Byron's Lane

by Wallace Rogers

  He didn’t.

  Adams rounded us up and led us down the deck’s steps, across his lawn, and around his house to the driveway.

  We shook hands with Breech and he climbed into his Jeep Cherokee. He started the engine and rolled down his window.

  “Your shingle over the patio door is a Hardiplank 4306. We got six pallets full of them delivered to the store right before I left for Canada. If you’ve already ordered replacements, cancel the order. When I’m back at work on Monday, I’ll ship a box up to you. That’s enough to cover eight board feet.”

  Adams quickly accepted his offer and thanked him for it. Breech was happy. His smile told us that being able to help Adams made him feel important and useful, maybe even valued.

  We shook hands again through Breech’s open window and repeated our good-byes. As his Jeep started down the driveway, Adams and I smiled at each other. Breech’s visit would no doubt inspire lots of thoughtful discussion during the rest of my visit.

  Twenty yards away the Jeep suddenly stopped. Breech backed the car up to where we were still standing and pushed his head out of the window. “If I can get some of the guys from the basketball team together for a weekend in Florida this winter, would you two come down and play some golf?”

  We said we would, that it sounded like a great idea. Jim Breech smiled again. As he started back down the driveway, he waved, grinning at us through his rearview mirror. Then he turned onto the road in front of Adams’s house and disappeared from our lives again.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  With Breech barely out of the driveway, Adams asked, “What’s worse, Tom: to be haunted for the rest of your life by something that happened to you when you were growing up, or to be stuck there?” I thought for a few steps and responded by reciting the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days.” By the time we got to the back deck we were doing a poor job singing it.

  Adams cleared the patio table and disappeared into the kitchen. He put his wooden bowl in the dishwasher and our empty bottles in the open beer case on the floor next to his refrigerator. It took two trips for him to haul in the bottles. He insisted on doing the job himself.

  Maggie once admonished me for putting wooden bowls in the dishwasher. Wooden bowls should be hand-washed, she said. I decided that wasn’t worth mentioning as I watched Adams through the screen door. I was left on the deck to ponder his question about guilt and stunted growth. Thoughts about Jim Breech’s visit pulsed through my brain like jets of gas in the brightly colored tubes of a blinking neon sign. I couldn’t get Springsteen’s music out of my head.

  I decided that Jim Breech had probably begun to drift away from Adams and me as early as the tenth grade, when we started to develop different political philosophies. Just as importantly, we were in different homerooms for the first time and only shared half the classes that we used to.

  Adams and I fancied the two of us to be on the short list of the best things Maplewood ever produced. Expectations were low for anything significant that was non-athletic to come from Maplewood. Distinction was a goal to which we were taught to aspire, but a goal we knew we never really needed to achieve in order to be judged successful. We learned that the broad, comfortable middle of the bell curve was the safest place to be.

  That was the context in which Adams and I confronted the conflicted relationship almost everyone seems to have with the place where they grew up. But on Adams’s deck that Thursday afternoon, Maplewood began to blossom into something worth a second look. Pleasant memories were popping into my head like perennials that sprout in a neglected garden after a warm springtime rain. Our town could never be described as a greenhouse for innovation. But maybe Maplewood was someplace in between-like an old flannel shirt—comfortable, never trendy, but never out of style.

  I speculated about what might have become of me if I, like Breech, had never really left Maplewood. I parked those thoughts in a safe place; Adams would surely want to talk about all this.

  I walked to the deck railing. Looking out over Adams’s backyard, I envisioned Monday evening’s shooting, wading deeper into the process of honing a theory as to why it happened.

  Suddenly, my attention was hijacked by a familiar picture that had been hibernating for a very long time in another part of my brain. It was Jim Breech’s fault that I was thinking about these kinds of things. I was staring out at the same landscape that I saw in the early afternoon. But I was looking at it through a different prism now. Like one of those pictures hidden within a picture, I recognized it. Now I could never view what spread out behind Adams’s house without seeing it: The scene beyond his back deck was a portrait of the eighty acres of raw land on which our neighborhood in Maplewood was built.

  It was Byron’s Lane—before Byron’s Lane.

  *

  Maplewood first found its way onto a map in the mid-nineteenth century. It was a water stop for steam engines at the junction of two rail lines. The main line was built along a canal right-of-way that bankrupted its owners before the ditch they paid to be dug was ever filled with water.

  The train tracks in the old canal bed had been abandoned by the time our eyes first fell upon our strange but ordinary community. A hundred years later, with our sudden presence on its doorstep, Maplewood transformed itself. In the wink of an eye it grew from a sagging water tower surrounded by a stagnant village of white wood-framed houses into giant tracts of basement-less ranch-style homes on eight-thousand-square-foot lots.

  Enough single-family homes were built in Maplewood from 1956 through 1960 to comfortably contain more than thirty thousand people. Instant neighborhoods spread out across the top of the wide terminal moraine that Maplewood straddled—the southern-most point that an Ice Age glacier had pushed a colossal pile of rocks there fourteen thousand years ago. Lake Erie, the big hole from which most of Maplewood’s stones had come, was once visible from the town’s highest point on a clear day. But those days became rare, then nonexistent, as the land between our ridge and the lake filled up with houses, streets, stores, and factories; streams and rivers turned brown.

  Maplewood was a conflicted place. It provided us the opportunity to assimilate and grow what became the basis for the better angels of our nature. It provided a safe, nurturing environment. It offered the time and the space we needed to develop into useful worker bees. As we grew into adults, we echoed Maplewood’s good and bad aspects. The bad things we did weren’t really that bad—they were nearsighted and inconsiderate. We did them because we believed they would make good things happen. Our self-confidence was peppered with brashness. We learned to enjoy eating steak by smothering it with ketchup. We watched our parents dilute one part top-shelf vodka with four parts Minute Maid frozen orange juice. We seasoned our view of the world with half a teaspoon of racism. We were taught that selfishness could be construed as virtuous if applied in ways that made our families safe and secure.

  I escaped Maplewood by marrying into a family that owned and managed a respected boutique publishing business in New York. I met Maggie and fell in love with her our sophomore year at Ohio State. My weekend with Adams coincidentally marked my twentieth year as the publishing company’s president.

  Adams affected his getaway by attending college in Chicago and converting a doctoral thesis about relationships between land use, economic development, and property taxation into a book that became and remains required reading for public administration students, city managers, urban planners, and thoughtful mayors.

  Jonathan Adams tried harder than me to shed Maplewood. I appreciated our hometown for having introduced me to a great steak and good vodka. Adams couldn’t shake the bad memories of a dinner at Kathy’s father’s country club in Bethesda, the first time she took him home to Washington, two years before they graduated from Northwestern and married. He asked the bartender to put ice cubes and a splash of water in his first glass of twenty-year-old single malt Scotch and reminded the waiter that he had forgotten
to put a bottle of ketchup on their table.

  When people asked Adams where he had grown up, he’d say Ohio. He never said Maplewood. But Byron’s Lane always seemed to hold him tightly in its grasp, like the weedy vines a few feet from where I stood on his deck that strangled a neglected lilac bush that had overwhelmed what was left of a cord of firewood stacked next to the deck’s steps.

  Jim Breech, Jonathan Adams, and I were baby boomers, along with eighty percent of the population that lived in Maplewood when it first exploded onto the map—the big snake America has never been able to digest us as we’ve moved from its head to its tail. We were Maplewood’s pride and joy and its unrivaled center of attention. We were children who were older than the neighborhoods that formed us. We were the first generation of Americans who were products of the American Dream, not participants in it. We didn’t have to earn its fruits, they were bestowed upon us.

  Our attitudes and demeanor reflected our circumstances and environment. Respect for the lessons of history, appreciation for the blessings that geography afforded us, family traditions and family ties—they all faded away as we floated through the public school system. Our drift produced a lifelong inability to put our lives into perspective. We faced no real challenges while growing up; we had no hardships to overcome, except artificial tests created by the games we played, our school’s grading system, and our deep need to be a cherished member of a group. Our privileged, plain-vanilla lives afforded us no context for evaluating what we experienced. We grew into adults with tendencies to overreact to life’s small problems, who failed to appreciate the significance of its large ones. We were so sure that our lives were different from anything our parents and grandparents had ever known that their stories had no relevance for us. We had no patience or inclination to sit and listen to them.

  *

  I first met Jonathan Adams at a place that looked just like his Minnesota backyard, when our fathers’ identical red Ford station wagons, coming from different directions, pulled up and parked at the same time on the recently widened gravel shoulder of County Road 106. The location was soon to become the south end of Byron’s Lane.

  It was early April. Eight car doors opened and the nine of us poured out, two husbands, two wives, and five kids, all eyes looking north. Adams and I would name the place El Capitan after we saw an Ansel Adams photograph in Life magazine of a larger, more impressive pile of rocks in California with the same name. We looked out over a scarred landscape, pockmarked by cement blocks uniformly arranged in thirty-by-seventy foot and thirty-by-eighty foot rectangles. They were anchored in mud, at intervals of forty feet. On most of the gray cement-block foundations rose pale yellow-brown skeletons of houses.

  The wooden frames and rectangular foundations stretched out in four parallel rows, for almost as far as we could see. They were lined up equidistant on both sides of rutted navigation lanes that seemed to be flowing downhill. Byron’s Lane was marked by two parallel rows of white wooden stakes, ten yards from each other, pounded into the soft ground by someone before someone else came along and poured a hundred truckloads of gravel between them.

  Mr. Adams hopped up on the open tailgate of his Ford Ranch Wagon to get a better view. I remember him pointing to the distant tree line where the white stakes that marked Byron’s Lane disappeared. The image reminded me of a painting reprinted in almost every American history textbook, in the chapter about Manifest Destiny: a frontier scout in buckskins, standing in the foreground, pointing westward, his charges in the background leading their ox-driven wagons in the direction he was pointing—a gap in the Allegheny Mountains. “Down there. That’s where ours is,” he announced.

  My family and a few displaced blackbirds perched above us on hastily strung telephone wires couldn’t help but overhear him. Adams’s pregnant mother smiled at her husband’s words, but had tears in her eyes that welled up and began to flow down pink cheeks that grew rosier the more they were watered. As his mother shed her happy tears, his two younger sisters emitted high-pitched squeals that both Adams and I learned to loathe the older we got and the more we heard them.

  Our house would eventually rise from one of the cement-block foundations laid halfway between Adams’s lot and where we stood. My parents, my sister, and I looked out in silence over the scene so boisterously framed by Adams’s father. That was our style. We communicated telepathically in my family, by way of a sophisticated vocabulary of facial expressions. Our family peculiarity made me hypersensitive to nonverbal expression. I’ve lived my life quietly and carefully, like a white-tailed deer in an urban forest.

  My first conversation with Jonathan Adams began ten minutes after we had first cast our eyes on Byron’s Lane.

  “I think this place used to be a prairie and home to a thousand buffalos a hundred years ago. What do you think?” he asked me.

  “Maybe,” I answered. “Look over there—corn stalks. I bet this was a big cornfield last year. Wouldn’t it have been fun hiding in it, a hundred people looking for us, and no one could ever find us?”

  My new best friend was sure the blackbirds, agitated, crackling and whistling overhead, could have told us what it all looked like last summer—but not in front of our families. That was the year Adams thought he could teach animals to communicate with him in long and short grunts, like the Morse code that he had just learned in Cub Scouts. Regardless, the birds’ answers would have been drowned out by the cacophony of men putting hammer to nail, the racing diesel engines of cement trucks and bulldozers, and the cars driving past us on the gravel road. By Labor Day weekend and forever after, the noise of carpenters and earthmoving equipment had given way to the sounds of children, delivery trucks, and gasoline-powered lawnmowers.

  Countless times during the next ten years, Adams and I ran, walked, or rode our bicycles the two blocks up Byron’s Lane from my house to El Capitan, just off the S-curve on County Road 106, which had been renamed Cambridge Drive. Our favorite vantage point was sitting on a broad limb of an ancient, dying elm tree that we were sure was older than George Washington. The big tree had somehow grown on the knob of a round top that ascended from the other side of the road where our fathers’ station wagons had parked. The protuberance was full of huge rocks, which probably saved it from being flattened and becoming a building site. It afforded an outstanding view of the neighborhood, particularly in the late autumn, winter, and early spring, when leaves on the other trees that grew from the rocks weren’t hanging around to foul it.

  The housing developer chose an English Romantic Period theme for his Maplewood subdivision. By the end of the first year of our neighborhood’s existence, literary new street names had swept away all of Maplewood’s more descriptive place names on our side of town. Gravel Pit Road was no more; Ridge Road disappeared from street signs; Cemetery Hill was gone forever. When it was finished, our instant neighborhood consisted of nine blocks: two north-south streets, bisected by two that ran east and west. We never counted how many houses made up the neighborhood, spread over a grid that resembled a giant tic-tac-toe board. But when Adams and I shared a Cleveland Plain Dealer route, we had 282 Sunday customers.

  When I think of a lane, my mind drifts to the drive up to Scarlett O’Hara’s antebellum mansion in Gone with the Wind, or a jeep trail under a canopy of oaks. No trees were ever planted to umbrella the exposed asphalt surface of Byron’s Lane. The road was straight as an arrow, with no evidence anywhere along its sides of absolutely anything asymmetrical. Byron’s Lane was hardly a lane at all.

  *

  I didn’t notice that Adams had left his kitchen and returned to the deck. His silence and his posture told me that he had reverted to his reflective mood. I moved closer to the place where he stood. I wanted to share my epiphany with him.

  His property slid down a long, gentle slope of grassland dotted by small clumps of brush. Besides our childhood neighborhood, the landscape was twin to the place at Gettysburg where Pickett’s Charge had taken p
lace during the Civil War. The tree line in the distance was where the Confederates assembled and began their march. Adams’s deck was the stone wall at Cemetery Ridge that protected the Union soldiers. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was a long but manageable Sunday drive from Maplewood. Adams and I did it once during our senior year in high school and twice during the two summers we were home from college. Adams’s grandfather was a soft touch when we needed a car for a road trip.

  I excitedly told Adams what I saw hidden in the panorama of his property. Lumping Adams’s backyard with two places we associated with lost causes—Byron’s Lane and Pickett’s Charge—produced a chuckle.

  “You might be right,” was all he said.

  I noted the expression on his face. “You look like someone’s just guessed the password for your ATM card.”

  “Yeah, right,” he sarcastically replied. His response was too quick and too dismissive. He asked for no elaboration; he offered no further comment. He turned and passed by me, walking the length of his deck to fetch a paper napkin that had fallen off the patio table. On his way back to where I stood, he disappeared into his house through the sliding screen door.

  Not knowing if Adams was planning to return, I started to walk toward the door. But he reappeared three steps before I got there, filling the threshold with his broad-shouldered frame. Seconds later he was sitting across the table from me, pushing another bottle of Rolling Rock in my direction.

  “Name an experience you had while we were growing up in Maplewood that affected the rest of your life,” I said. “There must have been at least a few. ”

  Adams looked up at me quizzically. His smile told me that he liked the question. I was surprised how quickly he responded. It was as if he’d been sneaked a copy of one of Mrs. Porter’s dreaded essay tests in tenth-grade world history class, and the question I had just posed was the only one printed on the test sheet she had just dropped on his desk. The fragrant whiff of a freshly mimeographed piece of paper swept through me.