The Widower's Tale (3 page)

"Good Lord," I exclaimed, irresistibly moved.

"You see? Isn't it just heavenly? And it's all super-safety glass," said Clover, knocking on one of the windows. "Practically impossible to break."

Along the outside walls, shelves painted in a dozen shades of green and purple held plastic bins of wooden animals, silk scarves, pom-poms, crayons, miniature scissors ... all the tutti-frutti paraphernalia of a childhood pictured in magazines. On the paneling between the skylights hung posters of wildflowers and exotic birds; on the floors lay soft multicolored mats; in smart blond shelves stood books with extravagantly artful jackets. From the angled ceiling of each room hung a fan. Swiftly yet almost silently, they stirred and cooled the air.

"Good Lord," I said again. "And to what slum did we send you and your sister for nursery school?"

"There was no Elves and Fairies then," said Clover. "There was just Mrs. O'Connor's playgroup in the basement of the Artillery." She turned to look at me. "Which was just fine, Daddy. We loved it."

She led me down the long hall toward the back; halfway there, to one side, I glimpsed an alcove holding three elfin toilets. The tiles formed a glittering mosaic of the sky: midnight blue and gold, van Gogh's cosmos boiling with comets.

I remembered then that Maurice's firm specialized in art museums. He'd designed a wing at the Fogg during my final years at Harvard.

"Come see the view," my daughter urged.

Filling the back wall of the loft, from my waist to well above my head, was a vast triangular window. Below us lay the pond as I had never seen it, for this wall had always been solid, opaque. I felt almost dizzy as I surveyed it--not because I have a fear of heights but because it seemed inconceivable that I could view this place I knew so well, better than almost any other place in my entire life, in a way I had never viewed it before.

"How can this be?" I muttered.

Clover laughed, misinterpreting something I hadn't meant to say aloud. "How it can
be,"
she said, "how it came out like this, was through the incredible generosity of all the people who wanted us to get it exactly right. Not to mention you, Daddy. Without you, God knows where we would be.
If
we'd be!"

I did not look her in the face, not wanting to share her raw emotion. Instead, I continued to survey the landscape stretched below me. I saw that the maples on the far side of the pond were already hinting at fall, a blush of orange in their crowns I would never have seen from the ground. I saw the roofs of the Three Greeks, a trio of Greek Revival houses that shared the opposing shore. I saw the pale hot summer sky as the wide plane of water so faithfully portrayed it. And for the first time, I saw the exact shape of the pond, not just as it is pictured on maps of the town but as it exists in nature: a paisley, an attenuated raindrop, a tear.

A phone rang. Clover went back down the hall. I heard her voice: "Elves and Fairies! Clover Darling here! May I help you?"

"Good heavens, Poppy," I whispered. "What a world."

"What a world indeed."

My heart seized as I turned around. Smiling at me from inside one of the classrooms was a pixieish young man, wiry and slight as a gymnast, his hair a compact yellow shrub.

"Ira Schwartz," he said. "I didn't mean to make you jump."

We shook hands. Churlishly, I withheld my name. Pointlessly, too.

"You'd be the heroic, legendary Mr. Darling," he said, cocking his head slightly. "I'm the new guy here, but I know all about
you."

Rampant freckles, a coy smile: the perfect Puck. Then it came to me. I laughed. "Ah yes. You'd be the fellow who wants to turn my poor old tree into a high-rise hotel."

"Oh that
tree
, can I tell you ... rarely have I met a tree like that. It's so"--he shook his golden head--"so royal."

"Yes, it is."

"But I assure you, Mr. Darling, that what I propose to do--and only if you're willing--won't compromise your tree in the slightest. Not one bit."

Down the hall, I could hear Clover involved in a conversation about toilet training (apparently now called toilet
learning)
.

I leaned toward the pixie and said, "Do you know why I've allowed my life and my property to be thrown helter-skelter by this endeavor?"

Finally, I'd silenced the fellow. He regarded me unwaveringly, however, eyebrows raised, respectfully attendant. "Well," he finally said, "I'd be curious to know, but only if it were my business."

"It's not, but I'll summarize. Family. Not money, not altruism, not--
not
--a nostalgia for the company of children."

He nodded, but his hands stayed in the pockets of his rather tight blue jeans. "Mr. Darling, I can take no for an answer."

"Young fellow, I'm not giving you an answer. I'm giving you a context." I spoke cheerfully, not disdainfully.

"I didn't mean to confront you," he said. "I'm sorry if it seemed that way. I guess I interrupted your tour...."

I looked at my watch, if only to give us both a graceful out. "My people will be in touch with yours."

It took him a moment, but then he burst into courteous laughter. "And my people will be ready to negotiate. I shouldn't tell you this, but they're softies."

He went back into his classroom, and I retraced my steps down the long, lovely hallway. Clover, still on the phone as I passed her office, made a desperate face, but we waved to each other. I blew her a kiss.

Outside, the afternoon heat struck me like a mallet, and I decided it was time for my final naked daylight swim. From mid-May to late October, I swam virtually every day, rain or shine or fog, and I hadn't owned a pair of swimming trunks in God knew how long. A week before, Clover had told me in no uncertain terms that I was to give up this habit; never mind that I made my way between the pond and the outdoor shower in a towel.

I do not believe in ghosts. Yet undeniably, over the years since Poppy's death, there were times when I swam in the pond and felt haunted: not by Poppy herself (that might have felt merciful, in a way) but by the doubts that I would never, ever share with anyone about the way in which she died. Swimming, for me, has always been a kind of meditation, not a form of exercise. The wild silence of "my" pond was a part of that meditation. Crickets, frogs, songbirds, peepers--each in its season--set the rhythm of my breathing and my brain. (I had learned to shut out the occasional distant mower.)

Half an hour later, as I drifted placidly on my back, watching the clouds above me do the same, a whole new sound invaded my world: from open windows, the bantering of the teachers as they readied the loft--the school--for the inaugural gathering that night. Voices carry surprisingly far across water. Except for Ira, the would-be tamer of my tree, the voices belonged to women, all maternal in the extreme, blessed with sunny outlooks and sunny laughter to match. "Did you fill the sand table, Joyce?" "Oh, aren't these new smocks adorable!" "I love watching the first-time dads scroonch down in the tiny chairs, don't you?" And then the pixie spoke: "Do you suppose that if Dick Cheney and all those joint chiefs were forced to hold their meetings in preschool chairs, maybe we wouldn't be in this ghastly war?" Uproarious laughter followed. One of the women said, "Ira, that is a beautiful thought."

I beheld a sudden mental projection of my heirloom beech wearing, like a turban, a miniaturized Guggenheim Museum.

I rolled over and swam the length of the pond, back and forth several times. I tried to concentrate on the pleasure of my increasing fitness rather than the treacly human birdsong that was, I feared, to taint a ritual whose importance to me no one else could ever know.

As for my running routine, that was exercise pure and painful. I had decided to make it a daily obligation in April of that year, on the day after my seventieth birthday, a month after my retirement from Widener Library: a time in life when it's easy to see yourself as headed downhill fast. And so, though I would vary my route in other ways, I always turned left at the foot of my driveway, aiming myself up the long hill toward the old meetinghouse and the town green.

Not long after settling into my regimen of touring the nearby streets on a regular basis, I began to notice a number of onerous signs that the character of my town was under siege. Especially disturbing was that I did not know whether these changes had been going on behind my back for years or had arisen recently, even suddenly; whether I could hope that, if the latter was true, the changes might somehow be reversed.

I noticed the first affront in May, the day I decided to turn onto Fox Farm Lane--a road I had not taken in years, since it is a self-referential loop serving only its residents. I'd passed but a handful of houses when I noticed that several wore new coats of paint in highly untraditional colors, that a cobbled drive had been laid where I remembered a long dirt track, that two dozen young maples had been planted at robotically regular intervals along the boundary of a lawn, each one cabled and braced, replacing a good length of the tumbledown antique stone wall flanking the road. I was thinking what a pretty penny those trees must have cost, what a tasteless shame it was to have dismantled that wall, when I rounded the first sharp curve and saw it.

I would have been no more shocked to come upon a trailer park than I was to behold the addition on the Harris Homestead: a vast, malignant cube of clapboard and glass jutting abrasively into the surrounding woodland. It was nothing short of a cardinal sin against the soul of that fine, stoic saltbox.

The Harrises have not lived in their eponymous house for nigh on two centuries, but this was the sort of town--or had been the sort of town--where people who bought such a house, formerly the sole dwelling on your typically rugged New England farm, regarded themselves not as owners but as stewards, keepers of the historic flame. The addition featured an aggressively shiny picture window and bulbous skylights--three!--as well as a new chimney in a rough stone that clashed with the center chimney of faded brick.

Had our relationship been true to its cordial facade, I would have rushed home and called my next-door neighbor--Laurel Connaughton, chairwoman of the Historical Forum--to inquire about this atrocity. The opening of Elves & Fairies in my barn was hardly the crux of our covert feud; there was her Nosey Parker quest to open a wall in my own ancient house (in which she believed there was a "secret passageway," based on her furtive, inebriated knockings at a Christmas party many years past) and, dating even further back, our endless dispute over the maintenance of shoreline on our side of the pond.

Year after year, Mistress Lorelei insisted on "grooming" the tall grasses and thickets on her part of the perimeter, imperiling the communities of bullfrogs and birds that relied on this tangle for habitat. Without my permission, however, she could not spray for mosquitoes. In part just to irritate her, I had installed half a dozen bat houses on the trees that divided our two lawns. (Actually, my grandson Robert installed them.) She was terrified of the creatures and tried to make an official protest. Hal Oxblood, director of the Conservation Commission, informed her that bats consume several times their body weight in mosquitoes on a daily basis, thus fulfilling her ultimate objective. I did not correct him on this point, though Robert had told me it's a modern myth: a useful myth, he pointed out, since bats need all the good PR they can get. (In fact, he told me, their appetite tends toward moths and beetles.)

Alarming discovery number two occurred a week or so after my unsettling tour of Fox Farm Lane. The first premature heat wave had struck, and the sky was clear, yet all of a sudden I felt rain as I ran onto Wharton where it forks away from Quarry. Puzzled, I stopped. I held out my hands. Lo and behold, the people who'd bought the Weisses' house (people who lived a quarter mile from me but on whom I had never laid eyes in their year-plus of residence) had installed an in-lawn sprinkler system. Where did they think they were living, Grosse Point? Yet I had seen no complaints about this--or about the architectural ravaging of the Harris Homestead--in the pages of the
Grange
. Was I the only citizen who regarded these developments as vulgar and outlandish, a sign that the end of Matlock as I knew it was surely at hand? Perhaps the absence of outrage in the letters column was in itself another sign of the end.

I began to hunt for further aesthetic offenses--and therefore saw one nearly every day that summer, from the faux Williamsburg streetlamps planted in front of our nineteenth-century meetinghouse to the sudden, stunning absence of the magnificent alluvial boulder that had rested literally forever at the bottom of Cold Pond Way. (Who in the world had removed it? Where in the world had it
gone?)
Yet what convinced me we had crossed a line was something far less monumental: my sighting in July of two Bernese mountain dogs, a pair of opulently pampered creatures as black and shiny as limousines--and good Lord, nearly as big--fancy-pantsing along my road with their nymphet owner, her derriere barely the size of a grapefruit, her mane a cunningly gilded fleece, her T-shirt flecked with
rhinestones
.

Clover had mentioned the dogs earlier that month, gushing on about what gorgeous animals they were, but my gut response on seeing them in the flesh was not so admiring. I looked at their collars--green bands printed with rows of red lobsters--and at their owner's cantaloupe-colored loafers and in a synaptic flash recalled what old Ben Stewart had whispered to me at the candlelight service two Christmases past, just before his final heart attack. "Percy, mark my words: our lovely village has become, alas, an enclave." I had humored him with agreement, though at the time I thought he was merely bitter about his sons' insistence on selling his house, the surefire real estate bonanza outstripping all fondness for their childhood home, with its wide lazy porch and its pocket orchard of eight wizened apple trees that bore fruit without any coddling.

As soon as I got home that day, the day of the dogs, I went straight to my
OED
(which Robert irreverently calls my "big dic"). I did not even pause to shower; sweat dripped from my bushy eyebrows onto the magnifying glass as I scowled down at the page.
Enclave: a portion of territory entirely surrounded by foreign dominions
. Ben was an English teacher at our top-notch elementary school, so he used words like surgical instruments.