Dreamthorp

by Williamson, Chet

  No. He was being paranoid. The last week had been hell for everyone in Dreamthorp. There was not a resident who had not lost a friend or an acquaintance in the collapse of the playhouse. It was a miracle that only fourteen people had been killed, but that was enough of a tragedy to bring in all three major networks for coverage. They were gone now, but the insurance investigators had taken their place, and were going over what was left of the playhouse with cameras and calipers and fine tooth combs. And the lawsuits were starting to trickle in. If Vernon Wolgemuth, the owner of the playhouse, had any sense, Tom thought, he'd declare bankruptcy or get the hell out of the country.

  There were a few of Tom's friends among the dead and more among the injured, and as he neared Charlie Lewis's cottage, he was pleased to see Charlie sitting on the front porch. "Charlie!" he called, and the older man waved.

  "Back, and meaner than ever. Come up and sit a spell."

  Tom walked up the steps to the porch of Charlie's cottage. Although all the dwellings in Dreamthorp were called cottages, Charlie's strongly belied that appellation. It was a gothic mini-mansion, complete with a widow's walk that looked out on nothing but treetops, ten rooms, three of which were rimmed with shelves containing both 331/3 and 78 RPM recordings as well as a vast collection of reel-to-reel tapes, and a roofed porch that went around the entire house. It had been built in 1907 by a nephew of Richard Weston, and Charlie had lived in it since 1981. The wicker porch furniture dated from the time of the first tenant, and Tom Brewer slid onto one of the padded armchairs. "How's the ribs?" he asked.

  "Hurt like a bitch. But when I consider the alternative, the pain lessens amazingly. You want a beer?"

  Tom began to look at his watch, then stopped himself. "Sure."

  "Mind getting it yourself? I'm sore." Tom stood up and walked toward the door. "Clever boy like you probably knows it, but they're in the fridge. Bring me one too."

  Tom brought the beers and handed one to Charlie. "Shitful thing, that playhouse," he said, opening the bottle.

  "It was indeed." Charlie took a long, cold swallow. "And it doesn't make a goddam bit of sense."

  "The way it happened?"

  Charlie nodded. "Like the hand of de Lawd. Just one twist and boom, straight down like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. I've never been so scared in my life. Afterward was bad—getting out, or having you get me out, for which I shall remember you in my will—but seeing that happen. . ." He took another swallow. "It was not possible. That's all there is to it. It was not possible, so it did not happen, and none of those people are dead, and my ribs don't feel like I've been used as the Giants' tackling dummy."

  "They've got investigators down there now, Charlie."

  "I don't care if they get Sherlock Holmes. I saw four dozen chestnut posts a foot thick all snap at the same place and do a side step. And that was impossible. I saw the impossible, Thomas."

  "Maybe you thought you saw it."

  "Meaning what?"

  "Maybe you were in shock, and what you remembered—"

  "Wasn't what I really saw—yeah, sure. Sorry, kid, I saw what I saw, and I don't care what the hell they turn up down at ye old ruins. That place was built to last till the last trump."

  "So what do you think happened then?"

  "There's the rub, bub. I haven't an idea in my head short of some terrorist organization that planted forty-eight separate plastique charges and set them off at the same time. Either that or divine intervention, take your pick. Hell, this beer gets warm fast." Charlie set the bottle on the smooth boards of the porch. "So what's it been like around here?"

  "Sad. At least all the funerals are over."

  "Good. I hate funerals. I plan to skip mine."

  Tom remembered then. "Except one. Harold Thatcher's is tomorrow."

  "Fell down the stairs. I read about that in the paper Wednesday."

  "Thursday."

  "Whatever." Charlie shook his head. "Thatcher had to be ninety. I'm amazed he could still climb stairs, let alone fall down them. Loose board or something, wasn't it?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well," Charlie said, "on to more important matters. They still going to have the season of shows?"

  "In the Hall of Culture. It's a lot smaller than the playhouse, but they're going to have extra performances."

  "Ah, the tenacity of Dreamthorpians. Whate'er may befall, we endure. Faulkner would've been proud. I just hope to hell that that building doesn't fall down too." Charlie made the atypical gesture of shaking his head sharply, as if flinging water from his hair. "So how's your love life?"

  Tom smiled glumly. "Word gets around."

  "It doesn't take a genius to see what's in front of your eyes, especially if you live next door. She's a pretty girl."

  "Yeah, well. . ."

  "It's okay if you don't want to tell your nosy neighbor about her, I understand. Just because I've been like a father to you—"

  "You've never been like a father to me. My father is next door right now, along with my mother, so don't tell me you've been like a mother to me either."

  "All right, maybe an uncle then. Who is she? I've seen her at your place every weekend for a few weeks and have had the good grace not to ask about her till now."

  Tom sighed. "Her name is Karen. She's a student at the college."

  "Graduate student?"

  "Undergrad." Charlie's eyebrows raised. "She's a senior, Charlie."

  "Oh, well, that's okay then. In one of your classes?"

  "No."

  "That's reassuring."

  "She's very mature for her age."

  "Sure, all college girls are. And you have a lot in common."

  "We do."

  "She an artist?"

  "No, but she likes art. She's a music major."

  "Ah. Baton twirling?"

  "Goddam, Charlie, you can be a pain in the ass." Charlie Lewis laughed. "I'll remember that next time you ask me to help put in your air conditioners."

  The laughter relaxed Tom, and he slipped further down in the chair. "She's a nice girl, Charlie, she really is. She's been good for me."

  "How's Josh taking it?" Josh was Tom's fourteen-year-old son.

  "He's taking it."

  Charlie lit a cigarette and dropped the match into his beer bottle. "He took his mother's death hard, didn't he?" It wasn't so much a question as a statement.

  "So did I, Charlie," Tom said quietly. "She was my wife."

  Charlie looked at him keenly. "I didn't mean anything by that, Tom."

  "I know you didn't. I'm sorry. I guess I just feel a little guilty, like I should plant a memory garden and wear black for the rest of my life."

  "Nobody expects that. Not even the traditional citizens of Dreamthorp."

  "Josh does."

  A long moment went by. "It's like that, is it?" Charlie finally said.

  "He was . . . very close to his mother. It's funny, but there were times when I actually felt jealous of what was between them. Oh, I don't mean she loved me any less after Josh was born—just. . . differently." Tom shook his head. "He's been like a different kid since she died, Charlie. Never talks anymore, never touches his guitar, doesn't go out with his friends, won't even talk to them on the phone."

  "I've noticed. He doesn't laugh when I kid him anymore. How about his schoolwork?"

  Tom shrugged. "His grades were better the second half of the year. Seems like all he does is study—I should complain about that? But school always came easy for him." He took another sip of beer. "He hates Karen."

  "Well, that's . . . to be expected. The Hamlet syndrome in reverse, I guess. I'm sorry I don't have any suggestions, but I haven't watched My Three Sons in years."

  Tom's laugh was loose and easy, something he'd been waiting to release for a long time. "Goddamit, Charlie, you'd joke during the holocaust."

  "I did. That's why the guards let me go."

  "And I gotta go," Tom said, standing up. "Thanks for the beer, but I've got a carving that's due next week."

&n
bsp; "Speaking of carving, that reminds me—you know the Hersheys, that couple with the metal detectors?"

  "I've seen them around."

  "They found something pretty interesting last weekend. A quartz carving. Pulled it out of the old lumber site."

  "A carving in quartz?"

  "Yeah. Pretty rough stuff, but Sam Hershey said it was about eight inches down, so I suspect it's fairly old."

  "Indian, you think?"

  "I don't know what else it could be, but I went over to Pete Zerphey's place, and he couldn't identify it. Said it didn't look like anything the Susquehannocks or the Shenk's Ferry People would've carved. I made a sketch, thought I'd hit the Archive Building at the William Penn Museum as soon as I can move without feeling agony in every joint. The Hersheys said they might take it over there themselves and see if somebody can identify it."

  "Well, let me know. Quartz, huh? Jesus, I'd hate to try and carve that stuff. It'd chip like crazy. Don't know how you'd get any shape out of it."

  "Like I said, it didn't look like much. Take care."

  The heat of inspiration may be subtracted from the household fire.

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  Once Tom was on the street, it was only a few yards from Charlie's cottage to his own. The place was built into the side of the steep hill, as were most homes in Dreamthorp. The streets in the old chautaqua grounds ascended the side of the hill in tiers, so that the second floor of one cottage was on the same level as the first floor of the cottage on the street above it. Since the basements were on street level, diagonal latticework covered those that were not enclosed by solid walls, and even some of the enclosed cellars had a false front of lattice, most of which had been constructed at the turn of the century.

  Tom's basement workshop, though fully enclosed, had such latticework surrounding it, except for a door on the side that faced Charlie's house, and it was that door that he unlocked and opened now. He did it quietly, not wanting his mother and father to know that he had come back to the house. He wanted to lay out his new tools in peace.

  He still could not quite figure out how it was that his parents were spending most of the summer with him. In the past he had suggested it might be nice for them to come up from Florida for a month or so during the summer, but that was when Susan was still alive and could act as a buffer between the three volatile personalities.

  Tom had never gotten along well with his father, a retired sigh school history teacher, bookish and scholarly, who had shown only the required minimal interest in Tom's art. To him, art was something done with oils, charcoal, or pen and ink. Sculpture, and especially woodcarving, with its crude and forceful use of chisels and knives gouging forms and making chips and splinters in the process, was too physical for him to feel totally comfortable with.

  Part of his father's discomfort, Tom thought, stemmed from disappointment that Tom had chosen to follow in his grandfather's footsteps rather than his own. Tom's grandfather had been a jack-of-all-trades. He had painted houses, done carpentry, and, though he never called them art, made numerous carvings of birds and animals as well as high relief panels for boxes that were as fine as anything Tom had ever seen. His grandfather was the one who had taught him the joy of working in wood, and Tom had taken to it immediately. By his senior year of high school, when his grandfather died, his carving had won him a number of awards and a partial scholarship to Penn State, where, at his father's insistence, he entered the art education department. A teaching degree would be "something to fall back on," as his father claimed. If Tom would not become a scholar, at least he would follow in his father's footsteps closely enough to teach.

  It was odd, Tom thought, how talents and dispositions skipped generations. Ed, his father, could not so much as whittle a stick, and Josh, his son, seemed lately to be a mirror image of the old man, a similarity that was greeted with delight by Tom's mother, who was a different fish from his father entirely.

  While Ed was content to express disapproval by sullen silences or subtly guarded remarks, Frances would lay everything right out on the table like one of her one-pot dishes. Everyone always knew what Frances thought about something for the simple reason that she would tell them. Tact was alien to her, and diplomacy unknown. On visits when Susan was still alive, Frances would constantly wipe the nearest smooth surface with her fingertip and rub it on her thumb. The resultant dustball (for there always was one) clung to her flesh like sin, and she examined it with disgust before flinging it from her into a waste can. "You should have a cleaning lady" was her mantra, with "Why don't you let me clean this place up?" a close second.

  Because Frances was his mother, Tom would curse and explain that he worked and Susan worked and who the hell cared if there was a little dust around or not; and then wonderful, patient Susan would still the waters and draw Mom into the kitchen to ask her what she put in her stuffing to make it taste so good, and everything would be fine until the next time.

  But Susan was no longer around to still the waters, and Tom's mother was driving him absolutely, certifiably insane after having been in his house only four days. He had wanted to use the collapse of the playhouse as an excuse to have them stay in Florida, but arguing with his mother proved to be impossible.

  "I'm sure you're all upset," Frances told him over the phone, "and Josh too, and that's why we should be there. I can take care of the house and Josh if you have things to do, and after all, we already paid for the tickets so we might as well come, and you did invite us. . . ."

  Although Tom was unable to remember the exact phrasing of his purported invitation, they came, and they were planning on staying through the end of July, a total of six weeks.

  If Susan had been alive it would have been bearable, but with her gone, Tom had acquired a live-in cook and housecleaner, who inspired guilt with every tidy act, and a scholar-in-residence, who positioned himself in the living room with a book for twelve hours a day. When boredom struck, both of them thought nothing of descending into Tom's sanctum sanctorum and talking to him while he worked. When Susan was alive, she had gently, but firmly, stopped them from disturbing him, knowing that he worked best alone. He had never realized just how much she had done for him until she died.

  The previous winter, Susan had been working late at the Merrill Lynch office in Lebanon, when it had begun to snow. The country roads, already wet, had iced over quickly, and she lost control on the curve right before the bridge across Little Conewingo Creek. The car hit the bridge abutment. Although Susan was wearing her seat belt, it had not saved her. The steering wheel was driven into her chest, and she was dead by the time the next car came along and found her.

  A state policeman came to Tom's house with the news, and he knew what had happened as soon as he saw the man standing there in his ruff-collared coat and trooper's hat. The policeman had looked cautiously at Josh, who was standing right behind his father, but Tom nodded, and the trooper gave them the news. Tom went numb, but Josh reacted violently, vomiting immediately and explosively over the rough planks of the foyer, then falling onto the sodden floor in a paroxysm of weeping.

  Caring for his son over the next few days sheltered Tom from his own grief, and it was not until after the funeral that he realized the abyss that Susan's death had cut into his life. It was like the absence of a limb that one is unaware of until he tries to use it, then finds that life has changed irrevocably, and for the worse. Tom felt betrayed, both by Susan and by life itself. She should not have driven so fast on the icy roads; she should have spent the night at some motel in Lebanon, she should not have gotten herself killed, stupid, stupid woman. . . .

  But his outrage at her for dying was nothing compared to his fury at the uncaring hand of fate, at a world in which an unexpected snowfall, a patch of ice, the position of a tire on a road, an abutment planned and built some thirty years before by some forgotten highway engineer could kill the woman he loved, the person around whom he had planned his life.

  A world like that,
he thought over and over again, was a world in which anything could happen, in which bombs could fall, children could be tortured, death could come as easily and simply as a knock on the door on a snowy evening. It was a conclusion and a knowledge that made him feel immeasurably old.

  And that was how he felt now, despite the close presence of his parents, who, he fancied, tried everything in their power to make him feel like a child. He decided to call Karen, although talking to her caused him equal ambivalence in how he perceived his age. Being with her sometimes made him feel far younger than his thirty-six years, as if her youth and enthusiasm were contagious. She was still discovering things about the world that he had known for many years; and although he felt the joys of sharing her discoveries, there were also times when her naive and unformed tastes embraced things for which his appreciation had diminished years before, and his impatience and boredom with them made him feel like her father.

  Still, he needed her now, and picked up the extension phone next to his drafting board. Karen's roommate answered and put Karen on the line. Her voice sounded like spring. "I'm glad you called," she said. "I've been missing you."

  "Me too. I've been so damn busy, what with Mom and Dad here, and a bunch of commissions to finish, and my classes."

  She asked him about the playhouse, and he told her what he knew, which was little. She had called him on Sunday night after she heard about the disaster on the 11:00 news, and he had assured her that he had been neither present nor harmed. They had met for lunch on Wednesday at the college, and had not seen each other since. "Are we still on for this afternoon?"

  "Sure. It should be warm enough."

  "Hello?" It was another voice.

  "Hello?" Tom said.

  "Tommy?"

  "Mom, I'm on the phone in the workshop."

  "Oh," said his mother. "I'm so sorry, I didn't know you came in. I was going to call the Acme to see if they had any fresh pork, I wanted to make some pork for supper. Would you like pork?"

  "Pork would be. . . fine."

  "I didn't know you were talking."