Independence Day (71 page)

Though farther on and across from Village Hall on Haddam Green there is action, with plenty of citizens already arrived in musing good spirits. A red-and-white-striped carnival marquee has been put up in the open middle sward, with our newly refurbished Victorian bandstand shining whitely in the elms and beeches and crawling with kids. Many Haddamites are simply out here strolling around as they might on some lane in County Antrim, though wearing frilly pastel dresses, seersuckers, white bucks, boaters and pink parasols, and looking—many of them—like self-conscious extras in a Fifties movie about the South. Out-of-place country-yokel music is blaring from a little glass-sided trailer owned by the station where I read
Doctor Zhivago
to the blind, and the police and fire departments have their free exhibits of flameproof suits, bomb-defusing shields and sniper rifles set up side by side under the big tent. The CYO has just begun its continuous volleyball game, the hospital its free blood pressure testing, the Lions and AA their joint free-coffee canteen, while the Young Democrats and Young Republicans are in the process of hosing down a mudhole for their annual tug-of-war. Otherwise, various village businesses, with their employees turned out in white aprons and red bow ties, have joined forces behind long slug-bucket grills to hawk meatless leanburgers, while some costumed Pennsylvania Dutch dancers perform folk didoes on a portable dance floor to music only they can hear. Later on, a dog show is planned.

Off to the left, across from the lawn of Village Hall, where seven years ago I achieved the profound and unwelcome independence of divorce, my silver “Firecracker Weenie Firecracker” cart sits in the warm witch hazel shade, attracting a small, dedicated crowd including Uncle Sam and two other Clio Street bombers, a few of my neighbors, plus Ed McSweeny in a business suit and a briefcase and Shax Murphy wearing a pair of pink go-to-hell pants, a bright-green blazer and running shoes—and looking, despite his Harvard background, like nothing so much as a realtor. Wardell and Everick’s gleaming onyx faces are visible back inside the trailer under the awning. Dressed in silly waiters’ tunics and paper caps, they are dispensing free Polish dogs and waxed-paper root beer mugs and occasionally rattling the “Clair Devane Fund” canisters Vonda has made up in our office. I have tried now on three occasions to sound out the two of them about Clair, whom they adored and treated like a rambunctious niece. But they have avoided me each time. And I’ve realized, as a consequence, that what I probably wanted was not to hear words about Clair at all but to hear something life-affirming and flattering about
myself
, and they are merely wise to me and have chosen not to let me get started. (Though it’s also possible that they’ve been stung to silence now by the two days when they were held by the police, treated harshly and then released without comment or ceremony—deemed, after all and as they are, entirely innocent.)

And yet, all is as I’ve expected and modestly planned it: no great shakes, but no small shakes either—a fine achievement for a day such at this, following a day such as that.

I pull unnoticed to the curb on the east edge of the Green, just at Cromwell Lane, let down my window to the music and crowd hum and heat, and simply sit and watch: millers and strollers, oldsters and lovers, singles and families with kids, everyone out for a morning’s smiley look-see, then an amble up Seminary for the parade, before hearkening to the day’s remains with a practical eye. There is the easeful feeling that the 4th is a day one can leave to chance; though as the hours slide toward dark it will still seem best to find oneself at home. Possibly it’s too close to Flag Day, which itself is too close to Memorial Day, which is already too damn close to Father’s Day. Too much even well-motivated celebration can pose problems.

I of course think of Paul, cased in gauze and bandages in not-so-faraway Connecticut, who would find something funny to say at the day’s innocent expense: “You know you’re an American when you …” (get socked in the eye). “They laughed at me in America when I …” (barked like a Pomeranian). “Americans never, or almost never …” (see their fathers every day).

Surprisingly, I have not thought of him at length since early dawn, when I woke up in a gray light and cold from a dream in which, on a lawn like the Deerslayer’s, he was dragged to earth by a dog that looked like old Keester and torn bloody, while I stood on the porch nuzzling and whispering with an indistinct woman wearing a bikini and a chef’s hat, whom I couldn’t break away from to offer help. It is a dream with no mystery—like most dreams—and merely punctuates our puny efforts to gain dominion over our unbrave natures in behalf of advancing toward what we deem to be right. (The complex dilemma of independence is not so simple a matter, which is why we fight to be known by how hard we try rather than by how completely we succeed.)

Though where Paul is concerned I’ve only just begun trying. And while I don’t subscribe to the “crash-bam” theory of human improvement, which says you must knock good sense into your head and bad sense out, yesterday may have cleared our air and accounts and opened, along with wounds, an unexpected window for hope to go free. A
last
in some ways, but a first in others. “The soul becomes,” as the great man said, by which he meant, I think, slowly.

L
ast night, when I stopped in the moon-shot river village of Long Eddy, New York, a TOWN MEETING TONITE sign had been posted in both directions. “Reagan Cabinet Minister to Explain Things and Answer Questions” was their important agenda, there on the banks of the Delaware, where just below town single fishermen in ghostly silhouette stood in the darkly glittering stream, their rods and lines flicking and arcing through the hot swarms of insects.

At a pay phone on a closed-up filling station wall, I made a brief reconnaissance call down to Karl Bemish, to learn if the menacing “Mexicans” had had their fates sealed at the business end of Karl’s alley sweeper. (Not, I prayed.)

“Oh well, jeez, hell no, Franky. Those guys,” Karl said merrily from his cockpit behind the pop-stand window. It was nine. “The cops got them three skunks. They went to knock over a Hillcrest Farms over in New Hope. But the guy runnin’ it was a cop himself. And he came out the front blazin’ with an AK-47. Shot out the glass, all the tires, penetrated the engine block, cracked the frame, shot all three of ‘em in the course. None of them died, though, which is sort of a shame. Did it standing right on the sidewalk. I guess you need to be a cop to run a small business these days.”

“Boy,” I said, “boy-oh-boy.” Across silent, deserted Highway 97, all the windows in the belfried town hall were blazing and plenty of cars and pickups sat parked out front. I wondered who the “Reagan Minister” might’ve been—possibly someone on his way to prison and a Christian conversion.

“I bet you’re having a bang-up time, aren’t you, with your kid?” Mugs were clanking in the background. I could hear muffled, satisfied voices of late-night customers as Karl opened and shut the window slide and the cash register dinged. Good emanations, all.

“We had some problems,” I said, feeling numbed by the day’s menu of sad events, plus the driving, plus my skull and all my bones beginning to ache.

“Ahh, you prolly got your expectations jacked up too high,” Karl said, preoccupied yet annoying. “It’s like armies moving on their bellies. It’s slow going.”

“I never thought that’s what that meant,” I said, good emanations rising away into the mosquitoey darkness.

“D’you think he trusts you?” Clink, clink, clink. “Thanks, guy.”

“Yeah. I think he does.”

“Well, but you can’t tell when you’re getting anyplace with kids. You just have to hope they don’t grow up like these little Mexican twerps, pulling stickups and getting shot. I take myself out to dinner and drink a toast to good luck every third Sunday in June.”

“Why didn’t you have any kids, Karl?” A lone citizen of Long Eddy, a small man in a pale shirt, stepped out the front door to the top of the town hall steps, lit a cigarette and stood drinking in the smoke and considering the evening’s sweet benefactions. He was, I supposed, a disgruntled refugee from the cabinet minister’s explanations—possibly a moderate—and I felt envy for whatever he might’ve had on his mind just at that instant, the mere nothing-much of it: the satisfactions of optional community involvement, a point of honest disagreement with a trusted public servant, a short beer later with friends, a short drive home, a quiet after-hours entry to his own bed, followed by the slow caressing carriage to sleep at the hands of a willing other. Could he know, I wondered, how lucky he was? There was hardly a doubt he did.

“Oh, Millie and I tried our best,” Karl said drolly. “Or I
guess
we did. Maybe we didn’t do it right. Let’s see now, first you put it in, then …” Karl was obviously in a mood to celebrate not being robbed and murdered. I held the receiver out in the dark so I wouldn’t have to hear his rube’s routine, and in that splitting instant I missed New Jersey and my life in it with a grinding, exile’s poignancy.

“I’m just glad you’re all right down there, Karl,” I broke back in, without having listened.

“We’re pretty damn busy down here,” he brayed back. “Fifty paid customers since eleven a.m.”

“And no robberies.”

“What’s that?”

“No robberies,” I said more loudly.

“No. Right. We’re actually geniuses, Frank. Geniuses on a small scale. We’re what this country’s all about.” Clink, clink, clink, mugs colliding. “Thanks, pal.”

“Maybe,” I said, watching the pale-shirted man flick away his smoke, spit on the porch steps, run both hands back through his hair and reenter the tall door, revealing a coldly brilliant yellow light within.

“You can’t tell me ole Bonzo’s uncle’s
that
fulla shit,” Karl said vehemently, referring to our President of the moment, whose cabinet minister was only yards away from me. “Because if he’s that fulla shit, I’m fulla shit. And I’m not fulla shit. That’s what I know. I’m
not
fulla shit. Not everybody can say that.” I wondered what our customers could be thinking, hearing Karl bellowing away behind his little sliding screen about not being fulla shit.

“I don’t like him,” I said, though it made me feel debilitated to say so.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You believe God resides in all of us, nobility of man, help the poor, give it all away. Yakkedy, yakkedy, yak. I believe God resides in heaven, and I’m down here selling birch beer on my own.”

“I
don’t
believe in God, Karl. I believe it takes all kinds.”

“No it don’t,” he said. Karl might’ve been drunk or having another small stroke. “What I think is, Frank, you
seem
one way and
are
another, if you want to know the gospel truth, speaking of God. You’re a conservative in a fuckin’ liberal’s zoot suit.”

“I’m a liberal in a liberal’s zoot suit,” I said. Or, I thought, but certainly didn’t admit to Karl, a liberal in a conservative’s zoot suit. In
three
days I’d been called a burglar, a priest, a homosexual, a nervous nelly, and now a conservative, none of which was true. (It was not an ordinary weekend.) “I do like to help the poor and displaced, Karl. I sure as hell in fact dragged you to the surface when you were tits-up.”

“That was just for sport,” he said. “And that’s why you have so much effing trouble with your son. Your message is all mixed up. You’re lucky he’ll have anything to do with you at all.”

“Why don’t you bite my ass, Karl?” I shouted, standing in the dark, wondering if there wasn’t some simple, legal way to put Karl out on the street, where he’d have more time to practice psychology. (Spiteful thoughts are not unique to conservatives.)

“I’m too busy to gas with you now,” Karl said. I heard the cash register ding again. “Thanks a million. Hey, pardon me, ladies, you want your change, don’t you? Two cents is two cents. Next. Come on, don’t be shy, sweetheart.” I waited for Karl to blast back something else infuriating, something more about my message being mixed. But he simply put the phone down without hanging it up, as if he meant to return, so that for a minute I could hear him going about his business serving customers. But in a while I put my receiver back on the hook and just stared out at the sparkling, alluring river beyond me in the dark, letting my breathing come back to normal.

M
y call to the Algonquin and Sally had a completely different, unexpected and altogether positive result, which, when I got home and found out Paul had weathered his surgery as well as could be hoped, allowed me to crawl in bed with all the windows open and the fan on (no more thought of reading Carl Becker or
drifting
to sleep) and to swoon off into profound unconscious while the cicadas sang their songs in the silent trees.

Sally, to my surprise, was as sympathetic as a blood relative to my long story about Paul’s getting beaned, our never making it into the Hall of Fame, my having to stay in Oneonta, then heading home late rather than pounding down to NYC to share the night with her, and instead dispatching her to the nicest place I could think of (albeit for another night alone). Sally said she thought she could hear something new in my voice, and for the first time: something “more human” and even “powerful” and “angular,” whereas, she reminded me, I had seemed until this weekend “pretty buttoned up and well insulated,” “priestly” (this again), often downright “ornery and exclusive,” though “down deep” she’d always thought I was a good guy and actually not cold but pretty sympathetic. (I had thought most of these last things about myself for years.) This time, though, she said, she thought she heard worry and some fear in my voice (buzzy timbres familiar, no doubt, from her dying clients’ critiques of
Les Misérables
or M.
Butterfly
on their chatty return trips to the Shore, but apparently not incompatible with “powerful” or “angular”). She could tell I’d been “vitally moved” by something “deep and complicated,” which my son’s injury may have been “only the tip of the iceberg for.” It may, she said, have everything to do with my gradual emergence from the Existence Period, which she actually said was a “simulated way to live your life,” a sort of “mechanical isolation that couldn’t go on forever;” I was probably already off and running into “some other epoch,” maybe some more “permanent period” she was glad to see because it boded well for me as a person, even if the two of us didn’t end up together (which it seemed might be the case, since she didn’t really know what I meant by love and probably wouldn’t trust it).