Fortunate Lives (4 page)

“I’ll tell you,” a woman in the obstetrician’s office had said, “there’s nothing like it in the world,” also with a trace
of dolefulness. But no one could have made Dinah believe in the passion of being the mother of a child. Fathers are passionate,
too, but they guard their souls more carefully. They are able to experience a crisis of faith, fear of mortality—in the abstract—
apart
from the fate of their children. And while she did know women who wore their maternity indifferently, Dinah was suspicious
of them even while she sometimes envied them. But she didn’t really think of them as being anyone’s mother. She thought that
real mothers—all the mothers in the world—are simply the fools of the earth in the ways they live with hope, in the ways they
must continue to believe that they can save their own children. Momentarily overwhelmed with hopelessness, she had sat leaning
against the tiled wall of the Vet Clinic, abstractedly stroking the limp body of the cat.

By this evening, though, sitting at dinner with Martin and David and Sarah, Dinah was surprised to find the remembered image
of her children moving through the garden in the near dusk filling her mind and pulling her to the edge of an exhausted and
tentative peacefulness. She
got up from the table and began clearing the plates away while David and Sarah and Martin went out to pick the corn.

“I like the really small ears,” she said. “I want two of them.”

A large kettle of water was boiling on the stove, and the windowpanes had misted over, so she couldn’t see the three of them
moving through the cornstalks, but she was suddenly pleased for the moment just to have the knowledge of their being there.
She had been trying for a long time, now, to hold on to kindliness in the world, wherever she could find it, in lieu of the
terrible urgency of passion.

O
VER A PERIOD OF
thirty years, Arlie Davidson, the Howellses, next door neighbor, had walked a succession of dogs along a route that crossed
the corner of the property on his other side to reach the meadow that sloped up into Bell’s Forest. But one Saturday afternoon
the new owner of that property, Raymond Brickley, who had bought the house to use as a weekend retreat, was disgruntedly inspecting
the job the house painters had done in his absence when he caught sight of Mr. Davidson and his corgi. Mr. Brickley climbed
down from his ladder and moved a few steps in Mr. Davidson’s direction. All his mistrust of the local tradesmen and his suspicion
of the natives’ intransigent dislike of him were suddenly brought to bear on this flagrant transgression of his privacy.

“Oh, you!” he had shouted across all the lovely green grass. “You! Davidson! You bring that animal on my property again and
I’ll call the police!” Mr. Brickley was suffused with anger, he was trembling with outrage, and Arlie Davidson
was bemused. He studied his new neighbor with interest while his corgi moved busily along from one bush to another, marking
his territory.

The whole idea interested Mr. Davidson, who had no great faith that the local police would show up on time even in an emergency.
He smiled and lifted his arm in a dismissive gesture as he turned away again along the path. “Go right ahead,” he said. “By
all means…” Mr. Davidson’s indifference, of course, only heightened Mr. Brickley’s fury, and it radiated outward over his
clipped lawn and carefully pruned maple trees and was ultimately absorbed by the far stand of spruces behind which Mr. Davidson
and his dog had disappeared.

It was a minor incident, only the small infraction of trespassing, but Mr. Brickley’s passion had momentarily been murderous.
In some other place, perhaps under other circumstances, all that terrifying energy might have come to fruition; Mr. Brickley
might truly have acted upon such a pure concentration of rage and frustration. As it was, though, he sat down on his terrace
to await Mr. Davidson’s return and dozed off while gazing out at the gentle mountains rising beyond the enormous evergreens.
And in any case, Mr. Davidson came home the long way round.

The town of West Bradford has a population of eight thousand people settled into a valley in the northern reaches of the Berkshire
Hills. It is the home of Bradford and Welbern College, which is the primary employer in the area. Otherwise, most of the working
people in West Bradford are employed by one of the three light, clean industries that, taken together, provide jobs for a
few less than three hundred.

The doctors, dentists, and veterinarians are splendidly schooled. Having trained at such places as Johns Hopkins, Harvard,
Yale, Tufts, Cornell, and Penn, they have given up the competition and money of big city medicine so
that they and their families can enjoy a better quality of life, although the liability insurance has gotten entirely out
of hand and fewer young practitioners are moving to town.

Seven lawyers have offices in West Bradford, and they, too, have high-powered credentials, but have been drawn back to the
area by nostalgia for the college where almost all of them were undergraduates. Five more have residences in West Bradford,
but are associated with firms in nearby Bradford.

The town easily supports a large lumberyard and a building supplies distributor, and the masons, electricians, carpenters,
and plumbers are, by and large, excellent and honest and are often poets or painters as well.

Thirty real estate agencies serve the area.

In the summer there is climbing, hiking, biking, swimming, golf, and any racquet sport. The nationally famous West Bradford
Summer Theater Festival brings Broadway and movie stars right into town. There are fourteen hotels and motels, seven flourishing
bed-and-breakfasts, and twenty-four restaurants, including—June through August—the nonprofit café at the Freund Museum of
Art. In the early 1950s, Thomas Freund chose West Bradford as the site of his museum because of his belief that, in the event
of nuclear war, his collection would be protected from the inevitable shock waves by the gentle buffer of the surrounding
mountains. But he had also been much taken by the bucolic setting, with cows grazing right outside a room of Renoirs, ice
skaters on the pond beyond the Monets. He and his wife are interred beneath the marble steps of the entrance.

Tanglewood, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, is a half hour’s drive away, and Saratoga, which has the oldest thoroughbred
racetrack in the country and is summer host to the New York City Ballet and the Philadelphia Orchestra, is only forty-five
minutes in the other direction. Any of
those professionals who might have been dubious about turning their backs on life in a metropolitan area are now absolutely
delighted to discover that their property values have more than quadrupled in the past ten years, although they bemoan the
encroaching condominiums and developing resort complexes.

There are nine churches in West Bradford and a synagogue in nearby Bradford. Discounting church or synagogue attendance, which
is large, it is hard to gauge the depth of genuine and fervent belief in God, but certainly, within the community there is
a widely held belief in the need and comfort of religiousness, and the ministers and priests are generally more intellectual
than passionate, espousing compassion and tolerance as opposed to the fear of damnation.

Well over 150,000 tourists visit West Bradford every year, and their influx is simultaneously welcomed and dreaded. Martin
Howells’s friend, Vic Hofstatter, likes to tell his story of standing in line at the local farmers’ market behind a woman
in a beaded sweater and with carefully arranged hair—clearly not a New Englander. He was waiting to pay for two heads of lettuce
and some asparagus, and he had begun to feel sorry for the restless woman in front of him, who had a basket filled with local
bread and produce in an amount that could never be prepared and consumed before they lost their freshness. Eventually she
seemed to suspect she looked foolish to the girl at the counter making change from a fishing tackle box, and she turned to
Vic with a hawklike glance, casting her eye over his few items.

“Are you a tourist or a native?” she asked sharply, and Vic smiled back at her indulgently.

“Oh, I live here,” he said kindly. “And I have a garden of my own.” He was saving her from the embarrassment of being unskilled
at shopping in a strange town.

“Well, for God’s sake!” she said, clearly exasperated. “I’d think you people could find somewhere else to shop during the
season.”

What Moira Kaplan had said at the crowded opening of the summer theater had immediately become a cliché: that the tourists
should send their money and just stay home. It had even become a kind of code. Martin had been stopped in his progress along
the Carriage Street sidewalk one summer morning on his way to the post office by a group of tourists who had paused to observe
the buildings across the way. One of the women seemed particularly indignant, gesturing with a sweep of her arm to include
the entire street and the casually dressed natives. “We have reservations for three nights,” she complained. “I
did
think it would be a little more gentrified!” An acquaintance of Martin’s, making his way around the group by stepping into
the street, caught Martin’s eye and said under his breath, “Go home now and leave a check.” And he and Martin acknowledged
each other with a brief nod before they passed by and went on their way.

On the other hand, it is a lucrative business, tourism, and it is sometimes quite heady to be securely established in a place
where so many people want to be. Even the teenagers in town are casual and carefully unimpressed when Christopher Reeve or
Paul Newman comes into the deli to pick up a sandwich.

“And what’s the name on that prescription, please?” said Jennie Abrams, who works part time at the Carriage Street Pharmacy,
when she looked up and was confronted with Mary Tyler Moore across the counter.

The Board of Trade had erected a modest-sized sign at the entrance to Carriage Street, the one-street shopping area, that
said:

As it turned out, though, almost no one was pleased with the sign once it was up; it was so clearly ostentatious.
Whenever anything at all went wrong—when the outlying routes became impassable in the spring thaw, when grocery shoppers faced
one another over the winter produce in the supermarket and inspected the trammeled-looking lettuce—the residents would look
at each other and say, “Oh, well. After all, this
is
the jewel of the Berkshires,” with a wry shrug. Like any other place that engenders affection, it also inspires a kind of
proprietary contempt.

A certain amount of town-gown tension exists, although generally civility rules. West Bradford is blessed with a relative
lack of cliques and no prevailing social order, partly because of the interdependency of the inhabitants. When Mike Detweiler,
general groundskeeper to most of the wealthy homeowners in town, sent invitations to a slide show and narrative of his most
recent trip to Malaysia, where he studied tropical plants, not one of his customers cared to offend him in order to attend
the performance of the Empire Brass Quintet or to hear Richard Wilbur read his poetry—both events having been scheduled at
the college that same evening.

No one would deny that there is room for improvement in West Bradford. Because of the sudden upsurge in real estate prices
and the popularity of West Bradford as a “second home” community, very few mid-to-lower income families or new faculty are
able to buy houses at all. The town is primarily a community of white families, and the college and the Medical Alliance often
have a hard time keeping single or minority faculty or doctors. The rate of teenaged suicide—too high at any number—is above
average in West Bradford, and drug use is a problem, although it is quickly being surpassed by alcohol abuse.

Certainly West Bradford has its share of poverty, and the current national recession is hitting the area hard. There were
one actual and two attempted rapes on campus
in the past year, and most of the townspeople believe that a disappearance and two murders of young women over the past eight
years are the work of a serial murderer who has also struck in small towns nearby.

There is always a run of various and assorted small crimes—thefts and break-ins—and this past spring three men from Boston
robbed the West Bradford Drive-Thru Savings Bank, but were thwarted in their escape by a combination of muddy back roads and
the fact that they were spotted by the animal control officer, who was parked in his driveway eating his lunch. His suspicions
of something nasty afoot were aroused when the battered van they were driving careered wildly past him up the hill, headed
at fifty or sixty miles an hour toward a dead end. He called ahead on his C.B. to alert the police in Bradford as well as
West Bradford, and then gave chase in his pickup. The incident was amusing in the retelling but, in fact, the three men had
been panicky and well armed, and when they were finally trapped at the end of the road it was mostly just good luck that they
did not kill someone.