Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (37 page)

“So, O.,” Hayley said, “you finally believe people care?”

“Everybody but you, maybe.”

“Gimmee a break!” she said, punching him on the arm.

“‘I see,' said the blind man, and he picked up his hammer and saw.” It was Hayley's favorite proverb and he'd heard it ever since he was a kid. She smiled.

Milt was thrust forward by Penny. Milton Plotkin the Patriarch held a plaque. Under duress, sweat pouring down off his forehead onto his chins, his eyes twitching as if, Orville thought, in a nascent case of Tourette's. “You and me have had our differences, Orvy, like in hotel management.”

No one laughed.

“Just read the plaque, Milt,” Penny said tightly.

“But, in fact,” Milt went on, trying to recover, “it hasn't been all that bad having you here.” This, too, went over like a lead balloon.

“Daddy, stop!” Amy said. “Just read it?”

Milt held up the plaque, one of those blue historic markers they put on buildings.

HERE LIVED THE TOWN DOCTOR

ORVILLE ABRAHAM ROSE

AUGUST 14, 1983–AUGUST 27, 1984

“Jesus, Milt,” Orville said, “you make it sound like I've died.”

“Maybe you have,” Milt said, “and this, with me, is Heaven!” Finally, a laugh.

Henry Schooner, exuding the wholesome scent of toasted oats, rode the laughter to the front of the crowd. The marvelous public Voice made some brief remarks, ending with, “I knew Orvy as a boy, I knew his mother as a great lady when I, too, was a boy, and a great mother, and now I can say from the bottom of my heart that Orvy the boy has grown up to be Orville Abraham Rose the man—a fine man, our very own, however brief, ‘Dear and Glorious Physician.' He's cared for us for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health—”

“What're you gonna do, honey,” Nelda Jo called out, “marry him?”

“We can all dream, Mother,” Henry replied, “can't we?”

Everybody thought this was about the funniest thing going.

“And Dr. Orville Rose,” Henry went on, “has shown us something incredibly important: that despite our differences we can all work together for the good of Columbia, the good of America, and the good of the world. It's like what a friend of mine who lives in New York City told me the other day, when I asked how he could possibly stand to live there. ‘It sucks,' he said, ‘but we're all in it together.'” He paused. “Well, friends, we're one up on New York City, as our dear friends the New Yorkers who have come to Columbia to live and make their fortunes can attest to—in our town it doesn't suck, it
shines!
”
As he said it, his face, too, seemed to shine. “Yes, friends, it shines, and it shined brighter this whole year with our dear town doctor here, the
good
doctor Rose. Yes, it shines, and we're all in it together. God bless you, Orville, and—”

Many in the crowd shouted out with him, “and God bless America!”

“And vote Schooner!” someone cried out. “Vote early and often in the Republican primary on September the 15th.”

Henry smiled, and said, “Thank you. One more thing. In Orvy's name, Nelda Jo and Junior and Maxie and I are donating the use of Schooner's Spa three hours per week for disabled boys and girls of Columbia. The Orville Rose Memorial Hours will start next month. Thank you, friends, and, again, may the Good Lord bless you and keep you.”

Pure
kitsch,
Orville thought, but he's right. A town this size, you have to get along. People who hate each other for a time are nice to each other for another time—like tonight with Milt, Americo, Packy, and others. One minute they're screwing you, the next they're friends with you, and there's no connection in between. What's real? What's fake? Who cares? Maybe Selma was right in her rules—
SO WHAT
? and
WHAT'S NEXT
?

Looking around, he realized that over the year he'd doctored just about everybody in the room, except the Schooners and Penny and Milt. I know all their secrets, he said to himself, have kept their secrets, and when I see them out in the world I hear all their lies—and they see me hearing their lies. As Bill had said, “In this office, you lift up the lid and look at the truth.” Corny as it sounds, he thought, the right word is “privilege.” Yeah, it has been a kind of privilege. And the most corny thing is that they seem sad to see me go.

Penny, too, showed no sign of her prior viciousness. She handed him a present from her and Amy. A black sweatshirt, on the front of which, spelled out in glittering sequins, was:

ROME

PARIS

LONDON

COLUMBIA

Toby oop den Dyke gave him a framed blowup of the photo of Orville chained to the
GENE
   
     
HOT
  —which got a lot of laughs, even from Packy and Americo and Milt—and Tommy Kline and Whiz, cocaptains of the Fish Hawk basketball team, gave him an old framed black-and-white photo of the three of them holding aloft a trophy with the caption
FISH HAWKS IN ROMP TO CLASS B TITLE
, 1962. Johnny Holsapple, a smart classmate turned into dairy farmer, presented him with a brass cow engraved with
BOTHWAYS FARM, WEST GHENT
. Orlando Durney gave him a framed photo of himself and Selma in front of a dilapidated Olana, clearly before the start of Selma's campaign. Americo's two gifts to him were a key to the city and no official remarks. Mrs. Tarr, pigeon free, had done a pen-and-ink sketch of the one-room Ichabod Crane Schoolhouse where he'd first met Miranda—which tipped his heart over and sent it plunging weightlessly down into nowhere.

“Speech, Orvy, speech!”

Shyly, Orville rose to speak. Someone called out, “Look out for breakage!” People elbowed each other, laughing, but glanced around furtively, some in fact positioning themselves along the sightlines and pathways for safe exit from the house.

“When I came here a year ago,” he began, “I thought it would be, well . . . a kind of hell. But now, while I can't exactly call it a kind of heaven, it's been a year filled with . . .” He stopped.
They're gone! Miranda and Cray, gone!
He stopped, unable to shake it. He tried to breathe. For a few seconds he was silent. Finally, fighting tears, and with his voice trembling, he said, “with love for those who are no longer with us. Thanks.”

Silence, broken by sniffles and coughs. Stillness.

Many times in his travels Orville had experienced moments like this, when a gathering of people falls silent, and then still, at about eleven at night. All over the world, he found, people would give the same explanation for the stillness: it was a sign of angels passing overhead.

Could it be? he asked himself now. Here in Columbia? In the ongoing stillness, he considered it. Maybe it could. I mean, how could you ever prove that it wasn't?

And then, like Fish Hawk hoopsters after a moment of prayer in the locker room before the big game with the dread Niskayuna, the crowd broke. Talk and laughter and shouts and cries and party tricks like picking up a chair by one leg with one hand resumed and carried the Columbians along. The group split into smaller and smaller ones and then the niggle of babysitters and the next day's work and dyspepsia and sciatica and rheumatica saw most of them take their leave.

Just after midnight, as Hayley and Amy and Orville were cleaning up the plates, glasses, and cigarette and cigar butts, the front doorbell rang. Orville went to answer it.

Miranda Braak. Before he could say anything he heard a cry and felt something hit him in the stomach, almost bringing him down, and he knew it was Cray.

“Hi, Orvy—” the boy started to say but then he was overwhelmed with joy and started bawling like a baby. Orville started to cry too. The boy wanted to hide his tears, and so Orville pulled him up into the crook of his neck, the boy's hair against his cheek, both of them crying. Orville recalled for the first time in his life how, when he was Cray's age and had been taken by Selma for a month-long trip to California to see Selma's crippled Aunt Anna and hadn't really thought of Sol at all the whole time, when the old propeller plane had touched down back at La Guardia and he had seen his father, he had felt a breakout of love and had found himself crying crazily and doing just what Cray was doing now, burying his face in his dad's neck. And then he had started talking, talking wildly about California and the paddle boats at Catalina Island and Disneyland and the tar pits and the farmers' market—and that's what Cray started doing now, only it was about North Dakota and the seas of wheat and Auntie Heyward's farm and the horses and the pigs.

The boy in his arms, he turned to Miranda across the threshold. As gently as one would brush aside a stray tear, they each took the one step to each other, he sensing that she was stepping with her good leg, she realizing how substantial he was in real life and how he'd lost matter in her memory during the months apart, and then there they were, Cray and Miranda and Orville all in each other's arms, crying like crazy.

“Happy birthday, Doc,” she said, wiping away tears. “Sorry we're late. We just drove in from North Dakota.”

“Unbelievable! But why?”

She ignored the question. “We saw the photo in
The Crier.
That was great!” She was beaming. “Simply great!”

“What the hell happened to you?”

Her eyes told him it was too much to tell right then, in the whirlwind of Cray and the re-meeting. “Give me a little time.”

“Orvy, listen! I learned how to milk a cow and milk a goat and drive a combine, wanna hear?”

“Totally!” Cray started to tell him, but then Amy was there and started crying and that set everybody off again.

Soon the hour caught up with the boy. Orville carried him up to Selma and Sol's big bed. Then he and Miranda unloaded essential items from the car. The Ford Country Squire looked battered and worn but triumphant for making it back from North Dakota. He carried their suitcases and the birdcage with the zebra finches. The finches sang and Starlight shrieked. For anyone to sleep, the birds had to be separated and so they were. Miranda carried in a big typing paper box containing her thesis.

All, exhausted and high, went to bed—Hayley in the guest room, Amy in Penny's old room, Miranda and Cray in Selma and Sol's, and he in his turret.

At two in the morning Orville was still awake, staring out his window onto the square. He was too wired to sleep, sensing for the first time since he'd been back that the house was
full.
It was a home to real live sleeping people with lives all the subtle colors of rainbows and all the power of diesel combines harvesting those seas of wheat, machines that were the whales of the plains.
As if a family, yes.
He could almost hear the breathing of each of them—Amy, Hayley, Miranda, Cray, the finches, Starlight who still believed it could fly but could still only fly down and always slept facing the water dish. He sensed so much life in the house, the place suddenly so full of hope, that he was sure that in this love nest there was no way that his dead mother would dare appear.

A knock on his bedroom door. Miranda stood there in one of Sol's bathrobes, one with the logo of a Spanish conqueror's helmet and the name of their golf course in Florida, El Conquistador.

“Hi,” she said. “Can we talk?”

“Sure. I have a special place. Can you climb the ladder to the roof?”

“With help.”

“Let's go.”

He helped her up to his boyhood sanctuary, the flat tin roof. He brought up a folding chair for her to sit on and sat beside her on the warm tin. This, he told her, was the only place in the house where he'd found any peace or privacy or fullness, the only place for him in the Family Rose. He pointed out his old pals the copper beech, the larch, the giant maple, and the summer constellations of the tilting stars, the shy sliver of moon. They fell silent, comforted.

“I left for a lot of reasons,” she said, in answer to his unasked question. “I probably know only about sixty percent of them, even now. I was hurt—but that wasn't the main thing.” She hesitated. “I just couldn't bear to watch what we had together fall any lower, not with the savageness we both showed the last time, on the bench under the catalpa, by the stream.”

“Horrible, yes. I'm so sorry.”

“Me too.” Tears rushed to her eyes, and she blurted out, “It's incredible to see you again. I . . .” She paused, swallowed hard. “I haven't stopped loving you, you know.”

He was startled, affirmed. “And I you. You and Cray were with me every day.”

“But I shouldn't say that. You're leaving, right?”

“Right. I've got my ticket out.”

“Where to?”

“Rome.”

The word sank in. “Ah.” She tried to breathe. “Maybe we shouldn't even talk,” she said. “Just forget it?”

“Can't. Just seeing you and Cray again, it's hard to imagine that there's not still a sliver of hope for us, isn't it?”

“Yes.” She wanted desperately to say more but could not.

Crickets did their thing with their hind legs for a while.

“Tell me everything,” he said at last, “from the time you left.”

She told him about packing up everything and then slipping away at night, dropping off the Scomparza box on his porch on the way out of town. Mrs. Tarr was the only one who knew where she was going, but not why, and was sworn to secrecy—she would be her lifeline to Columbia. They drove west across the grand, seemingly optimistic sections of America and in a few days reached her Auntie Heyward's farm, an island in the archipelago of farms in the ocean of wheat, hundreds of miles west of Grand Forks. She told Cray nothing except that she and Orville had had a falling-out—as he had noticed—and had broken up and that they were taking a geographical cure for the summer. Cray would be the man of the house and the farm and he would love it.