The Mt. Monadnock Blues

by Larry Duberstein

  He managed to push past to his primary concern, the kids. They needed him, didn’t they? He was obliged to go to Vermont, wasn’t he? He was going to Vermont, leaving P-Town on a Saturday, and yet again last night they both told him not to bother coming. “We’re fine, Unk,” Billy assured him. “It’s way too far to come.”

  But Goldsmith has spoken, Tim wished to protest, to explain. Might Goldsmith have reconsidered and spoken otherwise had she heard them, or known how far it was? Had she taken into account the obscene cost of the Provincetown house?

  Surely she would have reconsidered had she seen them in the flesh. Tim found them both so browned and so sound that he was torn between his delight and his resentment that he really might have wasted his time. Lifting Cindy, weighing her covertly, he did detect a rib or two. The lunch they enjoyed at Badger Hall told the story there, a feast of limp sprouts, soyburgers, and for dessert apples with the taste entirely removed. Surely as many of these delicacies went back to the kitchen intact as had left it a few minutes earlier. Did no one notice?

  It was as close as he came to a sense of purpose all day, obtaining permission to take them for a ride, locating a lunchroom in the village that had hamburgers, malteds, and pie, then filling their secret larder with miniature peppermint patties. At least they could not literally starve.

  But then he left, just as the Saturday night bonfire began to roar. “You eat my s’mores,” he said, kissing them. “I’ll call tomorrow night.”

  It was for the best—surely Goldsmith would support him in his decision, so grounded in common sense. They were tricky to connect with. Something about the bondings (or bondage) of summer camp life in that. Tim was an interruption. The kids were almost sorry to see him, not so sorry to see him leave.

  He did not take this personally. They had turned a page, made new friends (and what could be better than that right now?) and Tim’s very presence was a grim reminder. Out on stilly pineringed Keokuk Pond or sitting around the bonfire watching skits, they were no more orphaned than anyone else. Their condition was hidden, even from themselves, for in this far northern context, in the urgent false family of the group, all summer campers were orphans.

  Riding south on 89, Tim felt he had made progress somehow, or gained some relief. He anticipated with disproportionate joy the simple fact that he would sleep tonight in his own bed, completely alone and under the radar. His precise whereabouts unknown to all, he could stop by the office tomorrow, Sunday, without reporting to a soul. Could simply touch base.

  Such were the joys afforded him at the moment and, strangely, he was pleased by the prospect. He was alive. It came down to that, remembering that he was alive—and moreover, symptom-free. Tired, yes, downright slaphappy with fatigue after driving nine hours since breakfast, but that was it. That was Tim’s final worry of the day: staying awake for another ten miles.

  The morning air was cool and pleasant as Tim walked the deserted corridor to Copley Square. He took a muffin and a jumbo Colombian coffee upstairs, opened the windows, and settled into his chair. Touching the button, he unleashed a flood of recorded messages. To work was a gift for once, a freeing instead of the opposite, and he got going in earnest. Chasing information, updating itineraries, Tim was enjoying himself; it was as though he still had a job. Still existed.

  As an offer of proof, and of celebration, he got himself onto a dozen answering machines around Greater Boston and two in Salem, New Hampshire. By nine o’clock he had even spoken with a live client, the good gray Eli Pinckney III of Chestnut Street.

  Dr. Pinckney was a longtime customer, a man so delightfully helpless he could not arrange his own taxicab to Logan Airport. Tim always joked he should accompany the Pinckneys abroad so as to handle problems as they arose, but this time he almost wished he could do it. Could wriggle out of his own shadow and be off to the Golden Cities of the Baltic, to Lubeck and Riga and the rest. A silly package tour, yet there they were, those ancient northern European seaports, so many hinges of history.

  So many new verses he could add to the Blues of Tim Bannon. For Tim was not at all jaded. He still thrilled to the names of exotic places and despite his past disasters still yearned to disembark anew. Sure it was a shame he had been mugged in Budapest and yet he recalled the night with considerable nostalgia: a sweet sunset cruise on the Danube, the blue houseboat where he drank pastis with a handsome Hungarian motorman.…

  Abruptly, Tim’s reverie gave way to the ratcheting of the doorlatch, and to a familiar aimless whistling. Gone in a flash were the Golden Cities, gone his privacy, his haven. He gazed up at the perfect tan, the inhumanly white teeth and brilliant black hair of his partner Charles Tashian.

  “You can’t be here to work on a Sunday,” was all he could think to say. It struck him that they had not spoken a word since Jill.

  “To work? Not strictly, no. I’m meeting a friend. How are you, Tim? I hope you got my card?”

  “I did, Charlie. Thank you, it was a lovely card.”

  “I know how much you loved the poor girl.”

  Charles consulted his watch, which Tim took as a signal. Half an hour? The time line was unclear, but the need for Tim to vacate the premises would not have been clearer with a neon sign. Why the office, though? Tim felt a small dose of perversity leak into his soul; he might force Charles to beg.

  “Everyone who knew Jilly loved her,” he said.

  “Lynda volunteers to help, by the way. She would be happy to babysit the children.”

  “That’s very nice of her.”

  “Actually, I’m hoping it will snap her out of it. The panic to breed, that is. Give her a shot of reality, so to speak.”

  “She wants to have a baby?”

  “Now that’s putting a fine finger on it. Gosh, we only spend half our life fighting about it. Discussing it, I should say.”

  “You don’t want kids at all, Charlie?”

  “I don’t seem to. This idea that there comes a moment when you stop having fun and breed children so they can have the fun instead? It’s unsettling to me.”

  “Poor cindycrawford. How old is she now?”

  “Now, thirty-four. In October, thirty-five.…”

  The end of the line, clearly. Tim wondered how Charles could be reprehensible and likable at the same time. (No doubt cindycrawford wondered too.) Charles pushed his act just far enough to keep it entertaining, a neat self-parody, like those appealingly reptilian movie villains he resembled—Laurence Harvey came to mind, the white teeth more bared than shown.

  “You should end it, Charlie. Seriously, for her sake, you should cancel the engagement.”

  “Seriously, I am stuck. Because it is a misery to end it and a misery to continue. You see the problem.”

  Tim never really doubted he would cede Charles the office. He was consoled that he still had possession of the day. He would regain and then guard this fragment of time, this opportunity, even if he did nothing more with it than walk the streets clearing his head, clearing the way for a solution. At a café, at a cross light, the eureka moment would come.

  It did not come at Tower Records, where CD’s had crowded out cassettes just as cassettes had once crowded out vinyl. It did not come at the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop, where he loved to browse the musty cluttered aisles and where they persisted in treating him not as the man who had come in sixty times and bought a hundred books but as a thief, about to strike. He did not even expect it to come in the Chinese restaurant across from the B.P.L., where he was certain the potstickers were a mistake before he finished eating them.

  He stayed vacant mentally—abstracted, as he continued wandering, awaiting the lightning bolt. On Trinity Church Plaza, he maneuvered through a clump of twitching pigeons (bread crumbs on the bricks), then struggled to navigate past a man eating a hot dog. The man danced with him one step left, one step right—blocking his pathway. But the hot dog turned out to be a microphone, the dancer a TV reporter. Tim was the man in the street!

  Or the gay man in
the street, because the fellow sought his views on a rash of gay-bashing incidents around Copley. Why here? Why now? (Exactly, thought Tim, his plenum pierced again.) Was our fair city changing for the worse? Was AIDS to blame?

  Well, Tim had no idea. Out of the loop, he had been unaware of such incidents. “Just chance, probably,” he managed to offer up. “There are bad guys everywhere. There are still Nazis in Germany, you know.”

  “Keep talking, keep talking,” said the reporter, eyes on fire as though he had struck the mother lode.

  “Am I quoteworthy?” said Tim, mildly disgusted and sorry he had read the article about the Nazis. “Am I telegenic?” he drawled. But the man motioned him on, whipping the air between them like cream until Tim did continue. “Hey, there are Nazis everywhere. Neo-Nazis. I’m sure there are a few in Boston.”

  “So in your opinion, this is the work of Neo-Nazis—not the response of Joe Average to this terrible disease?”

  “Joe Average may not understand or appreciate gay life,” Tim waxed, “but he doesn’t go around attacking people.”

  With this, the reporter relented so abruptly and completely he might have been punctured, the air let out of him. From manic to gone, in a tick. Tim was slightly stricken, desperately sorry he had said a single word and least of all on the subject of gay bashing. The guy must have seen him coming.

  Nearing home, he told himself it could not matter, they would find no use for it, he was anything but telegenic. But his haven of mercy had crumbled around him even before he picked up the phone and heard a change in his mother’s voice. “I want you here this week,” she ordered. “I want you here tomorrow, Tim.”

  “As soon as camp is over—”

  “Come without the children. Just you get on down here.”

  “What is it, Mom? Are you okay?”

  “It’s time to bring Jilly home. Let’s leave it at that.”

  He could tell Anne was holding the receiver away to conceal tears of fury. Her voice was hoarse, and breaking word by word.

  “What about Ric? What about waiting for Ric to call?”

  “She did call, Tim. She will be here tonight. And she is extremely upset.”

  “Of course she is, Mom. Ric is human.”

  “That is not what I meant, Tim Bannon. Erica is upset about you.”

  III

  UNLOVED BY TURTLES

  The plane dipped low and skimmed over a plain of red clay unrelieved by houses or even trees. It might have been a strange new planet, but it was Charlotte, North Carolina. The red clay gave way to a cordon of high southern pines and the broad tarmac of the landing field.

  Every time he came through here, the city distanced itself further from the Charlotte of Tim’s youth. The so-called “New South” was old by now; here was the new New South. When he tagged along with Rex on business trips, silent Saturday bonding missions, Charlotte had just begun spilling onto the fringes of the countryside—onto skinny highways with chicken shacks and produce stands. Now it sprawled for sprawl’s sake, cloverleafing aimlessly from one superhighway to another, looking no more southern than Bridgeport, Connecticut.

  But this was a tired grudge (alterations of his childhood setting, the loss of a whole region’s past) and in truth his spirits still rose, especially as he neared the state line, where less had changed. One farm in particular was intact, its hilly fields and rambling barns still straddling the border, begging the absurdity of borders everywhere. Here Rex would always speak, and it was always the same sentence, how this one hog farmer could stand and eat a slice of melon with one foot taxed by North Carolina and the other foot taxed by South.

  A week’s worth of conversation from Rex.

  At the diner in Harlowe, where Tim ate some bacon and eggs done up in the wickedest grease, he still heard the local inflections.

  “River’s as clear as water in your well, Sam. Usually looks like blood by now, but the clay ain’t washin’ down.”

  “It won’t, either,” said Sam, delivering a jet of tobacco juice onto his saucer. “Not till we get us some rain.”

  Above them, two tilting shelves held canned goods that might have posed unsold for ten years—or twenty. There was a sunfaded calendar advertising John Deere tractors and a blue xeroxed flyer for the Bingo, Saturday night at the First Baptist in Mead City.

  Rex Bannon brought his wife Anne from Charlotte to Berline in 1947, freshly wed and ambitious of nothing more than a decent life. Because of the War and a postgraduate course in engineering, Rex was past thirty. It was his first real job, managing the limestone quarries in Ramey, and it would turn out to be his last. If they respected him, and paid him fairly, Rex would justify their trust with forty years of service.

  Rex’s was a life that haunted Tim, though not for the obvious reason. They were friendly to the end. (Not close; Rex was not close to anyone.) But his father was a reserved man who preferred work to play. He was comfortable with work. Even at home, Rex was always working on something and these projects provided a stage for their relationship. Around tools, and plans, Rex could communicate.

  The haunting went deeper. It was systemic, and insoluble. Lodged in the marrow of Tim Bannon’s bones was Rex’s sense of what a life was made of, and Tim could neither live that way, nor unload the weight of failing to do so. You did good work, raised a family in the church, paid your taxes, and never complained. Certainly you were heterosexual. The word, not to mention its antonym, did not enter the lexicon.

  Tim was not ashamed, or particularly embarrassed. He felt blameless, and free to be who he was, however inconvenient—and he saw it was far more convenient than being black. The crime of Driving While Gay was easily concealed. But he did shield his parents from it, and therefore shielded himself from a disharmony with his father so dramatic as to be unthinkable. Twice he had brought Ellie to Berline; never once had he encouraged his parents to visit him up North, or to meet his friends. He had lived with Karl Trickett for three years, on two coasts, and neither Rex nor Anne had ever heard Karl’s name spoken.

  He was doomed to failure, or to a sort of incompleteness: he would never inhabit his father’s legacy, never reach that core of comfort, and it was in Berline that Tim experienced this failure most vividly. Here, where he had not only failed to become his father, but had failed to become himself. Where no one, not even his mother, really knew him.

  First thing he saw was the Chinook, Earl’s hulking RV, which stood higher than the green shingled garage roof. Parked alongside it, Tim’s rented Geo looked like a bite of provender for the whale-on-wheels, a bit of fish food colored with rental-car-blue No. 6.

  Then he saw Anne rising from her rocker. She looked thin, but pretty in her loose cotton housedress. Only the wisps of hair at her temples were gray, and he stroked these back as he hugged her.

  “Stop burping me,” were Anne’s first words, and Tim realized he had been patting her back rhythmically. He squeezed and held her, unsure if the tremors were tears or laughter.

  “Are they hiding inside that thing?” he asked, releasing her.

  “Your sister? No, they took the car. There was no point undertaking a simple errand in that monster.”

  Tim, who had flown and driven since early morning, had no desire to sit down anytime soon, but Anne made him sit with her in the loveseat. Shoulders touching, faces forward, they swung gently.

  “Your sister told me,” said Anne, striving for quiet. For a softness. She had rehearsed a lot of this conversation, hoping to guide both of them safely through it. But of course she could not have rehearsed it all.

  An alarm sounded in Tim. Which sister? Told her what?

  “About you, Timmy.”

  Now the alarm was bonging like Quasimodo in the belltower. Tim’s scalp was alive; he could feel the blood moving.

  “I wasn’t shocked. I’m pretty sure Jilly told me a while back—or tried to. Left me hints that I chose to overlook. But I couldn’t say I was shocked.”

  “Only horrified?”

&n
bsp; Tim was astonished at this, astonished to have batted the ball right back to her, eschewing reflexive false denials. He was kidding around with her about a secret that had lain between them for decades.

  “Troubled,” said Anne. “And disappointed, in the way you can be disappointed when you turn out to be right about something. Do you know what I mean, honey?”

  “I’m not sure, Mom,” he said, accepting her hand.

  “Well, say you expected it might rain. And the weathergirl tells you rain. But then it really does rain. Like that.”

  “So Ric told you.”

  “She had to.”

  “Did she?”

  “It was time. And I will say one thing.” She turned to face him now, her eyes blurred with dampness. “It’s the first time in all the years he’s gone that I saw something benign in your daddy’s passing. And God bless your friend Eleanor, too.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “You didn’t kill him.”

  “Sorry for making you more unhappy. At a time like this.”

  “Troubled, is what I said.”

  “You didn’t need any more trouble,” he said, though it occurred to him that Anne had put it right to work, this revelation of Erica’s. Had used it to push Jill’s death back toward the shadows.

  “I’m not supposed to tell you this,” said Anne, and she had rehearsed this too, “but they plan on taking Jilly’s girl and boy from that summer camp.”

  Panic whacked at him like a stick, but Tim labored to stay calm. “And why will they do that exactly?”