A Multitude of Sins (27 page)

Tom maintained a moodiness after their car-argument, and only reluctantly came around to mentioning that Belfast was one of the last “undiscovered” towns up the coast. In Camden, and farther east toward Bar Harbor, the rich already had everything bought up. Any property that sold did so within families, using law firms in Philadelphia and Boston. Realtors were never part of it. He mentioned the Rockefellers, the Harrimans and the Fisks. Here in Belfast, though, he said, development had been held back by certain environmental problems—a poultry factory that had corrupted the bay for decades so that the expensive sailing set hadn’t come around. Once, he said, the now-attractive harbor had been polluted with chicken feathers. It all seemed improbable. Tom looked out through the dusty screen at a bare waterside park across the sloping street from the chowder house. An asphalt basketball court had been built, and a couple of chubby white kids were shooting two-hand jumpers and dribbling a ball clumsily. There was a new jungle gym at the far end where no one was playing.

“Over there,” Tom said, his plastic spoon between his thumb and index finger, pointing at the empty grassy park
that looked like something large had been present there once. “That’s where the chicken plant was—smack against the harbor. The state shut it down finally.” Tom furrowed his thick brow as if the events were grave.

An asphalt walking path circled the grassy sward. A man in a silver wheelchair was just entering the track from a van parked up the hill. He began patiently pushing himself around the track while a little girl began frolicking on the infield grass, and a young woman—no doubt her mother— stood watching beside the van.

“How do you know about all that?” Nancy said, watching the man foisting his wheelchair forward.

“A guy, Mick, at the co-op’s from Bangor. He told me. He said now was the moment to snap up property here. In six months it’ll be too pricey. It’s sort of a last outpost.”

For some reason the wheelchair rider she was watching seemed like a young man, though even at a distance he was clearly large and bulky. He was arming himself along in no particular hurry, just making the circle under his own power. She assumed the little girl and the woman were his family, making up something to do in the empty, unpretty park while he took his exercise. They were no doubt tourists, too.

“Does that seem awful to you? Things getting expensive?” She breathed in the strong fish aroma off the little harbor’s muddy recesses. The sun had moved so she put her hand up to shield her face. “You’re not against progress, are you?”

“I like the idea of transition,” Tom said confidently. “It creates a sense of possibility.”

“I’m sure that’s how the Rockefellers and the Fisks felt,” she said, realizing this was argumentative, and wishing not to be. “Buy low, sell high, leave a beautiful corpse. That’s not the way that goes, is it?” She smiled, she hoped, infectiously.

“Why don’t we take a walk?” Tom pushed his plastic chowder bowl away from in front of him the way a policeman would who was used to eating in greasy spoons. When they were college kids, he hadn’t eaten that way. Years ago,
he’d possessed lovely table manners, eaten unhurriedly and enjoyed everything. It had been his Irish mother’s influence. Now he was itchy, interested elsewhere, and his mother was dead. Though this habit was as much his nature as the other. It wasn’t that he didn’t seem like himself. He did.

“A walk would be good,” she said, happy to leave, taking a long last look at the harbor and the park with the man in the wheelchair slowly making his journey around. “Trips are made in search of things, right?” She looked for Tom, who was already off to the cashier’s, his back going away from her. “Right,” she said, answering her own question and coming along.

They walked the early-September afternoon streets of Belfast—up the brick-paved hill from the chowder house, through the tidy business section past a hardware, a closed movie theater, a credit union, a bank, a biker bar, a pair of older realtors, several lawyers’ offices and a one-chair barbershop, its window cluttered with high-school pictures of young-boy clients from years gone by. A slender young man with a ponytail and his hippie girlfriend were moving large cardboard boxes from a beater panel truck into one of the glass storefronts. Something new was happening there. Next door a shoe-store space had been turned into an organic bakery whose sign was a big loaf of bread that looked real. An art gallery was beside it. It wasn’t an unpleasant-feeling town, waiting quietly for what would soon surely arrive. She could see why Tom would like it.

From up the town hill, more of the harbor was visible below, as was the mouth of another estuary that trickled along an embankment of deep green woods into the Penobscot. A high, thirties-vintage steel bridge crossed the river the way the bridge had in Wiscasset, though everything was smaller here, less up-and-going, less scenic—the great bay blue and wide and inert, just another park, sterile, fishless, ready for profitable alternative uses. It was, Nancy felt, the way all things became. The presence of an awful-smelling
factory or a poisonous tannery or a cement factory could almost seem like something to wish for, remember fondly. Tom was not thinking that way.

“It’s nice here, isn’t it?” she said to make good company of herself. She’d taken off her anorak and tied it around her waist vacationer-style. The beer made her feel loose-limbed, satisfied. “Are we down-east yet?”

They were stopped in front of another realtor’s window. Tom was again bent over studying the rows of snapshots. The walk had also made her warm, but with her sweater off, the bay breeze produced a nice sunny chill.

Another Conant tour bus arrived at the stoplight in the tiny central intersection, red-and-white like the ones that had let off Japanese consumers last night at Bean’s. All the bus windows were tinted, and as it turned and began heaving up the hill back toward Route 1, she couldn’t tell if the passengers were Asians, though she assumed so. She remembered thinking that these people knew something she didn’t. What had it been? “Do you ever think about what the people in buses think when they look out their window and see you?” she said, watching the bus shudder through its gears up the hill toward a blue Ford agency sign.

“No,” Tom said, still peering in at the pictures of houses for sale.

“I just always want to say, ‘Hey, whatever you’re thinking about me, you’re wrong. I’m just as out of place as you are.’” She set her hands on her hips, enjoying the sensation of talking with no one listening. She felt isolated again, unapprehended—as if for this tiny second she had achieved yet another moment of getting on with things. It was a grand feeling insofar as it arose from no apparent stimulus, and no doubt would not last long. Though here it was. This beleaguered little town had provided one pleasant occasion. The great mistake would be to try to seize such a feeling and keep it forever. It was good just to know it was available at all. “Isn’t it odd,” she said, facing back toward the Penobscot, “to be seen, but to understand you’re being seen wrong. Does that mean …” She looked around at her husband.

“Does it mean what?” Tom had stood up and was watching her, as if she’d come under a spell. He put his hand on her shoulder and gently sought her.

“Does it mean you’re not inhabiting your real life?” She was just embroidering a mute sensation, doing what married people do.

“Not you,” Tom said. “Nobody would say that about you.”

Too bad, she thought, the tourist bus couldn’t come by when his arm was around her, a true married couple out for a summery walk on a sunny street. Most of that would be accurate.

“I’d like to inhabit mine more,” Tom said as though the thought made him sad.

“Well, you’re trying.” She patted his hand on her shoulder and smelled him warm and slightly sweaty. Familiar. Welcome.

“Let’s view the housing stock,” he said, looking over her head up the hill, where the residential streets led away under an old canopy of elms and maples, and the house fronts were white and substantial in the afternoon sun.

On the walk along the narrow, slant, leaf-shaded streets, Tom suddenly seemed to have things on his mind. He took long surveyor’s strides over the broken sidewalk slabs, as though organizing principles he’d formulated before today. His calves, which she admired, were hard and tanned, but the limp from being shot was more noticeable with his hands clasped behind him.

She liked the houses, most of them prettier and better-appointed than she’d expected—prettier than her and Tom’s nice blue Cape, the one she still lived in. Most were pleasant variations on standard Greek Revival concepts, but with green shutters and dressy, curved, two-step porches, an occasional widow’s walk, and sloping lawns featuring shagbark hickories, older maples, thick rhododendrons and manicured pachysandra beds. Not very different from the nice neighborhoods
of eastern Maryland. She felt happy being on foot where normally you’d be in the car, she preferred it to arriving and leaving, which now seemed to promote misunderstandings and fractiousness of the sort they’d already experienced. She could appreciate these parts of a trip when you were
there
, and everything stopped moving and changing. She’d continued to feel flickers of the pleasing isolation she’d felt downtown. Though it wasn’t pure lonely isolation, since Tom was here; instead it was being alone
with
someone you knew and loved. That was ideal. That’s what marriage was.

Tom had now begun talking about “life-by-forecast”; the manner of leading life, he was saying, that made you pay attention to mistakes you’d made that hadn’t seemed like they were going to be mistakes before you made them, but that clearly
were
mistakes when viewed later. Sometimes very bad mistakes. “Life-by-forecast” meant that you tried very hard to feel, in advance, how you’d feel afterward. “You avoid the big calamities,” Tom said soberly. “It’s what you’re supposed to learn. It’s adulthood, I guess.”

He was talking, she understood, indirectly but not very subtly about Crystal-whatever-her-name-had-been. Too bad, she thought, that he worried about all that so much.

“But wouldn’t you miss some things you might like, doing it that way?” She was, of course, arguing
in behalf
of Tom fucking Crystal, in behalf of big calamities. Except it didn’t matter so much. She was at that moment more interested in imagining what this street, Noyes Street, would look like full in the teeth of winter. Everything white, a gale howling in off the bay, a deep freeze paralyzing all activity. Unthinkable in the late summer’s idyll. Now, though, was the time when people bought houses. Then was the time they regretted it.

“But when you think about other peoples’ lives,” Tom said as they walked, “don’t you always assume they’re making fewer mistakes than you are? Other people always seem to have a firmer grasp of things.”

“That’s an odd thing for a policeman to think. Aren’t you supposed to have a good grasp on rectitude?” This was quite
a silly conversation, she thought, peering down Noyes Street in the direction of where she calculated
she
herself lived, hundreds of miles to the south, where she represented the law, defended the poor and friendless.

“I was never a very good policeman,” Tom said, stopping to stare up at a small, pristine Federalist mansion with Greek ornamental urns on both sides of its high white front door. The lawn, mowed that morning, smelled sweet. Lawn mower tracks still dented its carpet. A lone, male homeowner was standing inside watching them through a mullioned front window. Somewhere, on another street, a chain saw started then stopped, and then there was the sound of more than one metal hammer striking nails, and men’s voices in laughing conversation at rooftop level. Preparations were in full swing for a long winter.

“You just weren’t like all the other policemen,” Nancy said. “You were kinder. But I do
not
assume other people make fewer mistakes. The back of everybody’s sampler is always messier than the front. I accept both sides.”

The air smelled warm and rich, as if wood and grass and slate walls exuded a sweet, lazy-hours ether-mist. She wondered if Tom was getting around in his laborious way to some new divulgence, a new Crystal, or some unique unpleasantness that required the ruin of an almost perfect afternoon to perform its dire duty. She hoped for better. Though once you’d experienced such a divulgence, you didn’t fail to expect it again. But thinking about something was not the same as caring about it. That was one useful lesson she’d learned from practicing the law, one that allowed you to go home at night and sleep.

Tom suddenly started up walking again, having apparently decided not to continue the subject of other people’s better grip on the alternate sides of the sampler, which was fine.

“I was just thinking about Pat La Blonde while we were down at the chowder house,” he said, staying his course ahead of her in long studious strides as though she was beside him.

Pat La Blonde was Tom’s partner who’d been killed when Tom had been wounded. Tom had never seemed very interested in talking about Pat before. She lengthened her steps to be beside him, give evidence of a visible listener. “I’m here,” she said and pinched a fold of his sweaty shirt.

“I just realized,” Tom went on, “all the life that Pat missed out on. I think about it all the time. And when I do, everything seems so damned congested. When Pat got killed, everything started getting in everything else’s way for me. Like I couldn’t have a life because there was so much confusion. I know you don’t think that’s crazy.”

“No, I don’t,” Nancy said. She thought she remembered Tom saying these very things once. Though it was also possible she had thought these things
about
him. Marriage was that way. Possibly they had both felt the same thing as a form of mourning. “It’s why you quit the force, isn’t it?”

“Probably.” Tom stopped, put his hands on his hips and took in an estimable yellow Dutch colonial sitting far back among ginkgos and sugar maples, and reachable by a curving flagstone path from a stone front wall to its bright-red, perfectly centered, boxwood-banked front door. “That’s a nice house,” he said. A large black Labrador had been lying in the front yard, but when Tom spoke it struggled up and trotted out of sight around the house’s corner.