared dramatically as the road curved and dropped just before Trumball Farms, the roadside restaurant. Between curtains of green on either side of the roadway lay an avenue of sky straight to the rocky pointed peak of Mt. Monadnock.

  There were old Yankees in town and there were rural poor. Around the ponds and lakes, stately old mansions stood alongside ranch houses and summer shacks. And though the arts were quite prominent here, so too were shotguns mounted inside pickup trucks—the restraining order crowd, as Karl Trickett labeled them. “We’ve got diversity, too,” Jill liked to tease her brother, who was a fairly hardcore urbanite.

  Turning into the Trumball Farms lot, Tim braced for difficulty. Billy and Cindy were at home now, and he guessed they would finally break down. They did not, at all, possibly because it was simply too peaceful for emotional turmoil. (Across the road, Jersey cows grazed a tilting green hillside; above them, a two-seater from the local airfield floated and banked like a giant hawk.) In any event, they ate their way through a couple of clam plates, then took on ice cream cones as big as their heads, and showed no hesitation.

  Then at the house—where Tim flinched, mentally and physically—they sprinted inside blithely, happy to be home, which was both a relief and a worry to Tim. How could they not crash here? What could it mean?

  They did stay very close together, a tiny nation of two. Tim had seen them grow apart this past year, start becoming male and female, older and younger. For the first time, Billy had his friends and Cindy had hers. But today they huddled close, and frequently huddled with Tim and Ellie, checking in.

  “They’re afraid we’ll vanish, too,” said Ellie.

  “They aren’t showing any pain.”

  “Or we just aren’t seeing it.”

  Nor did they see it that night, although Tim watched them as closely as a research chemist watches his test tubes. He and Ell might be mere parental dummies, propped up at the kitchen table, but the comfort level never wavered, the pain never emerged. Eventually, both children lapsed into television comas and Tim carried them upstairs, one at a time.

  “Tim, they have been so easy, so sweet, but I do see why parents always say ‘It’s been a long day.’”

  “Hey, it’s going to be a long week,” said Tim, pouring two very large glasses of wine.

  “What about Provincetown? Isn’t that next week?”

  “The week after,” he said, and Ellie understood that to Tim ‘the week after’ signified a time far into the future. Ellie was guessing his Provincetown vacation was gone, shot, and wondered if his fall trip—what was it, Ireland this year?—would not prove threatened.

  “September? Are you serious?” he all but shouted when she mentioned the possibility. “That can’t be a problem.”

  Meaning Tim could not contemplate an autumn that included no new verse of “The Blues.” For every year he travelled, and every trip was beset by bad luck, by what his dear friend Karl called (collectively, as though they would be bound and sold) The Blues of Tim Bannon. Last November he had seen the magnificent Sognafjord against a broad spectral sunset, yet had spent three days biking through endless freezing bogs to get there. The Sognafjord Blues.

  “The Donegal Blues?” said Ellie.

  “Probably. Though I’m still considering Senegal,” he grinned.

  “Donegal or Senegal. That’s it?”

  Ellie raised her eyebrows and let it go. She was ready for sleep and only sleep right now. And she knew it would take Tim a while before he fully grasped that Jill would not be coming back from the dead.

  Next morning after breakfast, Tim drove to Keene for a meeting with the shrink, Olivia Goldsmith. She began by reciting how sorry she was for his loss (a rote, industry-prescribed line which nonetheless gave a brief frisson of comfort) and then sat waiting to hear from him, her virginal yellow pad at the ready. One might have called her ambient expression a very faint smile, though it was not exactly that.

  “What should I be doing?” he said. “What am I supposed to be looking for? What are they really feeling? Help.”

  Now he saw the difference, as she did smile. Goldsmith was an attractive woman in her late forties, with short dark hair tinged gray and punctuated by jade earrings that seemed like tiny fragments of the green in her eyes. Tim placed her as a trim, no-frills edition of middle Liz Taylor.

  “I like someone who can get to the point, Mr. Bannon, but honestly, just stick with common sense. Feeling? Shock, confusion, sadness—great great sadness. And they will feel anger.”

  “They don’t show any of it. I understand there are no cures, but there must be strategies. Some tips you could give me.”

  “Common sense is all you’ll need. And love, of course. I take it you have no children of your own.”

  “No,” Tim answered, though it was not phrased as a question.

  “Children are less apt than we are to disguise feelings, but they are also less apt to know them. And at a time like this, they can disguise those feelings from themselves, if you follow me.”

  “Not really.”

  “You want to pay close attention without hovering. Do they seek time alone? Fine, see that they get it. Do they want too much time alone? Then you break in on the pattern.”

  “Try this,” said Tim, who was not getting the kind of responses he had hoped for. “What would you do, if you were me. Today, I mean. Right when I walk in the door.”

  “Hug them. Feed them. You can’t go wrong there.”

  “Anything special?” he said, with a trace of sourness.

  “Oh come on. You mean Mcfrenchfries versus a garden salad? Here’s what matters: kids express their need through hunger. The rituals of coming by food and eating it—whatever it is—serve to fulfill them. It’s a normalcy thing.”

  “I suppose it is,” said Tim, still starved for behavioral clues, yet pretty sure Goldsmith had said yes to junk food.

  At the state police barracks later in the morning, Tim learned details of the accident. A drunk driver, of course. Uninsured, of course. A man named Alfred Chute would face charges of vehicular homicide—jail time—and charges of driving without proper insurance.

  “He rents a room on Oak Street in Jaffrey,” said Lieutenant Moss. “Hasn’t had work since March. I’m afraid it looks like the blood-from-a-stone problem, Chute being your stone. Will you excuse me for a minute?”

  “Sure,” said Tim, though Moss was already gone. Tim felt useless, passive, just as he had at Goldsmith’s office. He didn’t care about the criminal charges and he didn’t care (though he knew he ought to, for the children’s sake) that the unemployed, uninsured Mr. Chute had no money. Selfishly, he wished only to be done with bureaucracies and red tape.

  He marvelled at the barren expanse of Moss’ desk, a slab of speckled brown laminate with chipped edges that revealed the pressboard core. There was not a single object on the surface: no lists, no files, not even a paper clip or a day-planner. Tim sighed. He gazed out the window at a wide brick chimney, pink against a pale blue sky, and sighed again. He could see himself sighing a lot in the days to come.

  His duty, however, was clear. He must hold himself together
, somehow restore order to Billy and Cindy’s lives, and then return to his own life. Not that he had the slightest talent for an orderly life. On the contrary, he found chaos—or freedom—more interesting. “The curse of being queer,” he said, perhaps out loud, perhaps not.

  Possibly audible to Moss, who had reentered the room, or possibly not. What the hell, Moss had likely surmised it on his own; even a country cop could know one when he saw one.

  Jeff Moss had not heard. And though he had spotted an evening grosbeak at the birdfeeder, his real motive in stepping outside was to give Tim a moment to collect himself. In a town where half their calls were cat-in-the-tree or car-strikes-deer, this was a tough one. Toughest for the kids, but clearly tough for the gay uncle. This poor guy was really stuck.

  “Coffee?” offered Moss. “It’s fresh. Sort of.”

  Another long day; accordingly, more TV on Cedar Street that night. Tim gave the children milk and cookies (and how cozy was that) when The League of One came on. Grateful for the one-hour easement, he and Ellie took their coffee mugs out to the deck and lit a citronella candle to discourage the last battalion of black flies. Drained and weary, Tim had dissolved—pooled down—into the wicker chair when Billy poked his face outside.

  “Unk?”

  “What, Bill?”

  “It’s starting, is what.”

  Just as it had not crossed Tim’s mind that he would watch the show, it had not crossed Billy’s mind his uncle would miss it The show was a point of connection. The three of them had seen it together a few times, but they always hashed over the latest episode the following day, on the phone. And now it was starting.

  Dutifully, Tim reported. Cheerfully, he participated. He pooled down into the couch and relaxed around the cast’s familiar gestures. Maybe the rapport among these actors was contrived, but it felt genuine. Tim imagined the whole troupe having a blast at the day’s filming, then heading off together for beers after work and high jinks on Sunset Boulevard.

  He was gonzo, though, and the first raft of ads broke the spell. He had one sharp pang of envy for Ellie, under the burgeoning stars with her coffee and strudel. After that he was staring in the direction of the glowing tube without seeing much. Now and then he placed a cookie in his mouth.