Spirit of the Place (9781101617021)

by Shem, Samuel

  He wiped his cheeks. Embarrassed at her seeing him so opened up, he walked over to her and stood in front of her schoolmarmish desk. “Brings back a lot of memories,” he said with a deliberate casualness.

  “I know. For me, too. It’s a faithful restoration. Any questions?”

  Just why are you so stunningly beautiful? is what went through his mind. And why is your voice like music? And why no wedding ring? Shyly, he said only, “No.”

  “Well, if you do, just ask.” She smiled brightly and went back to her book, a thick, oversized volume with tiny print.

  Unwilling to break off, Orville searched for something—anything—to engage her in conversation. He noticed, hanging above the desk where she sat, one of those old prints of a whale being harpooned by a whaler. Four dollars. Amy might like it.

  “Excuse me?” She looked up. “Could I have one of those?”

  “Sure. There should be one right here.” She leaned over from her chair to search in a cardboard box on the floor. Orville couldn’t help glancing down her scoop-necked dress, seeing in all that healthy musculature healthy breasts, bulging up out of a white bra like, yes, waves breasting the ocean, all alabaster. He looked away. She riffled through the tubes of prints and sat back up, face flushed. “You picked our most popular print. We may be sold out. If you have time, I can look in the cloakroom.”

  “I’ve got time, yes.”

  He watched her gather herself and place both arms solidly on the desk and kind of hoist herself up and start to walk away from him across the room and—Oh, God, she’s walking with a limp? His heart went out to her, seeming to strain against his ribs with each step, rooting for her to make it. What he had thought was her dress was actually a blouse. To cover her leg—was it childhood polio? she looked the right age for it—she would always wear pants. What pain, to see this! Something about seeing this exquisitely lovely woman his age who had seemed to be in the prime of life and health, with practiced difficulty lurching hard on one foreshortened and probably withered leg, rolling on it at the hip as if about to fall before catching herself on the good leg, planting herself solidly once again, and limping on, threading a path through the desks. He was shocked, and touched. More touched for her making that journey away from him without looking back, without asking for help, without hiding a thing, knowing she was being seen. As he, too, had just made a journey to sorrow so frankly before her, but with the safety net of thinking he was alone. More—she walked with dignity. He found himself tearing up again.

  Pretending to inspect the other maps and posters and gag items such as a Day-Glo Orange whale hat with flippers for earflaps, he heard her limp back—Ka-plott . . . Ka-plott . . .—and heard her call out happily, “We’re in luck!”

  He turned, smiled at her smile. She handed him the tightly rolled whale, went back behind the desk and braced herself on her arms again and lowered herself into her seat. Orville’s reaction to her was so powerful that he had to fight it down into nonchalance. He handed her five dollars. She handed him one back. Now what?

  “Why whales?” he asked, prolonging the time with her.

  “What?”

  “Why whales?”

  “‘Why whales’ what?” she asked, coaxing him as if he were a slow learner.

  He felt like an eleven-year-old boy flirting with an eleven-year-old girl, his yearning making him so nervous that he sounded like a moron. “Why, in Columbia, the whale thing? The logo, the street signs, SPOUT? I grew up here. I’ve been away twenty years, and I keep asking Columbians ‘Why whales?’ and all they say is ‘Caught ’em in the river.’ I was taught that, too, in school here. So I say, ‘But whales live in seawater, right? And the Hudson is freshwater, right?’ And the Columbians go, ‘Duhh . . .’” She chuckled. “And then they think it over some more, and they go, ‘Duhhh . . .’”

  She laughed, runs of Mozart. Their eyes met. She laughed harder, now doubled over. It was contagious. He laughed with her. Finally, she surfaced, blushing, the blush spilling down her throat, her chest, and that lovely cleavage.

  “You really want to know?”

  “You know?”

  “I know.”

  “My life is saved.” She seemed startled by this. “Just joking,” he said. “Tell me.”

  As if to collect herself, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath in and then slowly let it out. “It’s the American Revolution, okay?”

  “I remember.”

  “Good. It’s good to remember American Revolutions. During it, the Nantucket whaling fleet is at the mercy of the British Navy, which destroys it. After the war, the rich Nantucket merchants decide that they don’t want to go through that again. They form a group to search out a deepwater port, safe from attack. They’re Quakers, peace-loving, spiritual folk. Very thrifty. Very wealthy. They send a delegation from Nantucket on a journey to this part of the world, in a three-masted whaling ship, to find a new home. They poodle around Long Island, almost buy a farm on the East River in Manhattan, and stop at Kingston—then called Esopus. One day, in 1784, they sail around a bend in the river to where Columbia is now. Is this boring?”

  “Fascinating.”

  “I talk too much history, my friends say. It’s my job. I’m the town historian. My name’s Miranda Braak.”

  “Orvy Rose. I’m a doctor, working with Bill Starbuck. Temporarily.”

  “Oh,” she said, as if surprised. “Yes, dear old Bill. I’d heard he’d gotten some help. And it’s you.”

  “Yeah. But I had no idea Columbia had a town historian.”

  “I pushed for it. Columbia’s bicentennial is next year. I convinced the Columbians there might be tourist money in it. The job doesn’t pay much, but at least it’s a job. I supplement it by volunteering—figure that one out.” They laughed again. “So, there’s no ‘Columbia’ here, then, just two stores and a ferry. Actually, we’d better back up a bit. Henry Hudson lands his ship the Half Moon here—maybe here—in 1609.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to go soon. I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version, condensed?”

  Orville nodded.

  “Okay. So. The wealthy, upper-class Dutch settle here in the mid-1600s. Wanting wetland and farmland and not river frontage, they build their village miles inland, to the northeast, at Spook Rock. ‘Spook’ comes from an old Indian legend, I think Iroquois. The river landing is owned by two feuding Dutch families, lower class, with some Mohican blood. There are two wharves, two stores, two of everything—and not enough trade—both families keep getting even poorer. A group of Mohicans, ostracized from their tribe because they’re drunks, do the heavy lifting, for booze. The Dutch storekeepers own the North and South Bays and the cliff we call Parade Hill. The place is called Claverack Landing, after the clay cliffs, or klavers. You can still see them rising above the North Swamp. Rack is reach.”

  She glanced at him, as if to check if he were still interested. Leaning back against a child’s desk, he said, “I’m with you. Go on.”

  “One day a huge, three-masted whaling ship comes upriver and docks. Out of it come white men in the homespun gray suits and tall hats of the Quakers. They speak no Dutch. The Dutch speak no English. Nobody knows what the Mohicans speak. The Quakers, led by Seth Jenkins, like what they see: two deepwater ports north and south, protected by the high escarpment overlooking the river, the bays, and the mountains. So they offer—”

  “Escarpment?” he asked, delighting in the word.

  She smiled. “Escarpment, yes.” A glance. “So . . . they buy it and settle it at once, bringing a few houses off the boat that day. Thirty Proprietors from Nantucket form the governance of the town. They start fresh, build their utopia.”

  “Utopia? This?” She laughed at his astonishment, a little riff of Lizst. “Wait a second,” he went on. “They brought houses off of the boat?”

  “They dismantled some houses in Nantucket and reassemble
d them here. Check out the Curtiss House, at Washington and First. It has a Widow’s Walk, 128 miles from the ocean. So they lay out their utopia, first on big sheets of paper, then on the land. The streets are perfectly ruled, and—”

  “Which is,” he said, beaming, “why the grid!”

  “Which is why the grid, exactly. Five long straight streets, eight cross streets, dead-true square corners. Alleys between the long streets for sanitation and freight. And in a grand flourish of Quaker imagination, the cross streets are named First, Second, Third—”

  “Hurry, the tension’s unbearable!” he said with a smile.

  She laughed. “Fourth through Eighth! Anyway, they rebuild their whaling port here. Start Quaker meetings, Quaker culture, the Society of Friends.” She seemed to consider this and then embrace it. “Wonderful phrase, don’t you think?”

  “Yes. Do you think it’s possible?”

  “Historically not, for any length of time.”

  “Why haven’t I seen any pictures of these Quakers?”

  “They didn’t—still don’t—believe in images. The whaling industry—sperm oil, spermaceti for perfumes, whalebone corset stays—attracts all kinds of other shipping-related business, like rope making and—”

  “As in Rope Alley?”

  “Yes. They stretch the strands of hemp for a hundred yards up Rope Alley, to braid rope, yes. They’re at a perfect crossroads: farm goods from the east, timber from the Catskills to the west, able to send goods upriver and down between Albany and New Amsterdam. The utopia gets a name—Columbia—and becomes a boomtown. Within five years, four thousand people live here. It’s the third biggest port on the East Coast. And the lifeblood of the port is . . . are—”

  “Whales! Those cute whales!”

  “Yes! Ships are sent out all over the world—to the South Atlantic all the way to Tierra del Fuego, to the South Pacific, to Japan. You could walk all the way across the South Bay on the decks of ships anchored there side by side waiting to unload.”

  “It’s not a bay, though. It’s a swamp.”

  “They killed the bay with the railroad decades later. But here’s the good part, the irony. There’s always an irony.” She squinched her eyes up conspiratorily. “The town, this ‘good’ town of strict, moral, orderly, religious folk, attracts those classically ‘bad’ elements that boomtowns do: gamblers, thieves, con men, whores. The Quakers attract the whores!” She smiled, then sighed. “But we have to stop. My son’s soccer game’s almost over. Can’t be late, you know.”

  “No,” Orville said, startled, then saddened. “Actually I don’t.”

  “Oh. I see.” Miranda seemed to pick up on his sadness, the red thread in the weave. “Sorry, but I do have to go.”

  “But it’s a cliffhanger.”

  She chuckled, gathered up her things, and hoisted herself up. They walked together quietly to the door. “I’d love to hear more,” he said, holding the door open for her.

  “Well, you’re in luck, because we’re only up to 1803. I live in the old Staats House, on the river north of town. I’m in the book.”

  “I’m always in the office or the hospital. Occasionally in my mother’s house, on Courthouse Square.”

  Together they noticed that rain, its arrival unnoticed, was now beating down hard on the tin roof of the schoolhouse. Lightning. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thous—boom! A crack of thunder, a roll, Ka-rrr-rrb-bboooom! And then the echo off the mountains, and the echo of the echo.

  “Rip Van Winkle and his men are bowling in the Catskills,” Orville shouted over the din.

  “Is that what it is?” she shouted back.

  “I was taught that in school.”

  “Well, at least you learned one thing that was true.”

  “Need a hand?”

  “Thanks. I’m fine.” She opened her umbrella. “Want to get in under?”

  “Nope. I love rain!” Miranda looked at him quizzically and then laughed.

  Orville strolled nonchalantly toward the Chrysler, thinking Handel’s Water Music. Rain was popping off the bald patch on the top of his head, sluicing over his eyes, funneling down either cheek, washing away the scratchy salt residue, soaking his trim beard, his white shirt, his khaki pants. The soaking reminded him of Holland and Celestina Polo.

  He felt a surge of grief, a pinching in his tear ducts. It passed. His heart felt wet too, all senses wet too, so that he caught the scent of wintergreen and thought Starbusol but it was coming from a small grove of finally drenched and relieved blue spruce and he felt happy, happy as a dog’s nose in spring, which was of course strange because winter was coming. His eyes climbed a spruce trunk up to a bough near the top where a big bird perched, huddling against the downpour. He and the bird stared at each other through the curtain of rain and alleged evolution. The bird gathered itself and sprang up and out into the wet air and started to fly in a circle, its cry a high-pitched scree, scree, so that the man knew it was a red-tailed hawk.

  The hawk in the rain circled tiltingly above the man as if on the rim of a plate spinning on a stick. They were tethered together by their shared sight.

  In the man’s eyes? A blurred shape in flight, a dreamhawk.

  In the hawk’s eyes? Too big to eat, too earthbound to fear.

  Man and bird, doctor and hawk, general practitioner and red-tailed, Orville Abraham Rose and Unnamed, did the dance of shared and differing creaturedness for a moment and then the bird flew off into speckhood, leaving a few red tailfeathers of hope clutched in the man’s and the woman’s memories and imaginations, maybe, as these things go in these moments, forever.

  Orville looked back. Miranda, under her umbrella, was nearing her car. He noticed again the bumper sticker: WORTH SAVING. That’s it! She was the limping woman in the picket line in front of the General Worth Hotel his first evening home.

  “Worth Saving?” he called out to her through the clattering rain.

  “What?”

  “Worth Saving?”

  “Yes! ‘Worth Saving,’ most definitely, yes!”

  Part Two

  No one is responsible for their face

  until they’re forty.

  —Abraham Lincoln (apocryphal)

  · 9 ·

  The next Sunday afternoon, Miranda Braak was driving into Columbia toward the Worth Hotel to meet Mrs. Tarr and Orville and his niece, Amy. Orville had called the morning after their schoolhouse meeting, saying he’d like to see her again and how about the next Sunday afternoon.

  “We could talk more history,” he said. “Starting at 1803.”

  “Why talk when we can do?” she answered. “I mean, if you’d like, we could visit a historical site. I promised Mrs. Tarr—she’s my coconspirator from the Daughters of the American Revolution, the DAR—that I’d do an hour’s picketing with her at the Worth. We could start there.”

  “Deal.”

  Miranda still felt high from the afternoon in the schoolhouse. Like a kid anticipating a great tomorrow, she’d had a restless night and had awakened early, even before her son, Cray. All week long she’d been trying to match the reality of the man with what his mother had told her.

  Selma had said that in the summer of 1961, when Orville was sixteen, she had come home from brain surgery at Albany Medical Center. She left home a beautiful woman. Two months later she came back with one side of her face slack, an eye sewn shut, and her shaven head in a turban. Back then, the normal way to handle such a thing was not to tell your children what the surgery was and not to allow them to visit. Weak and depressed and wanting to die, the only thing that kept her alive, Selma said to Miranda, was her children, “wanting to see them grow up and settle down.”

  When she came home that June, Sol tried his hardest to help, but hey, it was golf season. Her daughter, Penny, at loose ends after graduating from New Paltz State Teachers College and dat
ing Milt Plotkin up in Albany, was skittish about caring for her. Milt was about to take off on a Beth El Synagogue Summer Program to a kibbutz and had invited Penny to join in the Dead Sea fun. Selma encouraged Penny to go, to pursue being pursued by Milt—as Selma had put it, “sacrificing my happiness for my only daughter’s only chance at her own.”

  Which left Orville. That summer he had fallen in love for the first time, with a Columbian girl named Laurice. “Nice, but Lithuanian,” Selma had said. He finally seemed to be coming out of his shyness, Selma thought, having friends on the basketball team, and hanging around with Bill Starbuck. He was blossoming at last, his days and nights full of adventure.

  “But you know what?” Selma had said. “Despite the pull of his very exciting life, Orville was there for me. Day after day, week after week, my son sat with me out on the back porch, helping me learn to use my face again, my brain again. I told him, over and over, don’t stay with me today. Go out and play with your friends, go swim at Taconic, go to Catskill and golf with Sol, hang out with Bill, go out even with Laurice—but don’t don’t don’t sacrifice your summer for me. You’re free to go, honey-bunny. Fly!” With a grand humility, Selma looked Miranda in the eye and said, “And you know what? That boy would have none of it. He stayed. Stayed and took care of his mother. My son took care of me.”

  When Miranda realized who it was standing before her in tears that afternoon in the schoolhouse, her heart floated up to her throat and in an instant it all made sense. His tears were from the recent death of his beloved mother. Loving her so much, how could he have gotten over it in just three months? Especially after missing the funeral. She saw, then, that the whole thrust of his life, the conjunction of his caring for his mother with his finding a kindly old doctor to hang around with, had been determined by that summer of helping, that summer in which a shy boy had learned compassion and had grown into what Miranda had come to feel was a rarity in her world: a truly caring man. And now a caring doctor besides? She knew from her own long history with doctors how rare that was.