Electric City: A Novel (14 page)

“Feel like an adventure?” Martin asked when he met Sophie just outside the library doors. She was wearing a sleeveless green button-down shirt that made her eyes look like they were full of leaves. Seeing her bright face was the remedy for the loneliness he had begun to notice whenever she wasn’t around.

“What kind of adventure?” she said. They followed the sidewalk, heading toward a small patch of freshly cut grass near the corner of Liberty and Jay Streets. The noon siren had just gone off at the factory a few blocks away. Martin brought a thermos of iced tea and a bag of potato chips; Sophie brought Swiss cheese and tomato on rye bread smeared with mustard.

“I’ve got to deliver a canoe to someone at Lake George,” Martin said. He was planning to call in sick the next day, which was true enough if you counted his longing for fresh air. The lake was less than an hour’s drive but usually felt like more.

“Let’s get into my truck and drive up to see Henry,” Martin said, having thought it through at least this far. All three of them next to a vast Adirondack lake could bring a wider view of what each of them held. Giving Henry the full benefit of the doubt could be easier if they were someplace removed from Electric City.

“Maybe we could even figure out how to stay overnight,” he added.

White people aren’t all alike,
he heard his grandmother’s voice murmuring with a note of hope.
You learn how to trust your choices.

The audacious excellence of the idea made Sophie laugh out loud.

“Absolutely,” she said.

M
IDGE’S HOUND DOG
Zeus was the first to hear Martin’s truck bumping up the road to the house, and he barked an excited warning. On her knees harvesting tomatoes in her vegetable plot, favoring her left shoulder, which had been sore since the previous morning on the golf course, Midge smiled even before she saw the pickup. Usually she resented intrusions, but this arrival was a welcome excuse to put down the basket and get to her feet. By the time Martin greeted Midge with an embrace, Zeus and Bear were already tussling in the grass.

“Lucky me,” she said. “Two visits in one week.”

Martin shrugged, pointed to the canoe strapped onto the truck. “I’m heading up to Lake George. Thought you might want to wish us well.”

Midge immediately recognized Joseph’s exquisite work, the harmonious curves and cedar details. In an instant, she was transported back to a sun-drenched summer day, splashing at the river’s edge. When Steinmetz was absorbed in a private puzzle, drifting too far away from the cabin to be interrupted, she waited impatiently for his return. Since her two brothers always preferred each other for playmates, Midge saved her discovered treasures for Proteus alone. Fossils engraved like secret messages from outer space, skeletons of baby birds who had crash-landed, oblong stones perfect for skipping. During his longest absences,
she built hiding places out of reeds and branches, arranged pebbles in the shape of constellations.

No matter how tired or hungry he might have been after hours of calculating, whenever he paddled back toward home, sunbaked and distracted, Midge cheerfully waved at him until the canoe scraped its landing in the mud. He would hand over his splashed papers and tuck a worn-out pencil behind her ear, promising a game of jacks before dinner.

Now, Martin was in front of her, not smiling at all. Even the dogs had settled into a quiet alertness, panting side by side in the shade. Her face asked the question without words.

“Annie sold it,” he said. “Someone in the Adirondacks wants it for a private collection. The choice was hers, I guess.”

He turned to squint in the direction of the garden and away from the truck with its captured prize. She could imagine his urge to untie all the ropes and call Annie, explaining that whatever agreement had been made, it could still be canceled. Martin must have tried to tell his grandmother he wasn’t yet ready to sell. Or wouldn’t ever be ready. Maybe he was hoping that once Midge knew whatever price was offered, she could offer more.

“Do you have time for a cup of coffee? I baked a strawberry rhubarb pie, in case you need extra temptation. Being retired is bringing out the homemaker in me.” She laughed and smacked her dirt-caked palms together.

Martin nodded with half a smile. “I’ve been told it’s impolite to say no to pie.”

While Martin reached for the garden hose to refill a water bowl for the dogs, Midge went inside to rinse her hands at the sink. She wiped a rag across the long kitchen table—one of the few pieces of furniture handed down from her mother, marked with scratches and stains from years of service to the Hayden clan. Countless dinners had been shared with Steinmetz, whose cigar ashes occasionally burned delicate, abstract patterns onto the oak’s surface. Midge sometimes rubbed her fingers along the table edge where he used to sit, as though it might be possible to bring the smoky-sweet aromas back to life.

The pie recipe had been her father’s favorite, but Midge couldn’t remember if she had ever served it to Martin before. Someone at the golf club had told her that rhubarb was good for strengthening the blood. Or was it Annie who had said that?

He took a seat in front of the warm plate, bending to inhale its fragrance before piercing the crust with a fork. “Oh, excellent,” he said, sighing. “You’re good at this.”

Midge sat down to eat her own slice in silence. Both Joseph and Annie had assured her she would know when the time was right to explain.

“Tractor doing okay these days?” Martin asked, wiping at the red stains around his mouth, shaking his head to decline a second helping, then changing his mind.

“Tractor Kitty is right as rain,” she said, serving him a piece of pie even larger than the first. She had already told Martin about Daddy Steinmetz taking his bicycle onto the canal barge
Kitty
so that he could ride farther along the towpath. She was fond of borrowing his lexicon for her own uses. Even her golf cart was named Baker in honor of his electric car, though she kept it as an inside joke shared only with his ghost. It was because he’d been the one to teach her to drive, all those
years ago, on the Wendell Avenue property and at Camp Mohawk too. No matter that she was twelve years old at the time.

Martin began washing the dishes while Midge remained at the table, studying his back. There was definitely something he wanted to discuss, maybe more than just the sale of the canoe.

“Are you going alone up to the lake?” she asked.

Still turned away from her, he leaned his hands on either side of the sink, tipping his head back to look at the ceiling, as if answers might be found there.

“Not exactly,” he said.

Midge waited to see if there was more he wanted to add, watching Martin’s fingers tap on the Formica. She tried to recall Joseph’s hands, certain they must have looked a lot like his grandson’s did now. She thought about how her own small hands had learned to wrap around a golf club for the first time at Pebble Beach during the family trip out west. How Steinmetz had brought them all on his long-dreamed-about vacation. Her golf trophies needed dusting like everything else in her house. Where did all the time go, now that she was supposed to have so much more of it?

“Is she someone from school?”

Martin pivoted and looked down at his feet instead of revealing his expression to Midge directly. “She’s just a friend,” he said.

Punctuating the conversation, Bear barked twice, and Zeus nudged open the screen door with his nose.

“I see,” said Midge, making an effort not to press the subject. There was a mathematics of the heart that each person had to discover on his own. That was one of the few things she had grown certain about.

“It’s all right,” Martin said to her, unconvincingly. “There’s a Van Curler involved too, but that’s another story.” He paused while Zeus
leaned his full weight against Martin’s legs as though to test the sturdiness of the young man’s balance. Through the mesh of the door, Martin could see that Bear was standing beside the truck and ready to get back on the road.

“Okay,” Midge said, agreeing to whatever unspoken request Martin had just made. “But can I tell you a story of my own first?”

Martin rejoined her at the table, choosing patience. Zeus stretched out beneath an empty chair. Beyond the screen door, he could hear Bear
harrumph
into a dusty pose.

“I was fourteen when Proteus died,” Midge said. “Months later, we were still in shock, especially my father, who had worked alongside him for so many years. We’d inherited the Wendell Avenue house, but my parents had decided to move us somewhere else, a smaller place that would be easier to keep up. And nobody seemed to understand how much
I
missed him. Or maybe they just figured I was a normal teenage girl with better things to focus on than grieving.” She laughed. “I was never normal!”

Martin smiled with her. Whatever
normal
meant, it was hardly anything he had aspired to.

“I didn’t even catch a glimpse of your grandfather for most of that first lonely summer,” she went on. “My brothers were always going somewhere else with their sports teams and friends and whatever. They had never been all that close to Daddy Steinmetz anyway, not like I had been. One weekend I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I realized that even though it was a long bike ride on my own, I had to get to the cabin. To the river.”

She traced some of the grain-sized burn marks on the table, remembering. In their house he’d had a special hardwood chair that was more like a stool for him to perch on, even while eating. These days it stood
anonymously in the corner of her kitchen where it could receive the most light, holding a simple clay pot in which bloomed a pale yellow orchid.

“And that’s where you saw Joseph,” Martin said quietly.

Midge nodded. “I was overheated and breathless from my ride, thinking I would cool off in the water. And there he was, just returning with the canoe,” she said. “Gliding in like someone in a dream, droplets catching sunlight on the tip of the paddle. You can’t imagine how clear and beautiful the river used to be in those days.”

Martin’s hands were in his lap, folded like a prayer.
You were there
, he thought.
And now you are here.

“Joseph didn’t appear at all surprised to see me,” she said. “And after he had carried the canoe to a dry patch of grass and reeds, we sat on the ground next to it for a while, our legs crossed. The red cedar glowed in the summer heat like something burning. Your grandfather told me that there was no reason to suffer about the death of our friend. That when the chambers of Proteus’s heart had lost their ability to work in unison, it was time to return to the heart of the earth. ‘They will become part of a new heart,’ Joseph said. I’ll never forget that.”

Midge and Martin looked at each other for a while in silence. All he had been told until today was that the remnants of the cabin had been taken far away, and the canoe along with it. The river-drenched memories would belong with Midge, and with the details she passed to Martin.
Matter neither created nor destroyed
.

“The rest of the story is this,” she said. “That canoe has been saved for you all this time. Not to worry about this other one going to a collector. We’re keeping the treasure that matters most.”

Sudden understanding poured into Martin’s body as though he sat at the base of a waterfall. No wonder Annie hadn’t allowed a single
word of discussion, had brokered the deal as though his interests didn’t concern her. No wonder Midge had always kept one of her sheds excessively weather-tight and locked even to him. She had another canoe, the one made for Steinmetz. The one saved just for him.
The treasure that matters most
.

Zeus clambered to his feet when Martin pushed his chair back to stand up. “Can I see it when I get back?” he asked.

Midge walked him out the door to his truck, where they hugged hard and let go. “Say hello to the lake for me,” she said.

A
UGUST HAD LANDED.
Under-watered lawns were scorched around the edges; blotches of tar on the pavement softened during the day, trapping bits of gravel and chewing gum wrappers. There were bulky new air-conditioning units being installed in window frames all over town. The Company siren blared like a fire alarm every noon, as though the muggy heat demanded even more exaggeration. In the center of downtown, the moon-faced clock on the Electric City monument had stopped, its hands paralyzed at ten and two like someone in a state of surrender.