“No, but here’s a curious thing: Harold once told me very shyly that he’d done some acting in high school and wondered if he could try out for a part. So to make a long story short he played the policeman in The Gramercy Ghost, and he was wonderfully good. You’d never guess it, but he has a natural gift for comedy. I said ‘Harold, have you ever considered doing this professionally?’ He said ‘Whaddya – crazy? With a wife and four kids?’ So that was that. Still, I’m afraid I really didn’t – didn’t know about the cerebral palsy. Or the playpen.”
Then she fell silent at last and walked well ahead of the Davenports, giving them time to stroll and think it all over. The gravel road had brought them back around to where they could see the guest house again, far away on its shallow rise of grass in the fading afternoon, a house that might have been drawn by a child, and Michael squeezed his wife’s hand.
“Want to take it?” he asked. “Or think about it some more?”
“Oh, no, let’s take it,” she said. “We aren’t going to find anything better, at a rent like this.”
And when they’d told her of their decision, Ann Blake said “Wonderful. I love to see that: I love to see people who know themselves well enough to make up their minds. Will you come into my house for just a minute or two, then, so we can get the paperwork taken care of?” And she led them in through the door of her cluttered kitchen, turning back to say “I’ll have to ask you to excuse all the debris.”
“I am not debris,” said a young man who sat on a tall stool at the kitchen counter, hunched over a plate of poached eggs on toast.
“Oh, yes, you are,” she told him, sidling past him and pausing to tousle his hair, “because you’re always, always in the way when I have business to attend to.” Then she turned back again to her smiling visitors and said “This is my friend the handsome young dancer, Greg Atwood. These are the Davenports, Greg. They’re going to be our neighbors in the guest house – if I can find the papers, that is.”
“Oh, nice,” he said, wiping his mouth, and he got languorously down off the stool. He was barefoot, wearing skin-tight “wheat” jeans and a dark-blue shirt that he’d left unbuttoned to the waist in the style newly popularized by Harry Belafonte.
“Do you – dance professionally?” Lucy asked him.
“Well, I’ve done some of that, in a small way,” he said, “and I’ve taught, too, but now I work mostly for my own pleasure, trying new things.”
“It’s like practicing a musical instrument,” Ann Blake explained as she closed a drawer, opened another, and went on rummaging. “Some artists practice for years between performances. And personally, I don’t care what he does as long as he stays right here where I can keep an eye on him. Ah, here we are.” And she laid two copies of the lease on the counter in readiness for signing.
On their way out to the Davenports’ car she walked with one hand conspicuously locked and swinging in Greg Atwood’s, until he detached his hand and put his arm around her.
“What does the name of the place mean?” Michael asked her.
“ ‘Donarann?’ Oh, that was my husband’s idea. His name was Donald, you see – is Donald, I mean – and mine’s Ann, so that was his silly way of putting them together. I must always remember to say his name is Donald, because he’s very much alive and well. He lives four and a half miles north of here on a place about twice this size that he bought for the twitchy little airline stewardess he made off with, seven years ago. Nothing ever stays the same, you see. Well. It’s been so nice. See you again soon.”
“I don’t think we made a mistake,” Michael said as they began the long drive back to Larchmont. “It’s not perfect, but then nothing ever is, right? And I think Laura’s going to like the hell out of it, don’t you?”
“Oh, I hope so,” Lucy said. “I do hope so.”
After a while he said “Know something, though? It’s a good thing you knew who the old wheelbarrow guy is, because I would’ve flubbed it.”
“Well, actually,” she said, “what I’d mainly heard about him is that he’s sort of the queen of the road. There was a girl at college who came from Westport, and she said Ben Duane bought a house there during the run of his Abraham Lincoln play. Only she said he didn’t stay there very long because the Westport police gave him a choice: either to get out of town or to stand trial for showing dirty movies to little boys.”
“Oh,” Michael said. “Well; too bad. And I guess young Greg the dancer is a little on the queer side, too.”
“I’d say that’s a fairly safe assumption, yes.”
“Well, but if he and old Ann are shacked up together, how do you suppose they work it out?”
“It’s called being ambidextrous, I think,” she said. “It’s called being able to swing from both sides of the plate.”
Five or six more miles went by before Lucy began, in a gentler voice, to elaborate on her hope that their daughter would like the new place. “That’s really all I was doing this afternoon,” she said, “trying to see everything through Laura’s eyes, wondering what she’d make of it. I felt pretty sure she’d like the house – she might even think it’s sort of ‘cozy’ – and when we started up the hill I kept looking around at all that open countryside and thinking Oh, here’s the part she’s really going to like.
“Then when we saw the brain-damaged boy in the playpen I thought No, wait: this isn’t right; this won’t do. But then I thought Well, why not? Isn’t something like this a little closer to the real world than anything she’s likely to see in Larchmont – or anything I saw when I was growing up?”
He was nettled by her saying “the real world” – only the rich and their children ever talked that way, and it always implied a lifelong wish to go slumming – but he didn’t call her on it: he understood what she meant, and he agreed with her.
“I think you have to sort of balance everything out on the scales,” she said, “when you’re trying to decide what’s best for a child.”
“Exactly,” he told her.
Laura was six and a half and tall for her age – a shy, nervous girl with slightly protruding upper teeth and remarkably big blue eyes. Her father had recently taught her to snap her fingers, and now she would often snap the fingers of both hands in unison, without being aware she was doing it, as if to punctuate her thoughts.
She hadn’t liked the first grade and was afraid of facing the second – afraid even to contemplate the all-but-endless train of other long, aching grades that would have to be endured until, like her mother, she would someday be grown up. But she loved the house in Larchmont: her bedroom there was the only truly private, secret place in the world, and her backyard offered daily excursions into hazardous adventure – or rather into adventure as hazardous as she might ever care to have it be.
There had lately been a great deal of talk in the house about “Putnam County,” and she’d come to dread whatever that might turn out to mean, though both her parents assured her she would like it. Then one morning a huge red moving van backed carefully up to the kitchen door and men came tromping inside and began to take everything away – first the storage cartons that she’d anxiously watched her parents packing and sealing for the past few days, then the very furniture itself, and the lamps and the rugs – everything.
“Let’s get started, Michael, okay?” her mother said. “I don’t think she wants to watch this.”
So instead of being allowed to stay and watch it she rode alone in the back seat of the car for a very long time, holding an old and grubby Easter bunny that her mother had said she could bring along if she wanted to, trying to overhear and understand as much as possible of what her parents were saying to each other up in the front.
And the funny part was that after a while she wasn’t frightened anymore: she had begun to feel a reckless exhilaration. What if the men did take the whole Larchmont house apart until it fell into rubble and dust? What if the moving van did get lost on the road and never arrive at wherever it was they were supposed
to be going? What, for that matter, if her father didn’t know where they were supposed to be going either? Who cared?
Oh, who cared? Laura Davenport and her father and mother would always be safe in the shelter of their own car, traveling easily through space and time; and this very car might come to serve, if necessary, as a small but adequate new home for the three of them (or even for four of them, if her wish for a baby sister ever did come true).
“How’re you doing, sweetheart?” her father called back to her.
“Fine,” she told him.
“Good,” he said. “Won’t be much longer now; we’re almost there.”
That meant he did know where they were going. It meant everything was still essentially all right and life would probably soon come back to normal, or to something as close to normal as her parents were able to arrange. And Laura was relieved, but at the same time she was oddly disappointed: she couldn’t help feeling she might have liked things better the other way.
*
A day or two after they’d moved into the new house, with their belongings intact but still in disorder, Laura went out to fool around on the terrace at the front door where her father stood working with an unwieldy pair of hedge-clipping shears. He was trying to cut some of the thicker vines away from the base of the spiral staircase, and she watched him until it got boring; then she was startled to see a girl of about her own age walking steadily toward her across the wide expanse of grass.
“Hi,” the girl said. “My name’s Anita; what’s yours?”
And Laura acted like a baby, sidling around to hide behind her father’s legs.
“Oh, come on, honey,” he said impatiently, and he set the shears down in order to reach back and bring her out in front of him again. “Anita asked you what your name is,” he told her.
So there was nothing to do but take a brave step forward. “My name’s Laura,” she announced, and snapped the fingers of both hands.
“Hey, that’s neat,” Anita said. “Where’d you learn how to do that?”
“My father taught me.”
“You have any brothers and sisters?”
“No.”
“I have two sisters and one brother. I’m seven. Our last name’s Smith and that’s very easy to remember because it’s one of the most common names in the whole world. What’s your last name?”
“Davenport.”
“Wow, that’s a big long one. Want to come over to my house for a little while?”
“Okay.”
And Michael called his wife out onto the terrace to watch the two little girls walk away together. “Looks like her social life is beginning to pick up already,” he said.
“Oh, that’s nice,” Lucy said, “isn’t it.”
They had previously agreed that it would only be a day or two more, as soon as they managed to make the house “presentable,” before they could begin to do something about their own social life.
“… Well, hey, this is great,” Tom Nelson said on the phone. “You find a decent place? Good. How about coming over some afternoon? How about tomorrow?”
The town of Kingsley, where the Nelsons lived, would never have to be explained in terms of an almost-abandoned lakeside resort, a resultant blue-collar community, and a moribund summer-stock theater. It required no explanations, and it offered none.
There wasn’t really any “town” to it at all, beyond a snug little lineup of post office, gas station, grocery and liquor store; all the rest of it was country. The residents of Kingsley were here because they had earned the right to be – had earned enough money in New York to put squalor and vulgarity behind them forever – and they valued their privacy. The few houses that could be glimpsed from the road were set well back among trees and shrubs, so that what may have been the most agreeable parts of them would never be known to strangers. Michael was reminded, in passing, of Lucy’s parents’ summer place on Martha’s Vineyard.
The Nelsons’ big, white, well-remodeled farmhouse was an exception: you could see the whole of it, at the top of a long, broad hill of grass, as soon as the hill itself came into view around the curve of a slender subsidiary road. Even so, the very look of it let you know at once that it was invulnerable to intrusion and impervious to compromise. There would be no old homosexuals wheeling bricks along the crest of this hill, or any young homosexuals dawdling over poached eggs at the base of it. This place belonged entirely to Thomas Nelson and his family. They owned it.
“Well, hey,” Tom said in greeting at the top of the driveway, as his wife came smiling from the door behind him.
Then there began a happy inspection of the house, with Lucy saying “marvelous” at each discovery. The sun-bright living room was too big to comprehend all at once, and its most remarkable feature, for Michael, was that one long wall of it was packed floor to ceiling with open shelves of books. There were at least two thousand books here, and probably more like twice that many.
“Well, they’ve been accumulating for years,” Tom explained. “Been buying books all my life. Didn’t have room for ’em in Yonkers or Larchmont, so we had to keep ’em in storage. Nice to have ’em out again. Want to see the studio?”
And the studio too was long and wide and flooded with light. The old piece of galvanized tin lay on the floor in one corner, looking very small now, and several new pictures were carelessly displayed on a thumbtack board just above it, leading Michael to suspect that this might be the only corner actually used for working.
“First studio I ever had,” Tom said. “Feel a little lost in here sometimes.”
But to ease the times when he felt a little lost there was a full set of trap drums at the far end of the room, along with an arrangement of stereo components and a great many shelved record albums. Tom Nelson’s collection of jazz recordings was almost as substantial as his library.
On their way out to the kitchen, where the girls were talking, Michael noticed that a new place had been found for the soldiers: the parade figures stood apart from one another with their swords and wrinkled toothpaste-tube flags, and there was enough deep drawer-space beneath them to accommodate the combat troops.
“Oh, I’m so happy for you both,” Lucy said when the four of them were settled in the living room. “You’ve found the perfect place to live, and to raise your children. You’ll never have to think about moving again.”
But then the Nelsons wanted to know what kind of place the Davenports had found, and both Davenports nervously interrupted each other before they could get the information out.
“Oh, well, we’re just renting, of course,” Michael began, “so it’s only a temporary deal, but it’s—”
“It’s a funny-looking little house on an old private estate,” Lucy said, brushing flecks of cigarette ash off her lap, “so there’s quite a lot of land with it, but the people are kind of—”
“It’s kind of a fruit farm,” Michael said.
“A fruit farm?”
And Michael did his halting best to explain what he meant by that.
“Ben Duane,” Tom Nelson said. “Isn’t he the one who did the Whitman readings? And didn’t he get shafted by the McCarthy committee a couple years back?”
“Right,” Lucy said. “And of course I’m sure he’s perfectly – you know – perfectly harmless and everything, though I suppose I’d be uneasy if we were bringing a boy into the place. And I imagine we can sort of keep our distance from the landlady, too, and her boyfriend. Still, we’ll never really have a sense of being alone there, the way you are here.”
“Well,” Pat Nelson said, drawing her mouth a little to one side, “I don’t know what’s supposed to be so wonderful about the sense of being alone. I think Tom and I’d go utterly stir-crazy if we didn’t see a lot of our friends. We’ve started having parties every month or so now, and some of them have really been fun; but my God, when we first moved here it was gruesome. We were isolated. Once we went to some little party up the road – I can’t even remember the people’s name ?
?? and this one man got me cornered and started grilling me. He said ‘What does your husband do?’
“I said ‘He’s a painter.’
“He said ‘Yeah, yeah, okay, but I mean what does he do?’
“I said ‘That’s what he does; he paints.’
“And the guy said ‘Whaddya mean, he’s a commercial artist?’
“I said ‘No, no, he’s not a commercial artist; he’s just – you know – he’s a painter.’
“He said ‘You mean a fine-arts painter?’
“And I’d never heard that term before, have you? A ‘fine-arts’ painter?
“Well, we kept going around and around like that, missing each other’s points, until he finally went away; but just before he went away he gave me this very narrow, unpleasant look, and he said ‘So whadda you kids got, a trust fund?’ ”
And the Davenports slowly shook their chuckling heads in appreciation of the story.
“No, but you’re going to find a lot of that up here,” Pat told them, as if in fair warning. “Some of these Putnam County types assume that everybody does one kind of work for a living and another kind for – I don’t know – for ‘love’ or something. And you can’t get through to them; they won’t believe you; they’ll think you’re putting them on, or else they’ll think you’ve got some trust fund.”
There was nothing for Michael to do now but look down into his nearly empty whiskey glass, wishing it were full, and be silent. He couldn’t explode in this house because it would be humiliating, but he knew he would almost certainly explode later, when he and Lucy were alone, either in the car or after they got home. “Christ’s sake,” he would say. “What the fuck does she think I do for a living? Does she think I make my fucking living out of poems?”