Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  New Year's Eve there were raucous parties up and down the streets of my neighborhood. I fell asleep with the help of TV and only one beer (I knew I had to start cutting back). I did not even make it to the countdown in Times Square, did not know that the New Year had definitely arrived until nine o'clock the next morning. I spent all of New Year's Day washing my clothes, unsuccessfully trying to reach Lily by phone, and then calling various motels in the area for a room. They were all too expensive or too far from town, so I finally settled on Campbell's Boardinghouse, a place I thought I'd never end up.

  That last night in my apartment in Washington: no kids, no lawn mowers, no weed whackers, no Billy Bates, no dreams.

  Early on January 2, I got on a bus headed south.

  Chapter Seven

  PONTEFRACT, VIRGINIA: A DAY IN THE LIFE

  1

  From The Nightmare Book of Cup Coffey:

  The bus ride was long and uneventful—I left Washington, DC, at 8:00 a.m. on a bus that I swear was filled with nuns, drunks, and screaming babies, all smoking cigars. That bus pulled into every town on the map in its zigzag-route down through western Virginia, finally setting me down in Pontefract at 3:00 p.m. I called what turned out to be the only cab service in town and waited for my driver.

  My memory of this town has faded. Pontefract doesn't seem to be a chest full of my greatest terrors. I am a different person. An adult. They say that in a seven-year period, you shed your old skin entirely and replace it with a new "coat." I had not set foot in this town for twelve years—my skin was already nearly twice-removed from Pontefract's dust.

  When I was in my teens, the surface of this town had always held my deepest loathing—the sunshiny, All-American streets, the good-old-boy way of greeting, old men chewing tobacco in front of the drugstore, beehive hairdos, a decadent charm that evoked for me black-and-white movies from the '50s about small southern towns.

  But when the taxi came, a Ford station wagon, I settled into the backseat determined to see the town for what it is: innocent, untouched by the cosmopolitanism that is overtaking every other small town in Virginia. It still reminds me of all those things, beehive hairdos, "The Andy Griffith Show," chewing tobacco, '50s movies. But I think I can appreciate that—such a relief from all the noise in Washington, all the rush, all the bother over politics and fashion. Pontefract feels like a last refuge, and I realize my initial reaction is tinged with a nostalgia for what might have been had that night twelve years ago not occurred. I feel that somewhere in this town is the key to my own innocence, which was lost that one night.

  We drove through the portals of town—the Henchman Lounge and an abandoned Mobil Gas Station, set diagonally across from each other on Main Street like dance partners frozen in a do-si-do. I can't believe that the Henchman is still here. It was a dive back when I was a teenager and snuck in with some friends to try and order beer (we were kicked out). The Henchman Lounge is still the very model of a dive, one of its windows broken, the other bearing the legend scrawled in dust: WASH ME.

  The young, greasy-haired girl driving the cab scrutinized me through the rearview mirror and said, "'Course we shoulda stopped for gas back at the depot. I'm runnin' kinda low." She grinned a young hag's grin. "You a former student of old Peepee?"

  I'd forgotten the school's notorious nickname. Peepee, Pontefract Prep. "Show us your peepees!" the redneck townies would shout as we walked down the street. This also became a term of endearment among the townies; if you were a student you might be referred to as peepeebrain, or peepeebutt, or even the more visually interesting peepeeface.

  I laughed when my cab driver reminded me of this. "Yes," I replied, "I was a peepee in the olden days."

  She was apparently no older than seventeen, so my reference to the olden days seemed entirely plausible. She smacked her chewing gum. "Yah, well, my boyfriend used to go there, too."

  "It's a fine school."

  "Bullshit," she said, smacking the gum again in punctuation. She honked the horn twice as we drove by a cemetery. "Good luck," she informed me, "when you pass boneyards ya either gotta hold your breath or honk your horn."

  The girl steered with the careless abandon of one who invites accidents. We narrowly avoided hitting an old dog as it crossed the road ("Fifty points if I was to get him," she said) and a few squirrels.

  The town was comatose along Main Street. What has changed about it is there are more stoplights. That's about the extent of the damage. The combination of Federal-style and Greek-revival buildings (even with gutted interiors which were now dime stores and specialty shops) gives the small town an almost patrician flavor, as if indicating that this was once a town of some prosperity. We passed all the same shops I remembered from before, the old barber shop with its twirling pole and leather shaving strop hanging in the window, the Regency Row Arcade, the Tobacconist Shop, the Kountry Kitchen Bakery, Dunwoody's Ham Biscuit Haven, the Key Theater, Fauquier's Five'N'Dime, Fisher's Drugstore (old men in baseball caps, plaid hunting jackets, standing around the jumbo bags of coal in front, waving to me as if we were all old friends), Hotchkiss Market On the sides of some of the old red buildings are still stenciled COCA-COLA logos from the '30s, and from even earlier times, MILLER'S FEED & SUPPLY and CHAS. HOUSTON BUGGY WHIPS. The cool, blue mountains just beyond Pontefract give the illusion that this is a doll-sized town, and that at any moment a giant child's hand will reach over one of the distant peaks and smash his angry fist down on this setting.

  We drove around to the east of town, alongside Clear Lake, which was not yet completely frozen—some teenagers were standing along the edges, testing the ice and then backing up to shore again. The lake is much smaller than I remembered it. Although I suppose the greatest disappointments in life come from realizing that things are never as great as they seemed when you were a child. Clear Lake is almost a perfect circle. On one side is Pontefract, on the other, the school. Almost as if they, the town and school, are staring at each other. On the shore opposite from where we drove, dense woods lead into foothills, while from our southern approach, homes litter a mostly empty plain as the road curves up to the entrance to the school.

  "Could we stop for a second?" I asked my driver.

  "Your money," she shrugged and pulled the car over alongside the curb. "You want to get out and stretch?"

  "No, I just want to look. It's so pretty," I said, for lack of a better word.

  "I guess," she said, rolling her eyes.

  Pontefract Prep, with its columns and old bricks, gray stones, elm, oak, boxwood mazes, the white chapel, spread out in front of us like a welcoming hand. I have never since felt such a flood of emotion as I did then. Here it was, the place I had been so terrified of, the place where I buried my childhood. And it was so beautiful, so timeless.

  In the distance I saw the Marlowe-Houston House, its Georgian facade like the entrance of a mausoleum. The house made my heart skip a beat. But this is just guilt by association. The fact that I spent many happy afternoons talking with Lily on its veranda, or sneaking in through a half-open window in the spring to gawk at its treasures (old photographs of the Shenandoah Valley adorned the walls; Civil War souvenirs and ancient diaries were encased in glass; portraits of middle-aged Houston heiresses dripping with jewels and guarding the artifacts beneath their gilt frames)—none of this mattered to me when I arrived, age twenty-eight, to gaze upon the exterior of that old house. Instead I imagined it was somehow at fault with regards to the accidental death of Bart Kinter, and a conspirator in the destruction of my relationship with Lily Cammack. I turned away from it.

  "All right," I told my cabbie.

  She started the car again, but it died quickly. She turned the key in the ignition, at the same time pumping the accelerator. "Old shitkicker," she muttered. The taxi gave a few sputtering responses. We began to move slowly, shaking every few seconds, until the car stopped altogether and the engine gave up the spirit.

  "Motherfucker," she said, under her breath. The girl bowed
her head slightly, and all I could see was the stringy black hair and back of her neck. "Those assholes back at the office, those assholes meanin' my sister and her shithead husband, Sweeney, they was supposed to fill up the fuckin' tank this mornin'."

  She rested her head down against the wheel with her arms wrapped about its rim.

  "No sweat," I said.

  "I'm sorry, Mister," she whispered, head still down. Then she jerked her head up and looked in the rearview mirror at me. "Sherry's such an asshole, 'xcuse me, but she is, and I get so damn angry I could blow up. I'm gonna get some kinda ulcer before I'm twenty!" She continued to rant and rave, explaining what perfect assholes, "excuse me but they are," her sister Sherry and brother-in-law Sweeney were.

  I began to laugh. She must've thought I was nuts. I felt cured by the chilled country air, by the wounded sway and lurch of the station wagon as she tried to slam it to life. This was the kind of problem people had in towns like this. Car won't start. All of a sudden I suspected that when I finally did get hold of Lily, her problems would seem to be nothing compared to mine. She was considering divorce, or her father was ill, or she'd had an affair—in a town like this, those problems were monumental, but where I was from they were the ordinary business of life. Even when I was sixteen and she twenty, we had blown her predicament up, because in a town of this size, you were not dwarfed by buildings or corporations or the indifference of the masses. In a town the size of Pontefract, Virginia, you were only made to feel small by gossips and the leanings of your own conscience. And cars that simply refuse to start.

  "You okay, Mister?" the cabbie asked.

  "Yeah."

  "It's only a quarter mile to Campbell's. It's gonna be a half hour before Sweeney gets out here with the gas " She let her voice trail off, leaving me to catch her drift.

  I decided to walk it.

  I grabbed my minimal amount of luggage, paid her my fare, and said good-bye. I began walking up East Campus Drive, leading away from the school, and could just make out the pink house ahead and the white sign out front:

  CAMPBELL'S BOARDINGHOUSE

  Reasonable Rates

  2

  From The Nightmare Book of Cup Coffey:

  Patsy Campbell is that woman whom Blanche Dubois would've become had she been released from the mental home, taken a fancy to chocolate MoonPies, gained the inevitable one hundred pounds that accompany such fancies, and grown a faint moustache on her upper lip barely camouflaged by bleach. Oh, and the glasses she wore—those thick round kind, giving her steely blue eyes an owllike quality. When I was in my early teens, Mrs. Campbell's Boardinghouse had been the debutante capital of town, particularly during the big weekends like the prom and homecoming. If you brought Patsy a MoonPie and an RC Cola, she might let you sit in the parlor with your date, and if you were from a First Family of Virginia, or were quarterback of the football team, or if your daddy was someone of rare distinction, she might even serve tea and butter biscuits and play the imitation sixteenth-century virginal that had been in her family since before the War Between the States. I only heard about this from friends; I never had a date when I attended Pontefract. I'd only seen the inside of her house once when I was caught red-handed, or in actual fact, pink-and-lace-handed, in the middle of a panty raid during my sophomore year.

  I hesitated before knocking on the door of Campbell's Boardinghouse, wondering if Patsy would look the same, if chocolate would outline her lips, if the bug-eyed glasses would be replaced by contact lenses, if she'd have lost that frail catch in her voice that was so affectedly southern.

  One thing hadn't changed: the place was in need of repair. Everything about the house sagged, every pink board was warped. Even the doorbell didn't work. The front door was slightly ajar, which seemed odd considering how cold it was, but it allowed me to peer through the screen door and into the front hall—completely gray.

  I gave the edge of the screen door three solid raps.

  "Just a meenit," I heard her singsong voice come from one of the upstairs windows. Then, a padding of slippered feet down the stairs, and she emerged from the gray of the front hall truly larger than life. She had not changed a bit. Her hair was entangled in a bramble of pink plastic curlers, and she was draped like a Valkyrie in a baby-blue chenille bathrobe.

  I nodded a greeting. "Hello, Mrs. Campbell? I'm Malcolm Coffey. I called from Washington? About a room."

  She reached into one of the many folds in her robe and withdrew those orb-like eyeglasses, propping them across the bridge of her doughy nose. "Why, good afternoon, Mr. Coffey-did-you-say? Yes, yes," she said, "I do believe your room is prepared." When she spoke, she tugged at vowel sounds, and stretched consonants into extended vowels, so "prepared" became "preepayaahd." "Just call me Patsy, honey."

  She opened the screen door, her arm lifting up and out against the door frame. I was forced to bend down and tunnel beneath her buttressing arm just to get inside the house.

  Patsy Campbell apparently didn't recognize me, and of course my appearance was much different than when I was sixteen—I had lost most of the baby fat, my hair had darkened and thinned a bit, I stood straighter, was not quite as sloppy as I had once been.

  I guess it helped that when I introduced myself I didn't use the name I was popularly called when I'd been a student at Pontefract Prep. The nickname Lily gave me, the one that stuck even with my family: Cup. Perhaps I should've used it. Maybe she would've taken one good bloated look at me and turned me out while she had the chance. I was sure that if there was any one name Patsy Campbell would remember it would be Cup. She might not even know my last name at all. All she would know was "Cup."

  Patsy Campbell once had a nephew by the name of Bart Kinter.

  3

  Lily Has Not Been By to See Her Father

  4:00 p.m.

  Clare Terry drew back the curtain in her father's bedroom. Late afternoon sunlight flooded the room, and the old man held his hands up to shade his eyes. "So dark and cold, people will think I keep you in the dungeon." This was how she'd found him, in his pajamas, standing in front of the television set, staring down at the blank screen. His bedroom, like hers and Lily's, had remained exactly as it had been for as long as she could remember. Tankards of men's cologne lined up on his dresser, while large bottles of L'Air du Temps and Shalimar sat like sentries upon her mother's dresser, as if expecting that at any moment Rose Cammack would come over to them, choose one, and dab a bit of the chosen perfume on her wrist. Clare wanted to change the room entirely, but her father, even as out of it as he often was, went into a rage when she tried. After nearly two years of living with him again, she was getting used to his sudden fits of temper. It was understandable, because he knew, even if the onset of Alzheimer's Disease made him forget things, he knew what was happening to him and he felt helpless.

  The master bedroom was not terribly large. A king-sized bed took up most of the room. In spite of the fact that the maid had just been in that morning, it was an absolute wreck, the sheets tangled into the down comforter, the quilt practically threadbare, half on the Oriental carpet. Clare would have to make the bed for perhaps the second time today. The baby portraits of her and Lily hung next to each other above the bed. Even then, Lily had that pale cool beauty that Clare envied; and there was Clare, less than two years old, with that unruly dark curly hair, looking vaguely Italian, and who knew what gene that had come from? Their father had always said that Clare was the mystery child and teased her, saying that a gypsy woman left her on the porch.

  While Lily, he would say proudly, has the Cammack looks through and through, the porcelain skin, the white-blond hair, the high cheekbones. By God, he would say between puffs on his cigar, she is a blueblood Cammack and a McCammack before that.

  "Lily, Lily, child " Brian Cammack said to the blank television screen.

  "Daddy, it's me, Clare. Were you dreaming?"

  "Has Lily been by yet?" He finally turned his gaze to Clare who was still standing near the window. S
he could not get over how much he had aged in the past year—his face was a pasty gray, there seemed to be no color in his eyes, and his skin had taken on the translucent quality of rice paper. At times she was afraid to look at him for fear that she might see the veins and bones beneath his skin. He had lost nearly twenty-five pounds in the past year, and his flannel pajamas hung on him as though made for a man twice his size.

  "It's very cold today, Daddy, you shouldn't walk around in your bare feet." She went to the armoire and opened it. His shoes were stacked neatly. Clare pulled out his lime green duck shoes and held them up for him to see. "How about these? And the wool socks in your bottom drawer?" She nodded in the direction of his dresser.

  "Je ne comprenez-vous." He threw his hands up in despair. Her father often lapsed into French when he was confused. His knowledge of the language was very basic, learned when he was in Paris just after World War II.

  "Ah, pourquoi pas, mon p re?" Clare said, uncertain of her pronunciation.

  "They call her the little white dove, isn't that right?"

  "Yes, Daddy," Clare replied, happy that they had returned to the familiar territory of English.

  "That woman I saw before before she was lovely. Not like your mother. Rose was my Rose "

  "No, not like Mother. Would you like a walk in the garden? Daddy, you can stay in your pajamas if we just get something on your feet and throw a nice warm coat over you."

  "Yes," he said testily, clenching his fists and beating at the air like a trapped bird, "and I can dress myself, thank you. I've been to war, got lost in Paris one night, too, and I do you know Pound? 'The apparition of these faces in a crowd' I can dress myself, a va?" He went over to the dresser, opened the top drawer and poked around. "No socks here."