“How did your family come to live here?” I said. Would I ask a white person that? (“Dad moved us all out here from Peoria in ’58, and we had a heckuva time at first . . .”) For most questions there’s an answer.
“Oh, well,” Ms. Pines said from the foyer, “my father grew up in Haddam. On Clio Street.” She ventured a step nearer into the hall. “That’s the muse of history.”
“Come sit down,” I said and popped up, pushing a second wire-back café chair—Sally’s—away from the table for her to occupy.
She came toward me, looking left, then right, assessing what we’d done to the hall and the kitchen and the breakfast sunroom. New therma-panes where there’d been gunked patio doors. Green, replica Mexican tiles. A prior owner had “opened out the kitchen” twenty years ago, then moved away to Bernardsville.
“It’s all very nice,” Ms. Pines said, looking over-dressed now in her red Christmas coat and mistletoe topper. Her presence was like having a census taker visit and surprisingly become your friend.
“I’ve got some coffee made.”
Ms. Pines was still looking around the sunroom, her eyes stopping on my cherished, framed Block Island map. “Where’s that?” she said, furrowing a brow, as if the map was a problem.
“Block Island,” I said. “I went there years ago. It’s in Rhode Island, which most people don’t know.” Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz.
“I see.” She set her big purse on the floor and seated herself primly in the café chair.
“Take off your coat,” I said. “It’s warm.” Sally, lifetime Chicagoan, is always cold.
“Thank you.” She unbuttoned her red coat to reveal a green, wool two-piece suit sporting good-sized gold buttons and a Peter Pan collar. Pricey but stylish, and right for a woman of her vintage. With her coat off, her left arm also revealed the blunt end of a cumbersome white-plaster cast above her black gloved hand. “I have this wound to contend with.” She frowned at the cast’s bulk.
“How’d you manage that?” I set a yellow mug of coffee down, the sugar bowl, milk caddy, and a spoon. Old Rose was in the air again, not all that agreeable with the coffee aroma. She removed her other glove and laid it on the table.
“I’m a hurricane victim,” she said, arranging both her hands, cast and all, on the glass table surface. She said hurricane to sound like “hair-a-cun,” then inhaled a considerable breath, which she let out slowly. I all at once sensed I was about to hear an appeal for the Mount Pisgah cemetery maintenance fund, or some Nationalist Chinese outreach. “My home is in Lavallette,” Ms. Pines said. “We took a pretty considerable beating. I’m lucky I only broke my arm.”
“I’m sorry you did,” I said brightly, wrong about the solicitation. “Is your house intact?”
“It was ruined.” Ms. Pines smiled ruefully at her coffee, deliberately spooning in sugar. “I had a nice condominium.” She made the same “umm-hmmm” sound she’d made on the stairs. The sugar spoon tinkled as she moved it.
No words came out of me. Words can also be the feeblest emissaries for our feelings. Ms. Pines seemed to understand what silence signified.
“I’m back over here because of that,” she said, and lifted her chin as she stirred her coffee, then regarded me in what looked like an unexpected sternness. “I have friends in Haddam. On Gulick Road. They’re putting me up until I can determine what to do.”
“I’m sure you had insurance,” I said, my second, or possibly third, idiotic remark in five minutes.
“Everyone had insurance.” Ms. Pines right-handedly brought her coffee to her lips. I’d forgotten a napkin and jumped up, snatched a paper one out of the kitchen holder, and set it beside her spoon. “We just don’t know,” she said, setting her mug onto the napkin. “Haddam CC 4-Ball” was printed on it—a memento of my former wife, Ann, from long, long ago.
“Do you have a family?” I said.
“I had a husband,” Ms. Pines said. “We separated in ’01. He passed on in ’04. I kept our apartment. He was a police sergeant.”
“I see.” I’m deeply sorry wouldn’t have worked any better than Oh, great, that’s perfect. He’s out of the way. And you’re still damn good looking. Words.
“I teach high school in Wall Township,” Ms. Pines said, dabbing her lips. “We shut school down after the storm. Which isn’t the worst thing that could happen to me under these circumstances.” She regarded her busted-arm cast. “Our students are in limbo, of course. We’ll have to make provisions for them after Christmas.” She smiled at me with grim Christmas-no-cheer and took another sip of coffee.
“What do you teach?” I said, across the table. Snow had ceased in my small back yard, leaving the air mealy gray. A pair of enormous, self-important crows had arrived to scrounge in the pachysandra below the suet feeder.
“History,” Ms. Pines said. “I’m a Barnard grad. From ’76. The bicentennial year.”
“That’s great,” I said. “My daughter almost went there.”
Another silence invoked itself. I could’ve told her I’d gone to Michigan, have two children, an ex-wife and a current one, that I’d sold real estate here and at The Shore for twenty years, once wrote a book, served in an undistinguished fashion in the marines, and was born in Mississippi—bangety, bangety, bangety, boop. Or I could let silence do its sovereign work, and see if something of more material import opened up. It would be a loss if some hopeful topic couldn’t now be broached, given all. Nothing intimate, sensitive, or soul-baring. Nothing about the world becoming a better place. But something any two citizens could talk about, any ole time, to mutual profit—our perplexing races notwithstanding.
“You said your father grew up here?” I smiled what must’ve been a loony smile, but a signal of where our conversation might veer if we let it.
“He did. Yes,” Ms. Pines said and cleared her throat formally. “He was the first of his family to attend college. He played football at Rutgers. In the ’50s. He did extremely well. Studied engineering. Took his doctorate. He became the first Negro to work at a high level at Bell Laboratories. He was an audio specialist. He was very smart.”
“Like Paul Robeson,” I blurted—in spite of every living cell urging me not to say “Like Paul Robeson.”
“Um-hm,” Ms. Pines said, uninterested in Paul Robeson. “Some people are better as ideas than as humans, Mr. Bascombe. My father was that sort of man. I think he thought of himself as an idea more than as a man. Our race suffers from that.”
“So does ours,” I said, glad to see Paul Robeson drift off downstream.
“We lived in this house,” Ms. Pines said, “from 1959 to 1969. My father insisted on living in a white neighborhood. Though it didn’t work out very well.”
“Did your mother not like it?” Why would I assume that?
“Yes. My mother was an opera singer. Or would’ve been. She was out of place wherever she was. She was Italian. She preferred New York—where she was from. I was the only one of us who truly liked it in Haddam. I loved going to school. My brother didn’t have an easy time.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Well.” Ms. Pines looked away out the sliding door, where the crows were standing atop the melting snow-crust gawking in at us through the window. “I considered calling you before I came.”
“Why?” I said, smiley, smiley, smiley.
“I was nervous. Because if you knew who I was—or am—possibly you wouldn’t have liked me to come.”
“Why?” I said. “I’m glad you came.”
“Well. That’s kind.”
“They sound like interesting people. I’m sorry I didn’t know them. Your parents.”
“Do you not know about them?” Ms. Pines eyed me appraisingly, her chin raised a guarded inch. She placed her un-injured hand on top of the one that had the cast and breathed audibly. “Hartwick Pines?” she intoned. “You don’t know about him?”
“No,” I said. “Was that his name?” A name reminiscent of a woodwinds camp in the Michigan forests. Or a
Nuremberg judge. Or a signatory of Dumbarton Oaks.
“I’d have thought they were infamous.”
“What did they do?” I said.
“And you don’t know?” Ms. Pines said.
“Tell me.”
“I really didn’t mean to venture into this, Mr. Bascombe. I only felt required to come—after living not very far away for so long a time. I’m sorry.”
“I’m really glad you did,” I said. “I try to visit all the places I’ve lived at least once every ten years. It puts things in perspective. Everything’s smaller—like you said.”
“I imagine,” Ms. Pines said. As expected, we’d banged right into something with meat on its bones: being the first Negroes in a white suburban neighborhood with a boy-genius father and a high-strung temperamental operatic white mother. It had the precise mix of history and mystery the suburbs rarely get credit for—a story 60 Minutes or The NewsHour could run with; or ESPN, if the old man had been a standout for the Crimson Knights, gotten drafted by the Giants but chose the life of the mind instead. Even better if the mother had made it at least into the chorus at the Met, and the brother became a priest or a poet. There was even a possible as-told-to angle I could write. People tell me things. I also listen, and have a pleasant, absorptive, non-judgmental face, which made me a good living in the realty business (though doesn’t make me anything these days).
“Do you ever dream about yourself when you were young, Mr. Bascombe?” Ms. Pines said, blinking at me. “Not that you’re old, of course.”
“Frank,” I said. “Yes, I do. I’m always twenty-eight in my dreams, and I have a mustache and smoke a pipe. I actually try not to remember my dreams. Forgetting’s better.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Ms. Pines said, staring at the yellow rim of her Haddam CC 4-Ball mug.
Just at that precise instant one of the cloudy little gut bubbles we all experience descended distressingly out of my stomach and down, in such a blazing hurry-up, I barely caught it and clamped the exit shut. One more second would’ve cast a bad atmosphere on everything and everyone. My son Paul Bascombe used to call this being “fartational.” Memps, our oncologist-neighbor’s wiggly, old red wiener dog from our days on Cleveland Lane, was forever wandering nosily into our house and cutting big stinkers, one after another. “Out! Memps,” Paul would loudly decree (with relish). “Memps is fartational! Out, bad Memps!” Poor Memps would scuttle out the door, as if he knew—though not without a couple more salvos.
I was disconcertingly “all-but-Memps”—though not detectably, thanks be to god. It must’ve shown, though, in my mouth’s rigorous set, because Ms. Pines’ sloe eyes rose to me, settled back to her coffee mug rim, then fastened on me again as if I might be “experiencing” something, another episode, like my vertigo whoosh twenty minutes ago that I thought she hadn’t seen, but that might require a 911 call this time around—like her husband. Lentil soup was the culprit.
“I feel like I’ll be dying at the right time,” I said—why, I didn’t know—as though that had been the thread we’d been following; not whether our dreams were worth remembering; or what it was like to be a Negro in apartheid Haddam and have high-strung, overachieving parents for whom nothing could be normal. A squiggle of lower bowel pain made me squirm, then went its way.
“Are you dying now?” Ms. Pines looked concerned, and impatient—in case I was.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I was thinking yesterday about all the animal species that were on the planet when I was born and that are still around. Pretty soon they won’t be. It’s probably a good time to be checking out.”
Ms. Pines seemed puzzled. Who wouldn’t be? We’d been on the brink of a revelation. Possibly dramatic. Clearly she wanted to get back to it. She was operating on strong imperative now. Unlike me. “I . . .” she started to say, then stopped and shook her head, on which was perched her Christmas tam, which she’d forgotten about and that made her look ever-so-slightly elfin, but still dignified.
“I have dream conversations with my son Ralph,” I said. “He died in ’79. He’s forty-three in my dreams and a stockbroker. He gives me investment advice. I enjoy thinking it could be true.”
Ms. Pines just began, without responding. “My father, when we lived here, Mr. Bascombe, became distrustful. And very insular. He’d advanced at Bell by honest effort and genius. But it didn’t, somehow, make him very happy. His parents lived over a few blocks on Clio. But we never saw them. He hardly ever went out in his yard. Which made my mother more restless and unhappy than she already was. She believed she belonged onstage at the Metropolitan, and marrying my father had been a serious miscalculation. Though I believe she loved him. She had my brother, Ellis, and me to bring up, though. So she was trapped here.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” I said. Though it didn’t sound like anything white people on every block in Haddam didn’t have a patent on. We’re always environed by ourselves.
“Well,” Ms. Pines said. “Ellis and I didn’t know how bad it had become. We were quite happy children. Ellis didn’t prosper in school, but had a lovely singing voice, which made our mother dote on him. I did very well in school, which pleased my father. In that way it wasn’t so unusual for any American family.”
“I was thinking that,” I said. “Sounds like a story in The New Yorker.”
Ms. Pines looked at me with incomprehension. I was suddenly one of the in-limbo underachievers in Wall Township, who’d just made an inappropriate joke about the Compromise of 1850 and needed to be ignored.
“I’m not sure you need to hear this, Mr. Bascombe,” Ms. Pines said. “I don’t require to tell it. I’m happy just to leave. You’ve been more than kind. It’s not a happy story.”
“You’re alive to tell it,” I said. “You survived. Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?” I don’t, of course, believe this. Most things that don’t kill us right off, kill us later.
“I’ve wanted to believe that,” Ms. Pines said. “It’s the history teacher’s bedrock. The preparation for bad times.”
History’s just somebody else’s War and Peace, is what I thought. Though there was no reason to argue it. I smiled at her encouragingly.
Diaphanous mist rose off the scabby snow outside the window, making my yard look derelict and un-pretty. The house gave a creaking noise of age and settlement. A spear of pure, rarefied mid-December sunlight illuminated a square on the hickory trunk in the neighbors’ yard across the bamboo fence behind the potting shed the hurricane had damaged—the D’Urbervilles, a joint-practice lawyer couple. It could’ve been April, with balmy summer in pursuit, instead of the achy, cold days of January approaching. The inspector crows had disappeared.
Ms. Pines sniffed out toward the yard. “Well,” she said crisply. “I’ll make it brief.” (Why did I say I wanted to hear it? Had I meant that? Had I even said it? Something was making me suffer second thoughts—the hopeful ray of sunlight, a signal to leave well enough alone.) “My mother, you understand, was very unhappy,” Ms. Pines said, “in this very house, where we’re sitting. Our father drove out to Bell Laboratories each day. He was working on important projects and being appreciated and admired. But then he was coming home and feeling alienated. Why, we’ll never know. But at some point in the fall of 1969, our mother inaugurated a relationship of a common kind with the choral music teacher at Haddam High, who’d been providing Ellis private voice instruction.” Ms. Pines cleared her throat, as if something had made her shudder. “Ellis and I knew nothing about the relationship. Not a clue. But after Thanksgiving, my father and mother began to argue. And we heard things that let us know some of the coarser details. Which were very upsetting.”
“Yep,” I said. Still . . . nothing new under these stars.
“Then shortly after, my father moved down into the basement and out of their room upstairs.” Ms. Pines paused and turned her gaze around toward the hallway and the basement door. “He went right down those steps—he was a large, well-
built man.” With her un-injured arm she gestured toward there, as if she could see her father clumping his way down. (I, of course, pictured Paul Robeson.) “He’d converted the basement into his workshop. He brought his instruments and testing gauges and computer prototypes. He’d turned it into a private laboratory. I think he hoped to invent something he could patent, and become wealthy. My brother and I were often brought down for demonstrations. He was a very clever man.”
I realized for the first time this was how and when the basement came to be “finished”—a secondary value-consideration for resale; and also a bit of choice suburban archaeology, plus a good story for an as-told-to project—like the Underground Railroad stopping in your house.
“He’d put a cot down there,” Ms. Pines said, “where he’d occasionally take naps. So, when he moved there, following Thanksgiving, it wasn’t all that unusual. He was still in the house—though we ate with our mother and he, I think, ate his meals in town at a restaurant, and left in the mornings while my brother and I were getting up. School was out for Christmas by then. Things had become very strained.”
“This feels like it’s heading for a climax,” I said, almost, but not quite, eagerly. It wasn’t going to be a barrel o’ laughs climax, I guessed. Ms. Pines had said so already.
“Yes,” Ms. Pines said. “There is a climax.” She raised the orangish fingertips of her un-injured hand up to her shining, rounded cheeks and touched the skin there, as if her presence needed certifying. A gesture of dismay. I could smell the skin softener she used. “What do you hope for, Mr. Bascombe?” Ms. Pines looked directly at me, blinking her dark eyes to invoke seriousness. Things had worked their way around to me. Possibly I was about to be assigned accountability for something.
“Well, I try not to hope for too much,” I said. “It puts pressure on the future at my age. If you know what I mean. Sometimes a hope’ll slip in when I’m not paying attention.” I tried a conspiratorial smile. My best. “. . . That I’ll die before my wife does, for instance. Or something about my kids. It’s pretty indistinct.”