Second, there was the spring party, the end of German lessons. It took place not in the Muellers" dank ground-floor Kenmore Square apartment but in a new, more s.p.a.cious one, on a fourth floor, in Boston, near the Ma.s.sachusetts College of Art and, across the trolley tracks, dangerous Mission Hill. Out here, beyond the Museum of Fine Arts, the city had a rakish low-rent feeling, a bohemian swagger. The festivity was ambitious; all the students from both terms had been invited, with their significant others, plus a.s.sociates in the photography studio where Franz worked and various other strays the Germans had rounded up. In this ungainly gathering Franz gamely bustled back and forth, transporting beers and other beverages, an adroit, cheerfully sweating factotum, while Hedwig seemed paralyzed and dazed by the extent of her hospitality.
A number of the female students had brought hors d"oeuvres-raw vegetables with a hummus dip, tepid cheese puffs-but as the hours went by these morsels evaporated, as did the initial abundance of good will and polite conversation. A table by the big bay window had been set with paper plates and napkins and cutlery, but where was the food? Frau Professor sat in a thronelike ladder-back chair while her guests circulated with less and less energy, and it came to Ed that he had no business being here, among these young and would-be young, these part-time students and half-baked culture workers. Spring was the liveliest time for real estate in Peterborough, and his lawn and garden would need tending. Andrea came up to him with her version of the same feeling. She had finally disengaged herself from an elegant black photographer"s a.s.sistant, in torn jeans and a purple dashiki, who kept blowing some sort of smoke into her face. She was uncharacteristically querulous. "I"m starving. What"s happening?" she said.
"Ask Hedwig."
"That would be rude, wouldn"t it? We"re guests. We take what comes." Ed heard in this the implication that he, too, in his city sojourn, had taken what came.
He stuck to the immediate topic. "But nothing is coming. Forthcoming."
"She doesn"t move," Andrea plaintively agreed.
Over Andrea"s shoulder Ed saw Frau Mueller still in her chair, smiling even though no one was talking to her, and it came to him that she was stoned. If not stoned on a controlled substance, then on a c.u.mulative dose of being German, a Hitler b.i.t.c.h in a foreign land where the subjunctive was withering away and everything was mongrelized. America had worn her down. Or Hitler had left her, in a way slow to emerge, disabled. In a corner of the room, Franz, sweating, was on the telephone. What seemed another hour later, a Hispanic deliveryman came through the door bearing a baby-sized bundle wrapped in butcher paper. Hedwig made a helpless welcoming gesture by raising one arm and called, "Franz!" It was, rumors ran through the sagging party, a pork roast, and Franz was now placing it in the oven. Andrea said to Ed, "It"ll take till midnight. Meat disgusts me. I want to go home."
"Me, too, Liebchen. Liebchen." Ed had had one too many Lowenbraus.
"Would it be too rude to leave?"
"I don"t think it"ll be noticed."
"Should we say good-bye to the Muellers?"
"No. It"ll hurt their feelings. Anyway, this whole party is a good-bye. Verstehen Sie Verstehen Sie?"
She looked up at him with her childlike face, her chalky eyes wide and her lower lip retracted beneath the upper, and understood. "Ja," "Ja," Andrea said. He sensed she was trying not to cry, but he lacked the energy to put his arms around her. The trouble with Andrea was that she made no resistance. There was not enough to push against. She had been a silver-point outline. Andrea said. He sensed she was trying not to cry, but he lacked the energy to put his arms around her. The trouble with Andrea was that she made no resistance. There was not enough to push against. She had been a silver-point outline.
Over the years, word filtered back to him, in New Hampshire, of the two Germans. Andrea wrote him several times at first, a.s.suring him that his decision to return was a wise one-"Your dear uxorious heart never seemed to be in Boston." Luke and Susan sent annual Christmas cards. They had taken up living together, though they never announced a marriage. Franz and Hedwig, they wrote, had left New England for the Southwest, where they were swallowed up like raindrops in the desert. It was as if they had sought to lose themselves in the American landscape that least resembled damp, crowded, highly engineered Germany.
Word came through, in the Eighties, that they were divorced. Franz had moved to southern California, the capital of camerawork. But he was long out of photography and with his new wife had begun a catering service. Then, Susan"s florid big handwriting confided, her cards to Hedwig were returned by the Tempe post office, and it seemed likely that without Franz to take care of her she had died. But an old photography a.s.sociate of Franz"s later told Luke, at a wedding in Brattleboro, that it was Franz who had died, of a heart attack. He had survived two armies but not the unhealthy diet in America.
In the late Nineties, Arlene began to agitate for foreign travel, before they became too old and lame a couple to manage it. At the turn of the century, they signed up for a cruise of the Elbe and then, by bus, three days in reunited Berlin. One of their young guides, slim and sharp-featured, with straw-colored hair, reminded Ed of Hedwig, with her wary half-smile and her faintly deranged seriousness. Her name was Greta. At the tour stop in Potsdam, she lectured their group of footsore, aging Americans too lengthily and dogmatically, insisting that Truman and Attlee had been babies babies in 1945, new to power, and at the mercy of canny Joe Stalin, so that a great chunk of Germany had been stolen and given to Poland. "They were in 1945, new to power, and at the mercy of canny Joe Stalin, so that a great chunk of Germany had been stolen and given to Poland. "They were babies, babies," she repeated. Her English was almost flawless, and so fluent that the group tended to drift toward the other, less opinionated guide. Greta was what Hedwig might have been, had she had a grievance, a sense of having been wronged, instead of the opposite: Greta had grown up under East German Communism, lived by her wits in the capitalist economy fallen upon her, and was ready to fight, without apologies to anyone.
Though Ed listened carefully on all sides of him, on the street and at the opera house and in restaurants, he almost never recognized an expression or a phrase; it was as if he had never taken German lessons at all, except that a waitress in Wittenberg complimented him, in English, on his p.r.o.nunciation when he read aloud to her his choices from the menu. "Werry goot German!" she said.
"Why, darling!" Arlene commented dryly beside him, nettled by the unexpected compliment. "I"m impressed."
"I was not, actually," he told her, remembering how Andrea with such dear sad expertise would fit her small but wiry and knowing body to his, "much of a student."
The Road Home
IN HIS RENTED BEIGE N NISSAN, in a soft but steady early November rain, David Kern exited from the Pennsylvania Turnpike at a new tollbooth and was shot into an alien, majestic swirl of overpa.s.s and underpa.s.s. For some alarming seconds, he had no idea where he was; the little village of Morgan"s Forge-an inn, two churches, a feed store-which should have been on his left, had vanished behind a garish stretch of national franchises and retail outlets. The southern half of the county, a woodsy stretch of rural backwardness when, soon after the Second World War, his family, at his mother"s instigation, had bought back the family farm, was now a haven for Philadelphians, who were snapping up the old stone farmhouses for weekend retreats. There were even, he had been told, daily commuters-over an hour each way, but for them it was somehow worth it. For his part, fifty years ago, Kern couldn"t get out of the region fast enough.
He felt lost. Then a rusted, bullet-pierced road sign in the shape of a keystone, naming Route 14, oriented him, and he pressed on the accelerator with a young man"s verve. He knew this road: the gradually rising straightaway, with Morgan"s dam far below on the right; the steep downhill plunge, heralded by a sign advising trucks to shift to a low gear, toward the creek that curled around the roofless sh.e.l.l of the one-room schoolhouse his mother had attended as a child; the crumbling piece of asphalt, an earlier road, where his mother and he on June days used to set up a sign and a kitchen chair and sell strawberries, for forty cents a quart box, to the few cars that stopped; and then the sharp right turn, slowing you more than the car pressing behind you ever expected, onto the stony dirt lane, now macadamized, that led to what had been, for a time, his home.
Persistent small raindrops speckled his windshield. He drove between twin housing developments that had once been the Gengrich dairy farm and old Amos Schrack"s orchard, and from the crest saw what had been his family"s farm. The meadow, low land once drained by stone-lined ditches that had been dug by his grandfather and great-grandfather, was no longer mowed; instead, it was planted, by the new owner, in rows of evergreens and birches for sale to landscapers. Along its edge, quite buried in sumac and wild-raspberry canes, lay the road his mother used to walk, all by herself until joined by the Gengrich children down the road, on her way to the one-room schoolhouse. There had been a towering tulip poplar beside the meadow which had survived into Kern"s middle age, as had his mother. She would tell him how, in warm weather, she would pause, in her solitary walk, beneath the tree"s big, smooth, four-lobed leaves, grateful for the shade and for the birdsong-strong in the morning, subdued by late afternoon-in the branches.
His vivid image of her as a little girl, her hair braided and pinned so tight by her mother that her scalp hurt as she walked, in her checked dress and matching ribbons, down this sandy road between the fields, had been her creation, as she conjured up for him those days of country paradise, of trusting animals and hazy silence. She had wanted to infect him, her only child, with her primal happiness, so that when she died and he inherited the farm he would live on it. In the event, he had inherited it only to get rid of it quickly. The thirty acres on one side of the road, with the barn and house and chicken house, he sold to a second cousin, and the remaining fifty, fields and woods, he rented to the neighboring farmers, the Reichardts, thus keeping the green s.p.a.ce free of development, as his mother would have wanted. He had inherited as well her childhood bird guide, a tattered oblong small book with a crumbling oilcloth cover and notes, pencilled in a careful adolescent hand, on the species-bluebirds, grackles, chimney swifts-that she had spotted on this farm. When he held her limp little guide in his hand, he felt her absorption in birds as pathos. One of her tales of herself recalled, with a trace of lingering grievance, how fiercely her mother had scolded her for climbing into a basket of freshly dry wash in imitation of a nesting bird.
The absentee owner of fifty acres, Kern felt guilty at the rarity of his visits. His career had taken him west. He had retired from teaching English at Macalester College, in St. Paul, and he and his wife, who hated the Midwestern cold, had moved to southern California. He had come East this time to attend an expenses-paid, three-day conference of educators in New York, where he had read a paper on the not inconsiderable contemporary relevance of Edmund Spenser. He drove past his old house with hardly a glance. The cousin had sold it, and then it had been sold again, to a Philadelphian, and renovated almost beyond recognition. The first time Kern had seen this house, he was thirteen, and a tenant farmer"s children scurried off the half-collapsed porch and hid. Where sandstone steppingstones had once led the way across a lawn mostly crabgra.s.s, a smooth circular driveway now enclosed a clump of shrubs in shades of green like a nursery display, crowded around a terra-cotta gargoyle. Kern"s mother"s many birdhouses, and her wind chimes on the back porch, were gone. She had maintained, with the earnestness with which she advanced her most fanciful theories, that this had always been a woman"s house. She cited as proof the fact that its first owner was recorded, in 1816, as being a woman, named Mercy Landis. Nothing was known of her but her name on the old deed; she existed where history shaded into myth. And, in his mother"s version of things, her own mother had made the farm profitable by driving the wagon to market in Alton, every Sat.u.r.day, and by growing cigar-wrapper tobacco, in short supply during the First World War. Her husband invested the profits and sold the farm and moved to Olinger, an Alton suburb. Twenty years later his daughter used the family savings acc.u.mulated in the Second World War to buy the farm back, from an Alton hosiery-mill owner who had installed tenants and cows on the acres. It was hilltop land, not the rich valley soil where the Amish had their picture-book farms, and the magnate parted with it for four thousand dollars.
Kern felt the tracks of his ancestors all around him-generation after generation laboring, eating, walking, driving within this Pennsylvania county"s bounds, laying down an invisible network of worn paths. Only he had escaped. Only he, of his boyhood household, now lived to witness how the region was changing, gradually consuming its older self, its landmarks disappearing one by one in the slow-motion tumult of decay and subst.i.tution as the newer generations made their own demands on the land.
He drove on, a quarter-mile, and pulled into the parking lot for the Reichardts" produce stand. Their farm, one of the few surviving in the neighborhood, prospered as the south of the county filled in with new customers. The Reichardts were pious people but not superst.i.tious about keeping up with the times. Kern"s annual rent check was printed by a computer; the simple shed that he remembered, with an awning and a few boards on sawhorses holding bushel baskets of peaches and apples, sweet corn and string beans, had sprouted freezers and cash registers and supermarket carts and a sizable section of imported gourmet delicacies. Young Tad Reichardt, who usually dealt with Kern on his rare visits, was off with his family for a week at Disney World. "He goes every year, down to Orlando," a girl at the cash register volunteered. "He says it"s never the same trip-as the children get older, they see different things. His little girls have outgrown the princesses. Now, you live near Disneyland, I understand."
"Miles from it. Miles and miles. I"ve never been."
"Oh. Well, Mr. Reichardt got your postcard saying you were coming and said I was to fetch his father when you did." Though her hair was worn in a traditional white-net Mennonite cap, she pulled a cell phone from her ap.r.o.n pocket and deftly punched in numbers with her thumb, a trick all young people seem to have.
Kern protested, "There"s no need to bother Enoch. I can see for myself. Things are going fine here."
"He"s here," she announced into the tiny phone. Within a few minutes, a member of Kern"s own generation, Enoch Reichardt, appeared, damp with the rain and grinning widely. They had been boys together, on adjoining farms, but their attempts to play together had not been successful. Enoch, a year younger, had brought a softball and bat over to the Kerns" yard-the Reichardts had no yard, all the s.p.a.ce between their buildings was used for equipment and animals-and David, newly a teen-ager and not yet used to his own strength, had hit the ball far over the barn, into the thorns and poison ivy past the dirt road, next to the tumble-down foundation of the old tobacco-drying shed. The road in those days, before it was macadamized and straightened, swung closer to the barn, to the broad dirt entrance ramp, and then dipped downhill to run along the meadow, past the tulip poplar. Though the boys searched for a scratchy, buggy twenty minutes, they never found the ball, and Enoch never came back to play.
Today, more than fifty years later, he seemed to bear no grudge, and Kern was happy to see someone nearly as old as he looking so well-stocky and tan, repelling the rain as if waxed. His grin showed straight white teeth. Enoch"s teeth had been crooked and brown and must have pained him for years. He asked his visitor if he would like to see his fields, how they were being farmed.
"It"s pretty wet out," Kern said. "I think I get the idea."
He had arranged to meet two old Olinger High cla.s.smates, with their spouses, at the Alton Country Club that evening, and was wearing a Burberry, a gray suit, and thin-soled black loafers bought at a Simi Valley mall.
Enoch"s uncannily white smile broadened as he explained, "We"ll go in my car. It"ll take hardly a minute. There"s some new ideas around since you were here last. My car"s right outside. David, should I get you an umbrella?"
"Don"t be silly," Kern said. "It"s just a drizzle."
"Yes, well. That"s the way I look at it," Enoch allowed. "But I know in California you don"t see much rain."
His car was a rea.s.suring relic-a black Ford sedan, with its chrome painted black. The former playmates slithered in. Not far along, on the edge of the enlarged parking lot, which even in this weather held a dozen customers" cars and vans, stood the first of the new ideas-a kind of Quonset hut of white plastic, upheld by arching ribs. "Remember how we used to grow strawberries?" Enoch asked.
"How could I forget?" Strawberries had been David"s 4-H project, a means of making a few hundred dollars a summer toward his eventual college expenses. He and his mother standing along Route 14 selling them had humiliated him-she pretended not to understand why.
Enoch braked. "Would you like to take a look inside?"
David felt he had no choice, though the rain seemed to be intensifying and his Burberry was rain-resistant rather than rainproof. Enoch roughly, in his proud excitement, widened a gap in the plastic, and David peeked in. He saw strawberry plants up on several narrow troughs, four feet off the ground, so that the berries, ripe in November, hung down into sheer air like cherries, like Christmas ornaments. "Hydroponic," Enoch told him. "The plastic keeps the warmth in and allows for the solar effect; all the nutrients are trickled in from a hose. There"s no dirt."
"No dirt," David numbly repeated.
"Remember how the berries would rest on the ground and pick up sand? And the turtles and snails would nibble at them before they could be picked?"
"And how your back would ache from straddling the row and bending over. The daddy longlegs would climb up your arms."
"No more," Enoch said, pleased that David remembered. "You pick these standing up. They bear all through the winter if we put in s.p.a.ce heaters and growing lights."
"Amazing," Kern conceded, climbing back into the car after checking his new loafers for mud. Enoch wore thick yellow boots and a green slicker over denim bib overalls; he was one with the weather.
Enoch asked, "Would you like me to drive you over the big field?"
"Sure," David said. "If you won"t get stuck."
"Oh, now, I don"t think we"ll get stuck," Enoch said slowly, as if to a child.
In farming the acreage, and in selling to people who drove here and picked the fruits and sweet corn themselves, the Reichardts had laid out little roads, firmed up with spalls to check erosion, between the crops. Development, Development, David thought. His mother had dreaded it. Enoch drove, slightly skidding, among reserve lengths of PCP irrigation pipe, and dormant rows of strawberries grown through perforated black plastic, and several prefabricated shacks slapped up for the convenience of the summer trade. When the big field was under his mother"s management and lay fallow in clover and wildflowers, David used to mow it through a long August day on their old John Deere tractor, which he could drive before he could drive a car. Bought second-hand and painted mule-gray, the machine had crawled over the terrain gently rocking, dragging behind it the roaring rotary blade in its rusted housing. David thought. His mother had dreaded it. Enoch drove, slightly skidding, among reserve lengths of PCP irrigation pipe, and dormant rows of strawberries grown through perforated black plastic, and several prefabricated shacks slapped up for the convenience of the summer trade. When the big field was under his mother"s management and lay fallow in clover and wildflowers, David used to mow it through a long August day on their old John Deere tractor, which he could drive before he could drive a car. Bought second-hand and painted mule-gray, the machine had crawled over the terrain gently rocking, dragging behind it the roaring rotary blade in its rusted housing.
"Would you like to get out?" Enoch asked. The car had gone as far as it could. David looked down at his shoes, and solicitously considered of the crease in his suit pants. He had never been a guest at the Alton Country Club before.
"Sure," he said. He still owed Enoch that softball. They got out and stood together in the rain. A breeze made itself felt, at this high point of the hill. From here on a clear day you could see the tips of the tallest buildings in Alton, ten miles away. Today the city hid from sight. Kern"s mother in her decline would talk pathetically of his building a house out here, for him and his family, when he came back some day to the county to live. She would be safely tucked in the Mercy Landis house, just out of sight. "You won"t even know I"m there," she had promised.
As he feared, the red earth was as gummy as clay. Transferring his feet from one patch of old-fashioned hay mulch to the next, he watched his steps so carefully that he missed much of Enoch"s friendly lecture on crop rotation, and on the ingenious new machines that planted peach saplings at scientifically determined intervals, and on new varieties of corn that didn"t take so much nitrogen out of the soil. Soil, Soil, Kern thought, looking down. Ancestral soil, and to him it was just mud. He turned his attention upward, to the corner patch of woods that no farmer of these acres, for some good country reason, no doubt, had ever bothered to cut, de-stump, and plow. Kern thought, looking down. Ancestral soil, and to him it was just mud. He turned his attention upward, to the corner patch of woods that no farmer of these acres, for some good country reason, no doubt, had ever bothered to cut, de-stump, and plow.
Feeling his listener"s attention wander, Enoch said, with what seemed a twinkle but might have been raindrops in his eyelashes, "Your mother used to talk about how some day you"d build a house up here."
David said, old as they both were, "Well, I may yet." He couldn"t resist adding, with a wave over the irrigated and plasticized acres, "And make all this my big front yard."
On the way back, sure enough, the Ford began to slough and wallow in a stretch of puddles a short distance from the paved road. But Enoch downshifted and the black Ford slithered free, and Kern was spared having to get out, in his delicate clothes, and push.
He took away a gift, a paper bag of Enoch"s fresh apples. Driving north on Route 14 toward Alton, he moved from his mother"s territory into his father"s. He and his father, a schoolteacher, had daily driven together in this same direction, away from the farm to the region of schools, of close-packed row houses, of urban pleasures.
Kern was staying the night at the Alton Motor Inn, in West Alton, but was in no hurry to get there, by way of the newly developed section of malls and highways sprung up in recent years. He turned off 14, past the Jewish cemetery and under the railroad bridge, into Alton, over a bridge that his father, out of work at the start of the Depression, had helped to build, setting paving stones and tamping them snug between the trolley tracks. He had remembered that summer as pure back-sore misery, and his son never crossed this bridge without imagining drops of his father"s sweat as part of it, dried into the concrete. Kern"s bloodlines had left not just rural traces in this county.
Alton was a dying city, but its occupants persisted in living. Its prime"s ebb, which David located in his own boyhood but which his elders put earlier yet, before the Depression, had stranded a population that occupied the tightly built grid like sleepy end-of-summer wasps cl.u.s.tering in an old paper nest. Even in his boyhood the venerable industrial town had been prolific of what the child had thought of as throwaway men-working-cla.s.s males whose craft or occupation had withered away and left them with nothing to do all day but smoke cigarettes and wait for a visit to the local bar to ripen into a permissable activity. Driving through south Alton, Kern spotted them through the flapping windshield wipers, standing on tiny porches, watching the rain drip from the aluminum awnings and darken the composition sidings.
He drove on, into the wide central blocks of Weiser Street, where the trolley cars would clang and pa.s.s, where the shoppers and moviegoers would throng, and where David, during the war, when his parents still lived a trolley-car ride away, would methodically wander through all the five-and-tens, from Grant"s and McCrory"s up to Woolworth"s and Kresge"s, looking to enlarge his collection of Big Little Books. At a dime apiece, it was possible, even on a thirty-five-cent-a-week allowance, to acc.u.mulate a sizable h.o.a.rd. The five-and-tens all wore a warm cloud of perfume and candy scent just inside the entrance doors, and some had pet shops, with canaries and parakeets and goldfish, at the back. Alton, it seemed to him then, offered for sale everything a person could ever want in life.
He had been told by Ned Miller, one of the few high-school cla.s.smates with whom he kept in touch, that Blanken-biller"s Department Store was being torn down, to make way for a new bank. A dying city, A dying city, Kern thought, Kern thought, and they keep putting up banks. and they keep putting up banks. In the old days you couldn"t find a parking s.p.a.ce on Weiser Street; now he slid into one without trouble on the Blankenbiller"s side of the square. Not just the grand old department store, with its wrought-iron cage elevators and overhead pneumatic tubes for the whizzing bra.s.s canisters carrying change and receipts from a hidden treasury above, was being torn down; a row of buildings beside it, where Kern remembered shoes and office supplies and hardware being offered for sale, had vanished, baring walls whose sloppy mortar had never been meant to show and bas.e.m.e.nt chambers, now filled with rubble, that had not seen daylight since their construction. Even in the rain, as daylight drained from the afternoon, dolefully creaking backhoes were pecking away at the rubble. In the old days you couldn"t find a parking s.p.a.ce on Weiser Street; now he slid into one without trouble on the Blankenbiller"s side of the square. Not just the grand old department store, with its wrought-iron cage elevators and overhead pneumatic tubes for the whizzing bra.s.s canisters carrying change and receipts from a hidden treasury above, was being torn down; a row of buildings beside it, where Kern remembered shoes and office supplies and hardware being offered for sale, had vanished, baring walls whose sloppy mortar had never been meant to show and bas.e.m.e.nt chambers, now filled with rubble, that had not seen daylight since their construction. Even in the rain, as daylight drained from the afternoon, dolefully creaking backhoes were pecking away at the rubble.
His mother had once explained to him how she had become fat: she blamed Blankenbiller"s bas.e.m.e.nt restaurant, where the apple or rhubarb or pecan pie a la mode had been irresistibly good, to top off a lunch when she was working in the Christmas season as an extra saleswoman. You got so tired, she explained, standing on your feet for ten hours; the ordeal had made her a food addict. Kern gazed down into the sodden, brick-strewn grave of his mother"s slender figure, a figure he had glimpsed only as a toddler. It had been at Blankenbiller"s that, one day when shopping, he had let go of his mother"s hand and gotten lost, burbling to the floor-walker and wetting his pants.
One of the city"s surplus men, curious as to what Kern was seeing, crept out from one of the few sheltering doorways left on this block of Weiser Street. Kern winced in fear of being asked for a handout; but the man mutely stared with him through the chain-link fence. Kern"s father used to embarra.s.s him, in the city, by talking to strangers; the more disreputable they appeared, the more enthusiastically his father seemed to regard them as potential sources of enlightenment. Kern had been a fastidious, touchy adolescent, but had slowly shed many of his inhibitions. Now he turned to the poorly clad, indifferently shaven stranger, and attempted conversation: "Some hole, huh?"
The man turned away, offended by such levity. He might have said "Yeah" or said nothing at all, Kern wasn"t sure.
The Alton Motor Inn and Function Suites sat slightly north of the river, where Kern"s mental map of the county gave out. North of Alton had always had a different, hostile flavor: the high-school kids were tougher, the industrial landmarks were bigger and darker, and the rich, who had made their fortunes off the dismal mills and quarries, lived on walled estates well back from the highways. The geography was a tangle to Kern; confusing new highways sliced through former villages and sped shoppers to malls that after a few decades were becoming shopworn. Just after his mother"s death, without her to guide him, he had gotten lost on his way to the local airport to meet his children for the funeral. Though he now managed, after several wrong turns, to find the motor inn on its little rounded hill of asphalt, Kern was afraid he could not find, in the dark, in the rain, the Alton Country Club.
The girl at the front desk wore a mannish jacket and had had blotches of magenta dyed into her tufty hair. To her it was so obvious where the Alton Country Club was that a few stabs of her pencil at a miniature map and a hurried recitation of several route numbers satisfied her that Kern was as good as there. Uncomprehending, but afraid of appearing senile, he docilely nodded and went to his room. The room, its picture window overlooking the m.u.f.fled traffic of a mysterious cloverleaf, seemed a safe cave. But his cla.s.smates, in deference to their age and frailty, had urged an early dinner hour, so, instead of lying down on one of the inviting twin beds and turning on television, he unpacked his toilet kit, brushed his teeth, changed his tie to a more festive, flowered one, and tried to clean his muddy loafers with a wad of moistened toilet paper. Out on the parking lot, the controls of the rented Nissan still seemed foreign, the dashboard miniaturized and dim. There was an invasive sweet smell in the car: Enoch"s apples. How could he get them home on tomorrow"s airplane? Did California admit alien apples? Blazing streams of other cars were hurrying home; the county was not so depleted as to lack a rush hour. He was due at six, in just fifteen minutes. Where had the time gone?
As Kern squinted to see road signs, the headlights behind him pressed mercilessly, and those coming at him wore troubling haloes of refraction. He had turned off at the route number that the girl at the hotel desk had written for him, but possibly in the wrong direction. Anonymous mills and storage tanks hulked on one side, with silhouetted conveyor belts and skeletal stairways; on the other side, after a distance, a restaurant in an old limestone house advertised itself with a discreet white sign, and, closed for the winter, a driving range and miniature-golf course hurtled by. None of this was exactly unfamiliar-ages ago he and some boisterous friends had played, he felt, on those miniature fairways, merrily putting small white b.a.l.l.s through windmills and tunnels-yet nothing told him exactly where he was. He was being punished: he had lived his formative years in this county while disdaining to learn its geography, beyond the sections proximate to his ego and his immediate needs. Now, in revenge, the area manifested itself as a shapeless shadowy mire, experienced at a perilous speed.
Then a sweeping searchlight straight ahead declared, he realized, the presence of the Alton airport. It was down to about two flights a day yet kept its bright lights on. But it seemed to be, if he remembered the magenta-tinged hotel clerk"s sketchy indications, on the wrong side of the highway. Kern was beginning to sweat. He would never get there. The highway surroundings were thinning into countryside-distant isolated house windows, darkened low stores for carpeting and auto parts. He wanted to scream. He needed to urinate. At last, the broad glow of a combination Getty gas and 7-Eleven appeared. The doughy woman behind the counter-the lone sentinel in a sea of darkness, wearing steel-rimmed granny gla.s.ses-seemed afraid of him, her only customer. He saw as if through her suspicious oval lenses his frantic expression and wrinkled Burberry and California-style necktie, splashily patterned in poinciana blossoms. When he explained his disorientation, her face hardened. She appeared offended that he could have gone so far astray. "Go back the way you came," she told him. "It"s after the airport. You pa.s.sed it."
"How far after?"
"Oh-a mile or so."
"On the right or the left?" These Pennsylvania people, it occurred to him, did not want out-of-staters to make themselves too much at home.
"On the left."
"Is there a sign or anything?"
The woman mulled this over, continuing to size him up and keeping one hand out of sight below the counter, probably on the b.u.t.ton that would summon the police. "You"ll see it," she grudgingly promised. "There"s two big gateposts."
And Kern did, ten minutes later, see the gateposts, very faintly, on the other side of the road. They might have been ghosts-spectral apparitions between beats of the windshield wipers-but his only hope of refuge lay between them. It was the worst kind of highway, a two-lane wanting to be a three-lane. The streams of traffic behind him and coming toward him looked endless; he braked in the center of the road and, as halted headlights piled up in his rearview mirror, he took a breath and swerved into the oncoming lane. The first car coming at him gave a long blast of protest on its horn but braked enough to avoid the head-on collision that Kern"s old heart had leaped up to greet.
He was in. A tiny sign in a flowerless flower bed named the club. An allee of horse-chestnut trees led him between two areas of darkness-golf-course fairways, he guessed. The clubhouse loomed, spottily lit. There was plenty of parking; it was a weekday night. Kern got out of the car. His eyes watered; his knees were trembling. The day"s drizzle was letting up. He left his wet Burberry in the car. Ned Miller was waiting for him in the foyer. "We were getting worried," Ned said.
"I had trouble finding it," David told him, fervently gripping his old friend"s hand. "Then when I finally found it I nearly got killed pulling in. The guy who had to brake gave me a huge blast."
"That"s a bad left turn. You should have been coming from the other direction."
"I know, I know. Don"t rub it in. I"ll do better next time. Maybe." Ned said nothing; both men were thinking that there might not be a next time.
Ned had been, like Kern, a good student, but less erratically and noisily so. He spoke no more than he needed to, and talkative Kern, so excitable the words sometimes jammed together in a stutter, had realized that Ned was his best friend only when he realized that silence was the other boy"s natural, companionable mode. Ned"s head was full of unvoiced thoughts; they were for him a reservoir of strength. He had become a lawyer, a professional keeper of secrets.
The three other guests were seated at the table, their faces glamorously lit by gla.s.s-shaded candles. Ned"s wife was Marjorie, a firm-textured, silver-haired graduate of a different high school, east of Alton. Kern"s other cla.s.smate he had known as Sandra Bachmann, though she had long since married one of Ned"s legal partners, Jeff Lang. It had been Ned"s sly, considerate idea to include the Langs, since Kern had, at a safe distance, loved Sandra all through school. It had taken no great imagination to love her-she was conspicuously vivacious, an athlete and a singer as well as the cla.s.s beauty, with smoky green eyes and glossy brown hair worn, in elementary school, in pigtails and then, in high school, in a page boy with bangs. He had heard from Ned that she had fallen prey to various physical ills. He wondered if the aluminum walker tucked over by the windows was hers. Even as he gratefully took the place they had saved for him at the table, beside Sandra, he observed that her face had been stiffened and distorted by some sort of stroke. Yet, since his love for her had been born in kindergarten, long before s.e.x kicked in, it was impervious to bodily change.
In his happiness to be next to her, he gushed, "Sandra, I had the most terrible time getting here, not knowing where anything is any more. Not that I ever did. And my night vision isn"t that great. All the headlights had this rainbowy hair on them. In my panic I pulled right into the path of an oncoming car, and even in that split second I was thinking, "Well, stupid, you were born here, you might as well die here." Was the traffic always this bad?"
She stared at him out of her stony, twisted face, and with a spasmodic motion lifted her hand toward his lips as if to touch them, to still them. "David," she said carefully, "I don"t hear well. Speak more slowly, and let me watch your mouth." Her hair was sleekly swept back; he saw that the socket of her dainty ear was filled by a flesh-colored hearing aid. But her voice had kept its rich timbre. Contralto in pitch, it bore for him the intimate music of the regional accent, the Germanic consonants pressed from birth into his own ears. Sandra had never had to shout to get attention. Except for her bust, abruptly outthrust in the eighth grade, her physical attributes were precise rather than emphatic; she was like a photograph slightly reduced to achieve an extra sharpness. Her nose had a barely noticeable b.u.mp at the bridge and her mouth a slight, demure, enchanting overbite. Kern"s lips tingled where Sandra had almost touched them.
He slowly mouthed, for her eyes, the words "It"s won-derful to see you. I"m sor-ry I was late."
The general conversation sought its rhythm, and David, the returned prodigal, for a time was allowed the lead. The questions he asked, the details he remembered, arose from years that for him had the freshness and urgency of youthful memories but that for his friends were buried beneath a silt of decades, of thousands of days spent in this same territory, maturing, marrying, childbearing, burying parents, laboring, retiring. He called across the table to Ned, "Remember how our mothers used to take us out once a summer to the Goose Lake Amus.e.m.e.nt Park, at the end of the trolley line? They would sit there," he explained to the others, "side by side on a bench, while Ned and I went into the arcade and put pennies in these little paper peepshows that you cranked yourself-girls doing the hootchy-kootchy in petticoats, all very tame, in retrospect. What the kids nowadays see, my G.o.d."
Decades of teaching had left him perhaps too fluent. He evoked aloud the long-gone trolley cars-their slippery straw seats, the bra.s.s handles at the corners to switch the backs back and forth at the end of the line, the serious-faced conductor with the mechanical change-maker on his belt. "Like all those pre-electronic things, it was so ingenious!"
"Every child had to have one," Ned supportively chimed in.
"Exactly!" David agreed. He recalled aloud Ned"s old house-its abundance of toys, its bas.e.m.e.nt playroom, its side yard big enough for fungo with a tennis ball, and the slate-floored screened side porch where they used to play Monopoly for hours at a stretch. Kern, a schoolteacher"s son, had envied that house, and intended to praise it. But he got the name of Ned"s pet Labrador slightly wrong, Blackie instead of Becky; Ned made the correction with an uncharacteristic, irritated quickness.
Monopoly made Kern think of the canasta craze in their junior and senior years, those rows and rows of cards laid out on their parents" dining-room tables, and asked if anybody could still remember the rules. n.o.body volunteered. Marjorie Miller began to look glazed, and stated firmly that no one in her high school had played canasta; it never spread, she insisted, to her part of the county.
Deferential waiters, meanwhile, took orders and brought food. They kept calling Ned "Mr. Miller" and Sandra "Mrs. Lang"; only Kern went unnamed, the outsider. He had belonged to faculty clubs and golf clubs, far from here, but had he stayed he could never have made the Alton Country Club; there was no road up into it for a schoolteacher"s son.
Feeling the fatigue of his day"s adventures, he fell relatively silent, and his companions lapsed into local talk-the newest mayoral scandal in Alton, the hopeless condition of the downtown, the invasion of Hispanic drug dealers, the misfortunes (illnesses, business misjudgments, ill-advised second marriages) of mutual friends. Kern thought that Sandra kept up with the conversation pretty well, her calm gray-green eyes darting from mouth to mouth, her own lips opening in a frequent laugh. When she laughed, the gleeful pealing, a bit harsher than expected, echoed in Kern"s head a chord first heard during recess at elementary school, on the paved play s.p.a.ce around the old red brick building, strictly divided into boys" and girls" sections. Her voice, though not loud, could be heard above those of all the other girls at play. He must have been listening for it then.
The waiters-two of them, for this was a light night-stood ready, in their pleated shirts and striped bow ties, to take orders for dessert and coffee. The group looked toward David, and he said what he sensed they wanted to hear: "I don"t need anything. It"s late, for us old-timers." There was a babble of grateful agreement, and a prolonged fuss of gathering coats and umbrellas. Sandra used her walker, but as if it were a toy, swinging it jauntily ahead of her. Outside, the rain had quite stopped, and Kern could see off to the left a shadowy green, with its numbered flag still in the hole, ready for play once November relented.
On the glistening driveway, they shook hands and hugged good-bye. He and Sandra studied each other"s faces a second, trying to decide between a kiss on the cheek or on the mouth; he decided on a cheek, but as it happened on the side of her face somewhat paralyzed. Backing off, he mouthed at her, "Take care. You"re the best." Not sure the lamplight was strong enough for her to read his words, he added an absurd gesture: he gave her a thumbs-up, and then blushed. In his excitement he had drunk three gla.s.ses of wine.
Marjorie, hugging him with a disciplining firmness, said, "We"re all in one car; you follow us. We don"t want you getting lost again."
"Oh, I don"t think I will. I just do the same thing backwards, more or less. Don"t go out of your way. Ways."
"David. You follow us."