by T. C. Boyle
Tim was a magician. He was. And if she’d ever doubted him, she’d been wrong, because he’d really pulled one out of his hat this time.
4.
They made up a motley caravan, five cars in various colors and states of repair strung out in a gleaming procession along the clean white turnpike that sliced through the heart of Massachusetts. Before they even got going she’d already heard half a dozen quips about the Joads (“Don’t call me an Okie,” Charlie shouted, “I’m a Beantowner!” to which Alice added, “Ex-Beantowner,” and Ken, clowning, cried out “Ma, Ma! Where’s Pa?”). They’d gathered in the parking lot of a shopping center that was convenient to the turnpike at the appointed hour—eight A.M.—and stood around sipping coffee out of cardboard containers and taking delicate semicircular bites out of doughnuts until everybody was there. The last to arrive were Royce and Susannah Eggers, in a rust-spotted Pontiac with a pair of front wheels that let out an exasperated screech when Royce swung into the lot.
They were towing a trailer piled high with all sorts of junk—kids’ bicycles, end tables, mattresses and bed frames, a birdcage, a basketball hoop and God knew what else, the intimate exfoliations of a life lived apart from the group. Though they had a trailer themselves, the smallest thing U-Haul offered because they’d got rid of practically everything and that was all the space they needed, Joanie couldn’t help wondering what Royce and Susannah were thinking—they’d all be together soon, in the Alte Haus, which was furnished, or at least mostly so, and none of this stuff, this junk, would hold any meaning for any of them. It struck her then, as her friends milled around talking in quiet voices, lighting cigarettes, licking powdered sugar from their thumbs and forefingers, that this was the last time they’d appear as separate families, with separate vehicles and separate possessions, that they were finally going to come together as one and live not in the past but in the now.
Royce, mopping his bald head—he was sweating, though it was overcast and still relatively cool—kept saying, “Jesus, I hope it’s not going to rain. I mean, I should’ve got a tarp to cover all this crap with, but you know how it is, everything right down to the last minute—”
“I hear you,” Ken said, and he had something in his hand, pinched between two fingers, that wasn’t a cigarette. He offered it first to her, and though she’d had little experience of marijuana and Tim’s prohibition rang in her head (It’s illegal!), she took it gladly, hungrily—she was high on the moment, as excited and sweetly expectant as she could ever remember being, and she figured why not be higher still?
She glanced up at Fitz then—he was just across the lot, not thirty feet away, where they’d parked to leave room for the others, since he’d insisted on getting here first. He kept circling the car, peering under it, checking the trailer hitch and tightening and retightening the ropes he’d secured their things with. He was nervous, she could see that, nervous about the whole business. He’d arranged for a leave of absence, telling McClelland how much he regretted having come under Dr. Leary’s influence and pleading with him to understand that he was going to need time to reconfigure his dissertation—or, actually, jettison it altogether. In the interim, he told him, he was going to take a part-time job and really bear down on reviewing the latest literature in personality studies and come up with a dissertation proposal that would be acceptable to everybody in the department. And McClelland, relieved to be rid of Tim and Dick and any lingering influence they might still have, told him to take as long as he needed.
Now, seeing the expression on Fitz’s face—he looked as if he were expecting war, not peace—she said to Ken, with a laugh, “I think Fitz needs this, really needs it,” and after taking a furtive puff herself, crossed the lot to their car, took hold of her husband and pulled him to her for a smoky kiss. “Mm,” he murmured, “tastes good. But should we—I mean, I’ve got to drive, and it’s not as if New York’s just around the corner.”
“Here,” she said, after snatching a quick look over her shoulder—the nearest strangers all the way across the lot, Corey milling around with the Eggers kids and the Roberts twins, their heads down, doughnuts and cartons of milk in their hands—she passed him the marijuana cigarette. “Take this,” she said. “It’ll relax you.”
And he did take it, his eyes masked against the smoke and his hair glowing in the soft filtered light just then beginning to seep through the overcast. He leaned back against the car, crossed his ankles, and took a deep drag and then another and yet one more, before finally handing it back to her.
After all the packing, preparation and anxiety over the final details (Fitz’s anxiety, in particular, which seemed to build on itself with every item they stuffed into the trailer), the drive was a lark. Nobody got a flat tire, nobody got lost, and when they stopped for gas or a burger, they rolled into the parking lot like a traveling show, everybody on the same page, on the same team, and it was group mind that decided when everybody’s stomach started rumbling or bladder sent out its urgent signals to the brain. They were together in body and spirit, that was how it was, they were off on a grand adventure and nothing could stop them now. She was so excited she couldn’t seem to stop talking the whole way there, high on the trip and the marijuana too. Every hill and signpost seemed to remind her of something else, especially as they crossed the New York State line and took the Taconic south through the densely forested hills that were just beginning to show the first flames of fall color.
Her recollections of Millbrook were vague—she and Fitz might have visited it two or three times over the years, just to get out of the house for a Sunday drive and maybe stop for a sandwich at the diner there or a drink or two at the bar—but what she remembered, what she could see with her eyes closed, was the charm of the place, a prosperous little village of no more than maybe sixteen or seventeen hundred people that could have been set down in the Adirondacks or New Hampshire without anybody blinking an eye. Was there anything to do there? No. It was just a village, with a junior college for girls and not much else. If you wanted culture—or even a pair of shoes—you could buzz into Poughkeepsie, for what it was worth, but Manhattan was only two hours away if you really got desperate.
Of course, that wasn’t the point. The point was to get away from everything and everybody and indulge what Tim called the Fifth Freedom, the freedom to explore your own mind without harassment or disapproval or even the knowledge of the outside world. Without the squares. The unenlightened. The mass of people who lived lives of quiet desperation and never suspected there was anything beyond work and sleep and what their blinkered senses brought them in a continuous loop from birth till death. But that wasn’t her, not anymore. Or Fitz either.
The first thing you saw as you turned onto Franklin Avenue, Millbrook’s main street, was a great towering five-story wooden structure straddling a hill in a sea of fussed-over lawns and flowerbeds. It was grim, institutional, and looked utterly out of place amid the farms and fields surrounding it. “What’s that?” Corey asked from the backseat.
“That’s the local insane asylum,” Fitz said without looking over his shoulder.
“Your father’s only joking, honey,” she said. “That’s the college—Bennett.”
“No hope for you there,” Fitz said, swinging easily into place behind Ken’s VW Bug, as Charlie and Alice eased in behind him in their turquoise Chevrolet, followed by the Robertses’ and Eggerses’ bringing up the rear. “It’s all girls. Or wait a minute”—now the glance over the shoulder—“maybe that does provide hope for you, after all. You do like older women, right?”
His face pressed to the window, Corey didn’t answer.
“I mean, Nancy’s what—four months older than you? Or did you throw her over when we left Mexico?”
Corey’s voice was in the process of changing, and it got stuck a moment, so that when he did speak it came out as a croak. “This is it? You really mean we’re going to live here? In this hick town? I mean, what does everybody do on Saturday night—ride cows?�
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“They watch each other chew gum,” Fitz said. “Especially the teenagers.”
And she said, “Give it a chance, because just you wait and see where we’re going to be living, which is just—it’s at the top of this hill, isn’t it, Fitz? At the T?”
Suddenly Ken had his blinker on and Fitz hit the brakes so hard she thought she was going to go through the windshield. Corey shouted “Ow!” and thumped heavily into the seatback behind her while everything on the dash—maps, her sunglasses, an empty soda bottle that was hard as a brick—came raining down on her. No one was hurt, just startled. And Fitz had managed to stop without plowing into the rear end of the VW, which was where the engine was, and who knew what kind of damage that would do. Fitz let out a curse, his eyes leaping to the rearview mirror, but fortunately Charlie and the others were far enough back to avoid a pileup, and following Ken’s lead, they all rumbled up on the shoulder in a fan of dust. Dead ahead of them, rising up out of the pavement on the far side of the road, was a turreted stone gatehouse, three stories high. If they hadn’t stopped they would have sailed right on through the intersection and barreled into the heavy wooden gate one after the other, the blind leading the blind.
In the next moment, they were all out of their cars and gaping up at the building before them, which might not have contained sixty-four rooms, but looked big enough for all of them.
“You think this is it?” Ken asked, and he was looking to her and Fitz, as the local experts.
“What else could it be?” Fitz snatched a look up and down the road, as if they might have missed something. “Dick said you take Franklin through the village till it ends and you’re there. So this has to be it, right?”
“It looks like Disneyland,” Corey said.
She said, “It does. And this is only the gatehouse. Imagine,” she said, “just imagine what the big house is going to be like.”
The others had begun to gather in a scrum around Ken’s car, the adults alert and eager, the kids looking sheepish, as if they’d been the cause of some catastrophic loss and here was the evidence of it staring them in the face. She noticed Nancy Eggers in particular—she was the last one to emerge from any of the cars and she stood there in a slouch, gazing vacantly at the empty gatehouse, as if it had nothing to do with her. She was pretty enough, with her big eyes and the lipstick she’d begun to wear, her black hair cut in a pageboy and pinned up on one side with a barrette, but when was the last time anybody had seen her smile? You would have thought she was going off to prison instead of a new life that would make the old one in Boston look like something out of a Dickens novel.
“Where is everybody?” Royce demanded, his voice high and querulous. “I thought at least somebody’d be here to greet us or let us in or whatever. Should we try the gate?”
“Are you sure this is the right place?” Charlie had come up to stand there with the other men on the edge of the pavement, gazing dubiously at the gate. He was wearing blue jeans and a flannel shirt open at the collar, as if that was what rural life would expect of him. “I wouldn’t want to see you get an ass full of buckshot, my friend. These are good country folk out here, never forget that.”
Just then she became aware of the sound of an automobile coming up the road behind them and swung round expectantly. It wasn’t Dick. And it wasn’t Tim. It was a stranger in a battered station wagon, and when he pulled up to the stop sign she flagged him down. She took in his tortoiseshell glasses, the baseball cap, a face of angles and gouges and a straggle of hair the color of Fitz’s. In the next moment she was leaning into the open window. “Excuse me,” she said, “but is that”—pointing across the street to the stone turrets and mute gate—“the Hitchcock estate?”
“Private property, as far as I know,” the man said, squinting up at her. He paused. “That’s why they’ve got the gate.”
“But we’re expected.” She looked to the others, everyone watching her now as if all the progress of their lives depended on this exchange. “We’re guests. Actually,” she said, and she couldn’t suppress a flush of pride, “we’re going to be living here.”
The man just blinked at her. “I guess the Hitchcock boys’ll have something to say about that.” Then, sweeping his eyes over the whole group, he put the car in gear, added, “You take care now,” and drove off.
Everyone looked to her—and why was her heart fluttering? “Yes,” she said, smiling in relief. “This is it.”
Ken and Fitz immediately strode across the street and tried the gate, but it was padlocked, and then the rain that had held off all day began to spatter the pavement and they all had to retreat to the shelter of their cars. “So near,” she said, climbing in and slamming the door behind her, “and yet so far.”
“I don’t know why they couldn’t have left the gate open,” Fitz said, and though he rarely complained, he was complaining now. “I mean, it’s not as if they didn’t know we were coming.”
“I’ll go,” Corey said, and before she could object—But it’s raining—the door sliced open on a cool sweet smell of wet fields and moribund wildflowers and he was across the street and mounting the low wall at the side of the gatehouse. She saw him perched there a moment and then he was gone, racing up the drive through a scrim of rain.
“You think he’ll be all right?” she murmured, turning to Fitz. The main house was a full mile from the gate, or so Dick had said, because that was the way the original owner, a German American industrialist named Dieterich, had wanted it, not simply as a show of elegance and the privilege that came with wealth but for privacy too. Which was ideal for Tim’s purposes—for their purposes—as if they really were on Huxley’s island. But still, a mile was a mile. And it was coming down hard now, ricocheting up off the pavement and churning in the gullies on both sides of the road.
“He’s fifteen,” Fitz said. “He’s been wet before.”
“What’s the world record for a mile?”
“Just under four minutes. But give Corey ten—he’s out of training.”
The windows had steamed up, but she lit a cigarette anyway, just to do something. “What’s the first thing you’re going to do when we get there?” she asked.
“I don’t know—have a drink, I guess.”
“Yeah, me too. But no margaritas—something German, right? What do the Germans drink anyway?”
“Beer.”
“And schnapps—what about schnapps?”
“I wouldn’t count on Tim having a whole lot of schnapps in the cupboard,” he said, smiling and laying a hand on her knee. “Going German does have its limitations, you know.” He was in a good mood, she could see that—their troubles were over, or about to be. They both stared through the windshield a moment, as if to be sure the fairy-tale gatehouse hadn’t vanished in a puff of smoke. “I’d settle for a martini,” he said. “Actually, at this point, I’d settle for anything.”
She was thinking about unloading the car and getting things settled and what a trial that was going to be after a long day on the road—she had a headache already—when the high whine and blat-blat-blat of Dick’s little sports car came to them over the drumbeat of the rain on the roof, and then Dick was there and the gate was opening and Corey was sprinting across the road to them. Dick grinned, waved, then climbed back into his car and led the procession through the gate and up the long tree-lined avenue to the house.
So often, when you’ve built something up in your mind, the reality can’t come close to the fantasy, but that wasn’t the case with the Alte Haus. The minute it came into view, she was enchanted. Even through the rain-smeared blur of the windshield, she could see this was no ordinary house but a vision out of a storied past, the past of princesses, ogres and castles—and the myth, replayed a thousand times, of good conquering evil that every little girl in the Western world battened on. The style was late Victorian, though Tim was to describe it as Bavarian baroque, whatever that meant, and it was three stories high with towers on either side that extended it to fo
ur, and as they drove up in their procession, the spires that capped the towers seemed to take hold of the clouds and split them into long gauzy streamers as if the weather was just another facet of the house. “Wow,” Fitz said and gave a low whistle. “Can you believe it?”
Inside, it was even better—all tapestries and rich dark wood hand-tooled by the German craftsmen the original owner had brought over to make gingerbread of the banisters and carve fanciful figures into the mantels of the outsized stone fireplaces that were tall enough to step into. Tim had greeted them at the door, his grin as big as the house, and he wouldn’t hear of anybody unpacking anything until they each had a drink in hand and took a tour of the place. Martinis went round. Everybody seemed to be talking at once. And then Tim, pitcher in one hand, glass in the other, led them through the halls and up and down the staircases, pointing out the salient features in his crisp tutorial way.
Fanchon, in a pair of black toreador pants and a cardigan in poppy red that had to be at least two sizes too small, was full of herself, hanging on Tim and cooing over every detail, but all along she was looking to her main chance when it came to divvying up the rooms, make no doubt about that. As Joanie herself was (though, of course, as she had to remind herself, it wasn’t a competition and there was plenty of room for everybody). Each floor, each hallway, offered up new possibilities, and while Tim presided and everybody gabbled at once till the excitement was a current running through all of them like a new kind of electricity, she was trying to decide what would work out best—ground floor, where you had access to the gardens and all that glorious acreage or second or even third floor, where you could take in the views?
