Local Souls

  Finally, feeling plainer in this staging area where our good help weekly prepared herself to help us, I went more country-sensible. I grew more manly, recalling the sheer city-expense of carving too many letters into marble. Finally I got it somewhat shortened. By dawn, in Lottie’s office, I sensed I had it.

  William Rooney Mabry II

  1924–1975

  Citizen

  21

  DAD’S FUNERAL WAS right well-attended. Leading families who couldn’t come sent idled older cousins or those servant-helpers who’d dealt with Red most directly. Marge and Doc rode with us. Ten dark cars arrived in a divided convoy, his redheaded relations quick to stand far far apart. Separate glaring groups, Hatfields and McCoys. Had to be the “Peanut” Mabrys vs. the “Sweet Potato” ones. They looked cousinly as Israelis and Palestinians, that likely being half the trouble.

  Red, alone among Mabrys, failed to be counted among those that stayed. Somehow he’d found the nerve to light out for town. And by gosh, Red had plowed out a place for himself and his blood, right here among the mightiest Fallen, verily even along The River Road. So, two clans’ arriving “en masse” while still warring, gave best proof of this burial’s being (strictly locally, of course) a state occasion.

  Maitland Miller and his heavyset wife turned up by cab. They kindly refused to sit with Mom and Jan and Doc and Marge and me but seemed to appreciate the thought. Along with Mait and his Mrs., four of our younger caddies appeared up, edgy, scanning with stage fright this big a white church. They were quick to find me and Doc, to shake our hands, praising Red. “He been one the only real ones out there.”

  All dressed today in black suits and white shirts, their rich skin sleek as if oiled, they didn’t seem the nicknamed youngsters from our clubhouse. Not in their flashy shirts, freed from lugging old white men’s bags, today, on a rear pew picked by them, lined up to honor Red, their wariness gave them a strictness and reserve. They could’ve been the young Oxford-educated presidents of emerging African nations.

  I’D PHONED RIVERSIDE’S best lady-realtor about selling Mother’s Cape Cod. Mom stood listening in. The agent, as if expecting me, snapped, “Fine, but I could not even think of showing you-all’s little place with its existing-colored doors and shutters.”

  So, one week after the funeral, I gave myself the chore. Knowing it would prove winding, I’d have to pace myself. Couldn’t bear to hire another man for such a private duty.

  Mom, already become the total hider, knew my chore. She dodged both that and daylight, deep indoors.

  I took thick, plain enamel to his brighter choice.

  “Red,” I said as I drowned it all in white.

  THE MONDAY AFTER Friday’s burial my usual checkup was slated and I kept it and Roper breathed as usual to warm his stethoscope’s steel and listened to me dutiful front-and-back and finally patted my shoulder but neither of us said one word the whole time, not daring to. It would be very hard if any or all of the emotion got out. I didn’t trust myself. As usual, I chose to wait. When till, Bill? Wait for what? Dignity, Revelation, Legacy? Love? To wait for Later: that seemed my major inborn task.

  I simply sat there on an exam table that had seemed both Dad’s and mine, sat here singly.

  I knew that the twenty-seven thousand dollars’ profit we’d made selling his house would please Red very much. Three days after the funeral Mom already lived out in the country with her widowed sister. They themselves had wallpapered “her” room, giggling at every difficulty of gooped paste and paper’s rolling corners. Its pattern proved both sprigged and striped, featuring giant purple lilac blooms. It was certainly a print no Riversider would ever have used, even in some “for the fun of it” chauffeur’s garage-apartment’s half-bath. I knew that Mom was in on this joke, to some extent. Of course I didn’t press it. Clear, she’d never again live in any room painted just one tasteful color.

  I stayed on in Falls, of course. But as a former farm kid, I never could feel town-born. I was never a soul fully local anywhere but halfway, about where the tobacco field around our Dairy Queen stands. Brilliant? No. And not gifted with any one particular skill past trying out a million silent decencies. I found most of those had gone sort of unnoted. That left me what? Whom? Where? Left me here.

  “Having stayed” became a Purple Heart, for meritorious immobility. And likely I would stay on here where too little happened but the usual subtraction. Now “stay” meant being grounded by my father’s grave. The Presbyterians kept it trimmed with Presbyterian efficiency, leaving me little to do but stand there and look down at it.

  But, however uneasy I am about my achievements in life, if only in secret, I do give myself this: In the privacy of my heart, telling no one ever, some evenings looking back on my own better sort of days, I’ll tell myself, fully meaning it: I admit that my father found me noble, gifted, a naturalized Riversider almost royal. And so, if only in his eyes, I do stay that: the sole surviving son and heir to the happy Earl of Shadowlawn.

  22

  BY NOW, IF, vacationing, you mentioned your hometown, the name of a certain craftsman might buoy up. His hand-hewn second-career had got so much press, even strangers asked if you’d seen, possibly even met, him? The retired doctor was now richly established as “Marion, carved by his hand ©.”

  Though also getting along in years, Doc looked little different from when he retired. He changed so slowly and that made him freakish, if also more a sort of good-luck tribal totem-pole. Only Marge had aged, maybe lacking a passion on the order of Roper’s. You cannot get that by decoy-proxy.

  I should know.

  You can tell I’m heading toward the trouble. Not that we have not had bumps already. But no good story is a story only everyday. All of us only get away with just so much and then only for so long. Even in a moneyed river town, even someplace whose water is part amber lithium, part clear nicotine, life can retract its promise overnight. Can become a vale of tears breaking over you its sudden lashing. We had named ourselves “Falls,” copying Niagara (no truth in advertising there!). Maybe we were about to pay for stealing the Big-Time’s thunder?

  These were our end-days, looking back. The time Before. And Roper might or might not turn up at others’ cocktail parties. That depended on how “tacky” the paint felt on his “maybe all-time breakthrough coot.” Doc overexplained the merits of everybody’s Internet. You’d think he had invented it, boasting he could blow up any colored bird-image, could magnify then graph it to many times actual size. Did we actually care?

  Sometimes at the club or downtown, you still caught sight of him. The guy no longer wore his reassuring after-hours witch-doctor’s pendant, the stethoscope. Lately a jewelers’ loupe shone, clipped to his tortoiseshell reading specs. He did pretty detailed work and, after all, the guy was now up over eighty.

  Times, I longed to take him aside and sit and reminisce about our Red. As you’d get to swap tales only with a favorite sibling. To do that while on a camping trip, off canoeing up the Lithium, would be great. Just starting every sentence, “Remember that time Red . . . ? and that crazy time our dad, he . . . ?”

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE not to respect Doc, so long-established here; but then, our witch-doctor, he held out—silent—for even more. Didn’t withhold anything, exactly. But you feared he might. So you yourself made up the difference. For him, you produced a certain unreciprocated low-grade feeling; you forced it into something stronger, more bulked-up, yet your effort was still unimpressive. It finally felt humiliating, the strange suspense he exacted from the likes of ordinary me. Did he flirt with anyone? And, if not, why did everyone believe themselves the first?

  How many women in his office had—like Kate Bixby that day her boys drowned then lived—offered more, all? But Doc never seemed to take free samples. And this just drew more offers. Roper seemed to barely notice us while off-duty; and yet, he always assumed our full infirm attention anywhere he went. Still, something kept a person coming back.

  ESPECIALLY AFTER R
ED died in our company, it seemed Doc’s company alone met some basic medical need of mine. “First, do no harm.” That in itself is a mouthful. Roper’s river-swim each dawn across from my place had simply seemed what any good doctor would do for his nearest patient. That Australian crawl left me still sitting nice and dry on my deck and yet feeling half-flooded with borrowed pheromones. I cannot explain it. Nobody was alone in feeling this, I swear. The list of locals that Doc had saved soon seemed the roster of home owners under eighty-five. We all still had these immense riverside houses, echoing louder since our kids had somehow grown and gladly moved; but the houses, for all their costs and repairs, still looked beautiful to us. Monuments, but honoring what? Still, as much else failed, ownership gave us its own time-release back-channel consolation.

  Doc had forever known that facts about his other patients would fascinate us. Doc stayed rightly stingy with those. But a hunk of log carved so its “head” tucks under its “wing”? Could that ever rival news of whether polio would let the Collier girl ever walk again? Doc failed to note that life outranks art every time.

  His poor Margie was left joking: “The man eats, sleeps, drinks ducks. I’m not a golf widow. I married a doctor, got a quack.” He’d probably made that up, but she retailed it as her apology for him. People laughed at such a joke only because we’d always loved her. Good sport, Marge. Incredible rangy soccer player during her Randolph-Macon years. And once, when Doc was away at a Miami wood-tool convention, a Cambodian girl from the old mall’s new nail place turned up at the Roper house seeking him, her waters just broken. Marge got the girl down in a porch lounge chair and delivered the baby herself. “All in a day’s . . .” she said with that tough half-masculine tone of hers. Soccer captain, even at eighty. I’d noted that, as Roper and I got spindlier, somewhat artistic (spiritually in my case), our wives sort of toughened up, division of labor; Jan and Marge doubled down as stronger, more the bosses. To me they each looked a notch or two more bowlegged like poor Red. The pink razors along the bathtub’s ledge? seemed there less for removing feminine leg stubble than possible new growth on their handsome chinny-chin-chins. But maybe this is sour grapes from a failing male whose actuarial life had never been long.

  We sensed that, like us, Marge felt left a bit high and dry.

  Roper’d never had an excess of the office-hour small talk we all craved like niacin, B-complex. Now? Any stray encounter in Sears’ power-tool department started and quit with one of his mute nods. Retired, he seemed to have departed the office hours of language.

  People had seen his canoe ashore and far upriver, his little brown tent pitched for some overnighter. Him alone, selfishly alone. Binoculars, a camou-parka and one fierce glance from Doc must mean: my trusty rusted Evinrude was disturbing some important-species-nesting-habitat he alone could guard.

  Roper no longer seemed just absentminded. That’d been scariest when our village’s weakening ventricles preoccupied the guy. Now he looked clear past your head, as if startled by your hair? no, he was squinting beyond, at what? oh, that red EXIT sign.

  He would rather be sculpting. Even his rare jokes now seemed a pocketful of carving tools that might cut you mid-hug.

  Was around this time that I, having washed out as a carver myself (healing nicely, if with certain scarring Doc would not have left), considered paying retail for a real Josiah Hemphill. The Christie’s catalogue had one coming up. But I soon understood this was just my way to get Doc over to our place. A Hemphill, he’d come see. Pretty crude, I decided. One jerky decoy of a chess move. I was simply trying to pay for a last live visit from my real old friend, if he’d ever truly been one.

  —How come I could send to a Manhattan gallery and acquire some Federal-period Hemphill but not get one brand-new across-the-road “Marion”? During my ever-shorter daily walks, I wondered this. (Sometimes to the point of muttering aloud.) The route of my daily constitutional? Past whatever home now lacked dogs that barked at me. Little slights, even from store clerks, preoccupied me. I kept casting back for reassurance. Found myself remembering, when I’d hitchhiked home from college, I once sat reading a translation of The Odyssey near our pool at Broken Heart. Doc, already 31, tanned dark as oiled teak, had gone off the high-dive, jackknifing midair. Amazing swimmer.

  My own body gave signs it itself wanted to retire. From any strenuous further use. I could still drive a car anywhere. And I was a much safer driver than Jan liked to complain. Her jokes had always cast herself as Sensible and me as Her Dreamer. Like my true-believer dad, I guess. But artist at what? Which dreams exactly? Fame? Sex? Love? Elsewhere? After several enough drinks, Janet now did party-stand-up about my myopic U-turns and increasing inability to think in Reverse. But once I’d got us into the mall lot, once there, my even getting out of the car was something you might not want to watch too closely. I had seen my dad do this slow dance with himself at fifty-one. Made me think of a bug on its back, six legs scrambling, grabbing for doorframe, anything to gain the traction needed to get this creature pulled to the vertical. Then, having risen, for your trouble, another visa problem awaited, finding yourself at the next barricade, short of usable air. I sent my Janet on ahead, told her to go into Restoration Hardware and wait by their lamps. Jan was always drawn to their antique-y look but never bought one. She complained, “They still look too new.” I told her, “Oh, I can do that. Can ‘antique’ it in my wood shop.” “How, may I ask?” She sounded exhausted with knowledge of me.

  “By touching it,” I said. Which made her blanch then cackle. “I love you, you are so sick, Bill.” By now, that had become her compliment! Let my Janet laugh.

  I can handle anything but pity.

  MY WIFE’S COLLEGE roommate came to visit every other year for “Kaye’s beauty rest.” She’d come fresh from divorce court again, her newest face-lift mended upward unevenly.

  Kaye is smart in ways our little town cannot let itself be: she is witty and unforgiving out loud. Jan and I enjoy her company more than she knows, maybe more than she quite deserves. Kaye is old tobacco money and has what some people call style and others call edge. Kaye inherited enough, then married even more, three times running; so she always says exactly what she thinks in real-time. That, it seems, is no strict guarantor of happiness.

  After weekend drinks enough, Kaye even gets us sounding like her. She would be leaving tomorrow for Barcelona because somebody she knew was free to have a luncheon there late Thursday. Jan and I marveled. But we, un-jet-lagged, felt blessed at this age to count ourselves among those that stayed aground. —No local guessed what-all terrible we’d just been confiding to Kaye. And God knows, that many gins in, she wouldn’t remember.

  I stood gladly preparing a second pitcher of dry dry Bombay Sapphire martinis. I’d swing these libations out onto the deck to heighten viewing tonight’s already-terrific sunset.

  Couldn’t help overhearing our sophisticated guest quiz my wife, “Gosh, Jan? Who is that looking at a heron through binoculars and with no shirt? And here I thought Randolph Scott was extinct. Handsomest thing breathing. What is he, about fifty-eight? Looks to be on safari. Just my type and I never even knew that was a type. Seeing how I’m finally free of my fat dear oilman Roy, that’d be perfect for me. Who is the man?”

  “That’s not a man, dear, that’s ‘Doc.’” Janet coughed a laugh, one slightly bitterer than I ever liked others to hear. “And he’ll turn eighty-two come June. There are parties already planned. Sad to say for you and others, there is a Mrs. Safari. The two’re so happily married—they’ve upset many of us with daily comparisons. Doc there used to be our doctor, did wonders for Bill’s heart. Miracles, in fact. But that eventually bored Doc. (Me, I think the ole alpha-bird lost his power when he lost his patients but he doesn’t know that yet.) Now he’s becoming a famous artist of sorts. Craftsman, anyway. So, you see, dear, he’s not just a man. He sort of pokes up in the middle of us, kind of a weather vane. People tend to read the wind by him. I really think there’s something wrong wi
th him. Women want to save him so they can later be saved by him. And even men, otherwise intelligent men, they . . . well, I don’t know what they want from him. But I’ve certainly shuddered picturing it. Roper over there makes everybody think things are better than they are. He promised Bill’s sweet dad that he was tending the poor guy’s subpar heart, no problem, good as new. But guess who dropped dead, practically in front of our medicine man? (But where is my Bill with another several of these?) In the end, Doc never seems to make any of it stick. Not exactly leading people on, more like writing prescription IOUs. But everything he promises is, it’s . . . undeliverable. You know how they call certain guys confidence artists? Well, he does look good on paper, but . . . underneath there’s something very puritan, starved-out. He’s like a good copy of something that was, God knows, probably lots better coming out of the gate. —Meaning just the sort of guy all local women fall in love with . . . and I mean all! Plus about half our weaker men.”

  Amused, then surprised, I had started out, holding our best silver tray, its crystal pitcher full.

  I saw we needed extra olives.

  I turned back.

  BOOK TWO

  A.D.

  A PERSON’S PARENTS LABOR MIGHTILY TO PLACE THAT person on top-drawer waterfront land in the neighborhood where, if you cannot crawl home from tonight’s cocktail party, you might just dog-paddle. What happens next will seem to surge from nowhere. That’s just how it swept in on us house-to-house.

  Person lives in a neighborhood called Riverside since age eight. Person assumes that the muddy inching little trickle rich with lithium will stay put like that store-bought background noise meant to help uneasy sleepers finally doze.

  Yonder river should provide contrasting color for your Bermuda grass against its slow brown bend. It should not “say nothin’ and just keep rollin’ along.” It is meant to offer a few annual edible grandkid-caught sunfish and shad. The shared neighborhood water feature seems dug to help you teach your kids sportsmanship in boating.