The Mt. Monadnock Blues

by Larry Duberstein

  Sex was the kicker, of course, but Tim might be approaching the time of sexual retirement. Forty years old! Already the unruly hormones could lie quiescent for days at a stretch. Why couldn’t he do this? Come up to New Hampshire and raise Jill’s kids, if he had a whole driveway all to himself for parking? At the moment, the proposition seemed less impossible.

  And at the moment, stepping back out into the pre-crepuscular light, the sky of faded blue, he did not even register the presence of ashes in the trunk. The urns clattered slightly as he drove, just a distant insignificant tinkle to Tim. Then Cindy came to him, yelling pick me up pick me up, and all he saw was Jill. When she laughed, Cindy looked exactly as her mother had looked in the third grade. The formulation came first (Jill Bannon Hergesheimer, 1948-1990), then a crushing at his throat.

  “I’m so weak I can barely lift you,” he said, staggering under the impost, covering his grief with grunts.

  “Try me,” said Billy now.

  “Worse and worse,” said Tim, ‘failing’ to levitate the boy more than an inch off the floor.

  “Weaker and weaker!” shouted Cindy.

  Then he powered them aloft, one on each arm, and roared like the king of the jungle. Not so weak after all!—and not so very sober, he discovered, setting them safely down. As they ate (and this time Cindy did have things to tell him), Tim’s mind stayed fixed on the phone numbers in Jill’s pocketbook, for dishwasher repairmen. That and the dates, 1948 to 1990.

  At bedtime he read them poetry they had loved two years ago, from Stevenson’s Garden of Verses. They were old for these poems now, particularly Billy, except they insisted on them, and then they looked so dreamy listening. Whatever works, Tim allowed, verse or bourbon or “other.”

  Above the sequence of yards, the hills folded together and the North Star dangled. It was dark now and the moon, a flat disc of orange fire, soon shouldered its way to the treetops. Tim and Ellie patrolled the curve of Cedar Street, back and forth to stay in sight of the house, with its warmlit rooms revealed by rows of half-curtained windows.

  “Today was the longest day of the year,” said Ellie, letting the sweet air sweep her mind clear.

  “I will make it up to you, Ell. I absolutely will.”

  “Daylight, I mean—the summer solstice. Billy is the one who mentioned it, of course.”

  “They seem better, no?”

  “They’re great. Though they did refuse to call friends. In a while, they keep saying. To any suggestion you make.”

  “So they hung together.”

  “Tim, you would not believe the hours they can log with maps.”

  “I would, though, and it’s all my fault.”

  “The highest elevations! The principal rivers! There was a postcard from your sister and all they cared about was the postmark. So they could locate the spot on a map.”

  Mail from the dead? No, it was his sister Erica; it was mail to the dead. How bizarre that mail would keep coming to Jill and Monty. Bills. Invitations. They would be invited to dinner. And then there was Monty’s raffle ticket for the 4th of July. Monty might be the lucky winner!

  “Erica doesn’t know,” he said. “That’s the most bizarre of all. Your sister is dead and you’re too busy fishing to know it.”

  “Come on, Tim. You could have been away just as easily. Talk about incommunicado. What’s it, the Sognafjord Blues?”

  “Still.”

  “Still nothing. And they can’t be as bad as you say.”

  “Can’t they? Earl doesn’t even pretend he’s not awful. He’s got one of those little Sambo men on his lawn, for starters.”

  “He’s anti-black?”

  “Earl? He’s proud out loud—as he might put it—to be anti-black, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, anti-woman—”

  “He must be pro-something,” she grinned.

  “Well, guns. And money. He made Salesman of the Year two years running. They gave him golden cufflinks both times.”

  “This twisted misfit is successful, you’re saying?”

  “Probably because he’s twisted. Earl sold the Gardiner house the day it came on the market. You remember that?”

  “Should I?”

  “An entire family was murdered in the house, and Earl washed the blood off the walls and listed it two weeks later. Got market value for it too, he’s quick to assure you.”

  “He must be convincing, or charming, in his way.”

  “If you are asking me the secret of his success, the answer is I have no idea.”

  “Is your sister happy with him?”

  “I’ve always believed she’s scared of him.”

  “He hits her?”

  “Let’s say I’d be pleasantly surprised if he doesn’t.”

  Now as they went by the house for the eighth or ninth time, Tim shut the flap door of the mailbox, then heard it fall open again behind them. As the darkness filled and deepened, the moon had floated up, impossibly large and bright. It was silver now, an enormous circle of silver above the eastern hills.

  “It’s so nice here,” he said, and he was including the inn (which he had elected not to mention to the long suffering Pseudomom) and the splendors of parking, as well as the night air and the risen moon.

  “It’s beautiful. I’d pay for the smell of it all.”

  “Do you think you could live here, Ell?”

  “No,” she said, trying to examine his eyes for a sign, a plot that could include her. “Though I’m not sure why.”

  On Saturday morning, a neighbor materialized. “Alice McManus,” she announced, “mother of the twins”—her claim to fame. That plus her status as Jill’s best friend, though Tim’s clearest memory of Alice was the orchard of tiny white lights, a wretched excess girdling her house and grounds every Christmas. At least a thousand points of light.

  Her husband was taking the twins to Canobie Lake on Sunday and they wondered if Bill and Cynthia might like to join them. Then, before Tim could respond (that he had no idea what they might like), the woman handed him a casserole. “It’s just a macaroni and beef thing, but I know they’ll both eat it.”

  The casserole was in no way inconsistent with the nutty Christmas lighting; Tim simply filed it under Suburbia. Yet it did work. It did help. Right away the kids were racing next door to watch a video with the twins (their first foray back into the World) and they would indeed choose the amusement park on Sunday. They would slide and swim as though grief did not exist, only videos did, and casseroles, and lakes.

  Which was fine. Tim was grateful for the simplicity of it and grateful to have another resource in Casserole Alice. A parent needed “coverage.” Tim knew that from the travel business. Clients wanted to know what activities, what facilities were available at the Hamilton Princess. Were there tennis lessons, swimming lessons, horseback riding? Translation: would they have some time alone.

  With coverage, he could take Ellie to the train without dragging the children along. The drive to Fitchburg, to the Boston train, loomed as almost a vacation, a respite at least, and at first they both enjoyed the silence. They went past weedy lakes, past the Rindge House of Pizza (which was a house), past the Cypress Grove Lounge where there were no cypress trees but the roast pork special looked good at $4.95.

  By the time they crossed the Massachusetts border, the silence had begun to feel weighty, or feel like two separate silences born of separate crises. In Ashby, the sudden drone of a sitdown mower (circling the bandstand on the steep village green) pierced and exacerbated the hush that had fallen on them.

  “The good news,” Tim tried, foregoing any guesses as to what might be the bad news, “is that you have a date tonight.”

  “So?”

  “So not everyone has a date tonight. I, for one, do not.”

  He supposed it was The Usual: dating was futile, nothing worked out, tonight would prove to be no more than the latest defeat. Tim had no doubt Ellie was an attractive woman. Nothing about her was unattractive, from her short lively brown hair and trim
figure to her kind, observant nature. Did her lack of confidence lose her boyfriends, or did the loss of boyfriends erode her confidence? This was already a tangle when Tim met her twelve years ago.

  “It’s the 90’s,” he tried. “People just aren’t into commitment these days.”

  “Then how come my two best friends are married?”

  “You could have married Foxley. Maybe that’s who your friends married. Did they? Marry Foxley?”

  Ellie wished to shrug off Tim’s benign silliness, his blatant effort to cheer her up. She didn’t even need cheering up, she just needed to focus on Victor and on how best to handle the situation, for she had trusted too much already—had already moved herself into the zone of potential hurt. Of hope.

  “What makes you say I could have?”

  “Well, you were the one who backed out of it.”

  “My greatest moment, jumping before I was pushed. Keith was just waiting to step up.”

  “Up? Into the arms of Helena Sitzbath is up?”

  Her excuse (and Ellie knew it was an excuse) was Victor himself. Why make him answer—Victor, who had yet to put a foot wrong—for the sins of earlier failed contestants?

  “I never knew why you called her that,” said Ellie, who did know. But she could label Tim catty and still be the beneficiary of his cattiness.

  “She was into that stuff, bigtime. Sitz baths, high colonic irrigation. Worse, for all I know.”

  “I hope you never called her that to her face.”

  “Her face? Hey, with a face like that, who needs enemas?”

  They had reached the north end of Fitchburg, a fading Massachusetts factory town. The Main Street movie house had closed. Placard wavers stood protesting at a chain-link gate to the G.E plant. A narrow river that once powered the mills now trickled through the city unnoticed.

  At the depot in Moran Square, there wasn’t even a platform or trainshed, no shelter at all, just a patch of pavement and the open rails through shallow weeds. Across the tracks stood a moribund 60’s mall whose windowless cinderblock façade had attracted graffiti bombers. It was hard to believe the train would actually stop here.

  “Don’t do anything crazy in the next few days,” said Ellie. “And take the children to that camp.”

  “We’ll see about camp.”

  Though she was sure he would take them in the end, Ellie understood that Tim was still waiting for some “logic” to emerge, for clarity to shake down from the chaos, even though logic played no part in his own decision-making. That there simply was no solution would not jar him from reverie any more than the AIDS epidemic had discouraged what Ellie called his strange encounters of the third kind. What he called his “evening activities.”

  “Tell me about the new guy,” he said. “The Anti-Foxley.”

  “He’s not brand new. But too new to discuss.”

  “You make it sound pretty serious.”

  “Not for discussion?”

  Tim hoped the train would appear and transport Ellie into the arms of a true Prince Charming; at the same time, he hoped the train would breeze past them, forcing her to come back to Jaffrey. Ellie had no such ambivalence, despite the maternal reflexes Tim (not to mention Billy and Cindy) had always tapped in her. Her maternal reflexes were other-directed until further notice.

  “Cook a nice dinner,” she told him as the train, a three-car local, did appear and did stop. “Fatten ‘em up for camp.”

  She leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the lips, as she often did. And as he did just as often, Tim hunched his shoulders, monstered up, and whispered into her ear, “AAAA … I … DS.”

  “Yeah yeah,” she laughed, yanking herself up onto the steep metal stair, but her fearlessness was not lost on Tim. For years he had seen people literally cringe, their expressions distorted as if they had bitten a worm, when the deathly contagion of AIDS loomed close. Perfectly intelligent people (not just Earl) were freaked to be in the same room with him. In the same world.

  “Take this, Ell. Train fare, at least. Please—”

  She waved contemptuously at his twenty-dollar bill and vanished inside the cars, behind a row of filthy windows. The train was already moving. It chugged past the graffiti-scarred wall, then rolled out of the black cloud it had just manufactured. It passed beneath a swaying gantry and disappeared around the curve. Tim stood alone on the macadam, his life stretched out before him.

  Yes, absolutely, he should cook a nice dinner, save the casserole for a rainy day. But a sinking feeling beset him; anchored him to the pavement; sank him. Trapped, was what he was. Come September, Billy and Cindy would go back to school—and he, Tim Bannon, would be assembling Billy’s power lunches in the morning? Wrestling with Cindy’s braid? Carpooling to soccer practice? It was a dirty word to him, suburban death in so many syllables.

  But he had let himself slip into long-term thinking, that was the problem. Long-term was never Tim’s strength; short-term strategies suited him better, life taken one hour at a time. And Calvin Coolidge suited him perfectly. The car needed gas, so he pulled into the Mini-Mart in Rindge. Then all he had to decide was whether or not to eat a doughnut. One foot after the other.

  Instantly, the doughnut conundrum was solved, since he absolutely required a cup of coffee and if you were going to drink coffee in your car (and yes, coffee was bad for you too, but it was understood to be indispensible) then you pretty much had to have a doughnut—especially if it was the weak coffee from a gaspump convenience store.

  Coolidgewise, he was good. Gassed up, drinking and driving back, he already knew what came next: the plan was in place, a Camp White Sneaker outing to Lake Nubanusit.

  White Sneaker had evolved (or morphed, abruptly) from the earlier “Camp Bannon” joke, the expeditions Tim had always organized—hiking, biking, and canoeing with the kids. Then one day he dragged them to the Boston Public Library to hear a Wampanoag storyteller who was decked out in buckskins, beads, braids…and bright white Reeboks! It was a zeitgeist, all three of them saw at once that they would thenceforth be renamed Camp White Sneaker. All agreed to the single proviso of mandatory white sneakers on future excursions.

  Tim loved them so much for this; for having a sense of humor and a craving for the outdoors in what was, for so many kids, a relentlessly technological age. Tim himself had hunted and fished as a kid in South Carolina. (“My life as a straight white male,” he referenced it among wide-eyed friends in the gay community.) He knew knots, trees, animal tracks. Not expertly, just with the routine familiarity everyone acquired back then. You did not learn such things with a purpose, they simply came to you, from close at hand.

  From uncles, come to think of it. Uncle Jim and Uncle Rollie. And from his father, from Rex. Maybe that’s how Billy and Cindy inherited it, via good old trickle-down genetics, trickling down through Jilly. Surely they did not get it from their own father, with his infamous “laptop tan.” Monty was literally allergic to the sun. At Crane’s Beach the weekend Tim met him, Monty was got up in sleeves, slacks, and a solar topi—and broke out in a rash anyway.

  Grateful for genetics, grateful for the Nubanusit plan, Tim nonetheless girded himself as he made the left turn onto Cedar Street. This was his first moment as a single parentis. From the car he watched a lively soccer game flowing back and forth between Jill’s yard and Alice’s, for they were contiguous and had no fence, no boundary of any kind. There were a dozen kids zigging and zagging madly, yet even from a distance Billy Hergesheimer glowed like a hot coal. When Billy played sports, it always seemed as if he were alive and all the others barely awake.

  Including his sister. Floppy and marginally involved, Cindy ditched the game the instant she spotted Tim. She ran to him frowning, or pouting. Doing the thing with her lower lip.

  “What is it, sweetheart? What’s the matter?”

  “I feel sick, Unk. My head hurts, and my tummy.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

  “I want to stay home, Unk. It’s cold on Nubie.”<
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  Was Cindy sick? Not very, but should it matter? Maybe it was enough that she did not want to go. (Or maybe she did want to go, and needed Tim to persuade or command her.) What would a parent do? What would Jilly have done? Questions.

  “You know what?” he said, possibly for no better reason than his need to account for the next few hours, “Nubie will cure you. There’s definite magic in the Nubanusit air.”

  “There is not.”

  “And there’s magic in a glass of milk, so let’s start there. Then you can make the checklist.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes, my sweet, and this time let’s not forget the towels.”

  Cindy did not forget anything. Nor did she appear sickly, merely engaged, as her list lapped onto a second page. It took half an hour to gather and organize, and another fifteen minutes (ropes, straps, bungee cords) loading the canoe. Allowing for the run up to Hancock plus the time it would take to unload all this shit, Tim calculated he was getting them through the afternoon just fine.

  Was this good, though? To wish away such glorious hours in the very heart of summer; to muddle through life as though death, at the other end, was the goal? “Paddles!” came a cry from the back seat, where he had them strapped down like prisoners of war. (Because Jill insisted they ride in the back seat that way. But how and when would Tim be liberated from this directive? Would she have wanted them back there at twelve? At fourteen?)

  “You didn’t load the paddles?” he said.

  “You didn’t load the paddles,” Billy shot back. Silently, intently, they had been combing down the checklist.

  “You messed up, Unk.”

  “Maybe I was testing you guys.”

  “Maybe not, Unk. Maybe you messed up.”

  “Well, then, Cynthia saved the day, with her Nobel Prize-winning checklist.”

  “Yay, me,” said Cindy.

  On the skid down to the boat launch, cars and trucks with boat trailers jockeyed for position. Once launched, however, they vanished quickly and only the brightest kayaks comprised the view. A stiff wind shoved and chopped the water.