Independence Day

  “Did you have any good dreams last night?” I sit forward in my chair, stare straight into the cool mulberry leaves out my window. This way it is possible to concentrate totally. Paul sometimes has wacky dreams, though it may be he invents them to have something to tell.

  “Yeah, I did.” He sounds distracted, but then the thunga-thyunga-thunga-thyunga goes very low. (Last night was apparently a good one for dreaming.)

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  “I was a baby, right?”

  “Right.”

  He is tampering with something metallic. I hear a metal snap! “But I was a really ugly baby? Really ugly. And my parents were not you or Mom, but they kept leaving me at home and going off to parties. Veddy, veddy posh parties.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Here. I don’t know. Somewhere.”

  “In Deep Water?” Deep Water is his wisenheimer’s name for Deep River, calculated precisely to make Charley O’Dell feel as unappreciated as possible. He conceivably has less use for Charley than even I do.

  “Yep. Deep Water. And that’s the way it is.” He adopts his perfect-pitch Walter Cronkite voice. A headshrinker, I’m confident, would read signs of dread and fear in Paul’s dream and be right. Fear of abandonment. Of castration. Of death—all solid fears, the same ones I entertain. He at least seems willing to make a joke out of it.

  “Anything else going on?”

  “Mom and Charley had a big fight last night.”

  “Sorry to hear that. About what?”

  “Stuff, I guess. I don’t know.” I hear the weatherman on Good Morning America giving us the good news for the weekend. Paul has activated his TV now and doesn’t want to talk more about his mother’s marital dustup; he simply wants to announce it so he can refer to it usefully on our trip. For a while I’ve sensed (with an acuity unique to ex-husbands) that something wasn’t right with Ann. Early menopause, early nostalgia all her own, late-breaking regret. All are possible. Or maybe Charley has a honey, some little busty button-nosed waitress from the boatyard diner in Old Saybrook. Their union, though, has lasted four years, which seems long enough under the circumstances—since its chief frailty is that Charley’s nobody anyone in her right mind should ever marry in the first place.

  “So look. Your ole Dad’s got to go sell a house this morning. Slam home my pitch. Reel in the big fish.”

  “D. O. Volente,” Paul says.

  “You got it. The Volente family from Upper High Point, North Carolina.” He has decided, from his one year of Latin, that D. O. Volente is the patron saint of realtors and must be courted like a good Samaritan—shown every house, given the best deals, accorded every courtesy, made to pay no vigorish—or bad things will happen. Since the rubber incident our life has largely been conducted as a reticule of jokes, quips, double entendres, horse laughs, whose excuse for being, of course, is love. “Be a pal to your mother today, okay, pal?” I say.

  “I’m her pal. She’s just a bitch.”

  “No she’s not. Her life’s harder than yours, believe it or not. She has to deal with you. How’s your sister?”

  “Great.” His sister Clary is twelve and as sage as Paul is callow.

  “Tell her I’ll see her tomorrow, okay?”

  The volume suddenly zooms up on the TV, another man’s voice blabbing at a high-decibel level about Mike Tyson making 22 mil for beating Michael Spinks in ninety-one seconds. “I’d let him sock me in the kisser for half that much,” the man says. “Did you hear that?” Paul says. “He’d let him ‘sock him in the kisser.’” He loves this kind of tricky punning talk, thinks it’s hilarious.

  “Yeah. But you be ready to go when I get there tomorrow, okay? We have to hit the ground running if we expect to get to Beaton, Texas.”

  “He was Beaton to the punch, then socked in the kisser. Are you gonna get married again?” He says this shyly. Why, I don’t know.

  “No, never. I love you, okay? Did you look at the Declaration of Independence and those brochures? I expect you to have your ducks in a row.”

  “No,” he says. “But I’ve got one, okay?” This refers to a real joke.

  “Tell me. I’ll use it on my clients.”

  “A horse comes into a bar and orders a beer,” Paul says, deadpan. “What does the bartender say?”

  “I give up.”

  “‘Gee, why the long face?’”

  Silence on his end of the line, a silence that says we each know what the other is thinking and are splitting our sides in silent laughter—the best, giddiest laughter of all. My right eyelid gives a predictable flicker. Now would be a perfect moment—with silent laughter as sad counterpoint—to think a melancholy thought, ponder a lost something or other, conduct a quick review of life’s misread menu of what’s important and what’s not. But what I feel instead is acceptance hedging on satisfaction and a faint promise for the day just beginning. There is no such thing as a false sense of well-being.

  “Great,” I say. “That’s great. But what’s a horse doing in a bar?”

  “I don’t know,” Paul says. “Maybe dancing.”

  “Having a drink,” I say. “Somebody led him to it.”

  Outside, on the warming lawns of Cleveland Street, Skip McPherson shouts, “He shoots, he scooooores!” Restrained laughter floats up, a beer can goes kee-runch, another manly voice says, “Old slapshot, ooold slapshot, yesssireeobert.” Down the block I hear a diesel growl to life like a lion waking. The streets crew is up and going.

  “I’ll catch you tomorrow, son,” I say. “Okay?”

  “Yeah,” Paul says, “catch you tomorrow. Okay.” And then we hang up.

  2

  On Seminary Street at 8:15, Independence Day is the mounting spirit of the weekend, and all outward signs of life mean to rise with it. The 4th is still three days off, but traffic is jamming into Frenchy’s Gulf and through the parking lot at Pelcher’s Market, citizens shouting out greetings from the dry cleaners and Town Liquors, as the morning heat is drumming up. Plenty of our residents are already taking off for Blue Hill and Little Compton; or, like my neighbors the Zumbros, with time on their hands, to dude ranches in Montana or expensive trout water in Idaho. Everyone’s mind-set reads the same: avoid the rush, get a jump, hit the road, put pedal to the metal. Exit is the seaboard’s #1 priority.

  My first order of business is to make an early stop at one of two rental houses I own, with a mind to collecting the rent, then do a quick sweep through the realty office to drop off my editorial, pick up the key for the house I’m showing in Penns Neck and have a last-minute map-out session with the Lewis twins, Everick and Wardell, the agency’s “utility men,” regarding our planned participation in Monday’s holiday events. As it happens, our part simply amounts to handing out free hot dogs and root beer from a portable “dogs-on-wheels” stand I myself own and am lending to the cause (all proceeds to Clair Devane’s two orphaned children).

  Up Seminary, which since the boom has become a kind of Miracle Mile “main street” none of us ever wished for, all merchants are staging sidewalk “firecracker sales,” setting out derelict merchandise they haven’t moved since Christmas and draping sun racks with patriotic bunting and gimmicky signs that say wasting hard-earned money is the American way. Virtual Profusion has laid in extra bunches of low-quality daisies and red bachelor buttons to draw the bushed businessman or seminarian hiking home in a funk but determined to seem festive (“Say it with cheap flowers”). Brad Hulbert, our gay shoe-store owner, has stacked boxes of one-size-only oddities along his front window and stationed his tanned and bored little catamite, Todd, on a stool behind an open-air cash register. And the bookstore has hauled out its overstocks—piles of cheap dictionaries, atlases and unsellable ’88 calendars, plus last season’s computer games, all of it heaped high on a banquet table to be eyed and picked over by larcenous teens like my son.

  For the first time, though, since I moved here in 1970, two businesses on
Seminary have left their stores standing empty, their management clearing out under cover of darkness, owing people money and merchandise. One has since resurfaced in the Nutley Mall, the other hasn’t been heard from. Indeed, many of the high-dollar franchises—places that never staged a sale—have now gone through takeovers and Chapter 11 reorganizations and given way to second-echelon high-dollar places where sales are a way of life. This spring, Pelcher’s postponed a grand reopening of its specialty meat-and-cheese boutique; a Japanese car dealership suddenly went belly-up and now sits empty on Route 27. And on the weekend streets there’s even a different crowd of visitors. In the early Eighties, when the Haddam population ballooned from twelve to twenty thousand, and I was still writing for a flashy sports magazine, our typical weekenders were suave New Yorkers—rich SoHo residents in bizarre getups and well-heeled East Siders come down to “the country” for the day, having heard it was a quaint little village here, one worth seeing, still unspoiled, approximately the way Greenwich or New Canaan used to be fifty years ago, which was at least partly true, then.

  Now those same people are either staying at home in their cement-and-burglar-barred pillboxes and getting into urban pioneering or whatever their checkbooks allow; or else they’ve sold out and gone back to KC or decided to make a new start in the Twin Cities or Portland, where life’s slower (and cheaper). Though plenty, I’m sure, are lonely and bored silly wherever they are and are wishing someone would try to rob them.

  But in Haddam, their place has been taken by, of all things, more Jerseyites, down from Baleville and Totowa or up the dogleg from Vineland and Millville—day-trippers driving 206 “just to remember where it goes” and who stop in here (unhappily rechristened “Haddam the Pleasant” by the village council) for a snack and a look-around. These people—I’ve watched them through the office window when I’ve been “on point” on the weekend—all seem to be a less purposeful lot of humans. They have more kids that’re noisier, drive rattier cars with exterior parts missing and don’t mind parking in handicap spaces or across a driveway or beside a fire hydrant as though they didn’t have fire hydrants where they come from. They keep the yogurt franchise jumping and bang down truckloads of chocolate-chip cookies, but few of them ever sit down at The Two Lawyers for an actual lunch, fewer still spend a night in the August Inn, and none get interested in houses—though sometimes they’ll waste half your day larky-farking around looking at places they’ll forget the instant they’re back in their Firebirds and Montegos, beetle-browing it down to Manahawkin. (Shax Murphy, who took over the agency when old man Otto Schwindell passed on, tried instituting a credit check before allowing a house to be shown over 400K. But the rest of us did some lobbying after a rock star got turned away, then spent two million at Century 21.)

  I turn off Seminary out of the holiday traffic, coast down Constitution Street behind downtown, past the library, across Plum Road at the blinker, and cruise along outside the metal-picket fence behind which my son Ralph Bascombe lies buried, out as far as Haddam Medical Center, where I make a left at Erato, then over to Clio, where my two rental houses sit in their quiet neighborhood.

  It might seem unusual that a man my age and nature (unadventuresome) would get involved in potentially venal landlording, chockablock as it is with shady, unreliable tenants, vicious damage-deposit squabbles, dishonest repair persons, bad checks, hectoring late-night phone calls over roof leaks, sewage backups, sidewalk repairs, barking dogs, crummy water heaters, falling plaster and noisy parties requiring the police being called, often eventuating in lengthy lawsuits. The quick and simple answer is that I decided none of these potential nightmares would be my story, which is how it’s mostly happened. The two houses I own, side by side, are on a quiet, well-treed street in the established black neighborhood known as Wallace Hill, snugged in between our small CBD and the richer white demesnes on the west side, more or less behind the hospital. Reliable, relatively prosperous middle-aged and older Negro families have lived here for decades in small, close-set homes they keep in much better than average condition and whose values (with a few eyesore exceptions) have gone steadily up—if not keeping exact pace with the white sections, at least approximating them but also not suffering price slippage related to recent sags in white-collar employment. It’s America like it used to be, only blacker.

  Most of the residents on these streets are blue-collar professionals—plumbers or small-engine mechanics or lawn-care partners who work out of garage setups that come right off their taxes. There are a couple of elderly Pullman porters and several working moms who’re teachers, plus plenty of retirees whose mortgages are paid off and who are perfectly happy to be going nowhere. Lately a few black dentists and internists and three trial lawyer couples have decided to move back to a neighborhood similar to where they grew up, or at least where they might’ve grown up if their families hadn’t been trial lawyers and dentists themselves, and they hadn’t gone to Andover and Brown. Eventually, of course, as in-town property becomes more valuable (they aren’t making any more of it), all the families here will realize big profits and move away to Arizona or down South, where their ancestors were once property themselves, and the whole area will be gentrified by incoming whites and rich blacks, after which my small investment, with its few-but-bearable headaches, will turn into a gold mine. (This demographic shifting is, in fact, slower-moving in the stable black neighborhoods, since there aren’t that many places for a well-heeled black American to go that’s better than where he or she already is.)

  Though that isn’t the whole picture.

  Since my divorce and, more pointedly, after my former life came to a sudden end and I suffered what must’ve been a kind of survivable “psychic detachment” and took off in a fugue for Florida and afterward to as far away as France, I had been uneasily aware that I had never done very much in my life that was honestly good except for myself and my loved ones (and not all of them would agree even with that). Writing sports, as anyone can tell you who’s ever done it or read it, is at best offering a harmless way to burn up a few unpromising brain cells while someone eats breakfast cereal, waits nervously in the doctor’s office for CAT-scan results or mulls away dreamy, solitary minutes in the can. And as far as my own hometown was concerned, apart from transporting the occasional half-flattened squirrel to the vet, or calling the fire department once when my elderly neighbors the Deffeyes let their gas barbecue set their back porch on fire and threatened the neighborhood, or some other act of tepid suburban heroism, I’d probably contributed as little to the commonweal as it was possible for a busy man to contribute without being plain evil. This, though I’d lived in Haddam fifteen years, ridden the prosperity curve right through the roof, enjoyed its civic amenities, sent my kids to its schools, made frequent and regular use of the streets, curb cuts, sewers, water mains, police and fire, plus various other departments dedicated to my well-being. Almost two years ago, however, while driving home in a weary semi-daze after a long, unproductive morning of house showings, I took a wrong turn and ended up behind Haddam Medical Center on little Clio Street, where most of our town’s Negro citizens were sitting out on their porches in the late August heat, fanning themselves and chatting porch to porch, pitchers of iced tea and jars of water at their feet and little oscillating fans connected with cords through the windows to keep the air moving. As I drove past they all looked out at me serenely (or so I judged). One elderly woman waved. A group of boys stood on the street corner wearing baggy athletic shorts, holding basketballs, smoking cigarettes and talking, their arms draped around each other’s shoulders. None of them seemed to notice me, or do anything menacing. So that for some reason I felt compelled to make the block and do the whole tour over, which I did—complete with the old woman waving as if she’d never laid eyes on me or my car in her life, much less two minutes before.

  And what I thought, when I’d driven around a third time, was that I’d passed down this street and the four or five others like it in the darkto
wn section of Haddam at least five hundred times in the decade and a half I’d lived here, and didn’t know a single soul; I had been invited into no one’s home, had paid no social calls, never sold a house here, had probably never even walked down a single sidewalk (though I had no fear about doing it day or night). And yet I considered this to be a bedrock, first-rate neighborhood and these souls its just and sovereign protectors.

  On my fourth trip around the block, naturally no one waved at me (two people in fact came to the top of their porch steps and frowned, and the boys with the basketballs glowered with their hands on their hips). However, I had seen two identical next-door houses—single-storey, American-vernacular frame structures in slightly run-down condition, with keyboard awnings, brick-veneer half-fronts, raised, roofed porches and a fenced alley in between, both with a Trenton realty company’s FOR SALE sign out front. I discreetly jotted down the phone number, then went straight to the office and put in a call to investigate price and the possibility of buying both places. I hadn’t been in the realty business long and was happy to think about diversifying my assets and stashing money away where it’d be hard to get at. And I thought that if I could buy both houses at a bargain, I could then rent them to whoever wanted to live there—black retirees on fixed incomes, or not-entirely-healthy elderlies still able to look after their affairs and not be a burden on their kids, or young-marrieds in need of a sensibly priced but sturdy leg up in life—people I could assure a comfortable existence in the face of housing costs going sky-high and until such time as they could move into a perpetual-care facility or buy a starter home of their own. All of which would bestow on me the satisfaction of reinvesting in my community, providing affordable housing options, maintaining a neighborhood integrity I admired, while covering my financial backside and establishing a greater sense of connectedness, something I’d lacked since before Ann moved to Deep River two years before.