The Widower's Tale (58 page)

In the bathroom, he turned on the shower. He stripped off his clothes and stepped into the tub. He made the water as hot as he could stand. Inhaling the steam, he wished he could wash away so many months--or, more than time, whatever insolence or impunity had led him to do such fatally stupid things. He remembered the day he had first wondered, almost smugly, if Turo was little more than a groupie, a Moonie, a galley slave for the DOGS, but in the end Robert was the blind disciple: not even a disciple; more like a yes-guy, a patsy, a cog. A moth to the flame of groupthink.

Whatever he did after this, if he could just make it across to the
after
, like the opposite bank of a rushing river, it would be something independent. No labs, no lectures, no group anything. Not if he could help it. He would do more than ask questions; he would insist on pinning down the answers. He would look at them as closely as he could.

22

Small house. Big tree. Both a good deal older than I." Those were the first words I spoke in person to the young real estate agent I met at her office in Vigil Harbor on a gray day in early June. We'd traded telephone messages and e-mails.

"How old is that, exactly? As a point of reference." Though she appeared hardly old enough to drive a car, let alone help me find a place to live, Daphne did not treat me with the cloying respect so often leveled at me and my peers.

"Seventy-one."

"Well, that won't be a challenge. Piece of cake in a town like this."

I was reminded, with predictable sorrow, of the day I'd walked into TGO in need of bathing trunks. Daphne was half Sarah's age, but she had that forthright nature I've always loved in women who know themselves well. She had a head of boyishly short dandelion hair, a rose tattoo above her right ankle, and, on her left hand, an emerald the size of a peach pit.

She showed me five houses that day--two without the tree, for which I scolded her. "Just testing your resolve," she said.

The fifth was desperately in need of paint, its wide-plank floors scuffed and gouged, its kitchen and single bathroom--again to quote young Daphne--"a blank canvas if you're into renovation." I liked its back porch, the ratio of four fireplaces to three bedrooms, and, most of all, the katsura, a braggart of a tree rising like a glossy green phoenix from the lawn, roots breaching the ground for yards in every direction. Not much dared grow in its thirsty shade.

"There's some local legend about this tree that has to do with a shipping merchant, his daughter's dowry, and a fateful voyage to Japan," said Daphne, "but frankly, the minute I hear 'shipping merchant' in any story around here, I have a hard time not rolling my eyes. Historically--if that interests you--this was a town of hardscrabble fishermen, not colonial Onassis types."

The house, dwarfed by the tree, was built for a blacksmith in 1813. A parched wooden plaque by the front door made this claim. That door opened directly onto the street; as we stood in the small parlor, a FedEx truck passed within two feet of the window. "Good Lord!" I exclaimed.

"Not to worry," said Daphne. "Those guys drive by the inch."

What privacy this house possessed was all in back. At the nether end of the long yard stood a swaybacked shed (reminding me, on a smaller scale, of that dear old barn before Poppy and I gave it new life). Beyond a splintering fence, stacks of yellow mesh lobster traps stood higher than my head. They reeked a bit, but absent a view of the shore, they were a plainspoken reminder that the ocean was just around the corner.

Daphne led me into a rugged crawl space to show me the furnace and the knob-and-tube wiring. "Are you prepared to see an inspection report for a house this old? It's not for the faint of heart," she said when we emerged into the kitchen, standing upright again.

"My dear, I could write that inspection report. This house is a youngster compared with the one I've lived in for most of my life."

She gave me a sly smile. "I'd say that's more than long enough to become an expert on just about anything."

"Young lady, anyone else would call you impertinent."

"But you're not anyone else, are you?" She brushed the dirt from the cellar off her manicured hands and drew the brass bolt on the door.

With those manicured hands, Daphne passed me her pen when, a month later, I signed at the closing.

Not long after we became engaged, Poppy and I planned our retirement. We were walking along the Charles River and passed an elderly couple feeding scraps of bread to a family of ducks.

"You rarely see that as a coeducational activity," Poppy remarked.

"She's brainwashed him," I said, "over years of her excellent duck a l'orange."

Poppy groaned. "What will I brainwash
you
into doing by that age?"

"Joining the Peace Corps. Something liberal and in vogue."

"What I do not want to do," said Poppy, "is sit around on park benches feeding the birds. You're not far off about the Peace Corps. If we have children and manage to wean them properly, we could head off to the Congo, or El Salvador, and help build houses for the poor."

"My young joints quake at the thought of being up to that task forty years from now," I said.

"We could teach English. Teach reading. You'd be good at that, Percy. You could start libraries in equatorial Africa."

"Perfect. Me shelving books in the Kalahari Desert. I'm so glad that's settled."

Poppy put her arm around my waist. "So now that we know we can agree on the end of the story--and we can't complain about the beginning, can we?--what's left to learn about but the middle?"

"The middle is the tricky part," I said.

"You are too pessimistic," she said. "The middle is where the filling is, the jam, the custard, the cornmeal stuffing. The scallop inside the bacon."

We realized that we were hungry, and chilly, so we walked to the Square for lunch. We agreed soup would be just the thing. "We're already in the middle, you know," said Poppy. "And look how easy it is."

"Thus far," I said. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

Two years ago, once I made the decision to retire, I thought about those impetuous plans, the way we'd scoffed at fate by letting them pass our lips. Certainly I had no intention of heading off to equatorial Africa, not even for a vacation. But I had a misguided daughter to care for--that was to be my first challenge--and then I had books to read (a pleasantly never-ending task) and grandchildren to amuse, intimidate, and, for as long as I could manage, entertain. That's how I saw it, then.

Little did I know that my retirement would very soon involve a sudden, most unwelcome familiarity with courtrooms and judges' chambers, none the least bit grand or elegant, in niches of the city I'd never visited before and hope never to visit again. In my vital effort to gain the goodwill of countless "officers of the law" and the clerks who give access to such people, I did what my daughters had tried but never succeeded in getting me to do before: I shed my so-called attitude. I spoke the plainest of English. I did not offer humor where none was required. (None was ever required, let me tell you that.) I learned to defer to lawyers and their legalese, and on the rare occasions when they permitted me to speak, I learned to beg through bargaining.

I did none of this without help. Without, to put it properly, counsel. The counsel of, specifically, Anthony Giardini. When I reminded him that I'd learned his reptilian nickname from Douglas, he was quick to point out that in our case he would be taking the role of supplicant, not predator. The goal was to keep Robert out of prison, not to win him a yacht, a country home, or the custody of children. The goal was, in fact, to get him more or less
into
custody, said Anthony: custody of a nonpenal nature. Robert wasn't a child, and that was the tough part.

At first, Robert insisted repeatedly that he had never been a "member" of these DOGS, but he had to admit to the judge that he had participated without coercion in their acts of vandalism. His efforts to help the police locate a woman named something like Tabitha Earth Girl led to naught; he'd apparently been to her down-and-out neighborhood only once, after dark. Similarly fruitless were his attempts to find the deserted building in Lothian where they'd prepared for the "major action," as he referred to the debacle in my backyard.

Robert spent most of a weekend in jail before Trudy posted his exorbitant bond. Insisting she was too distraught and angry to see him yet, she sent me to retrieve him. I followed Anthony to a part of Cambridge that I could never, at gunpoint, find again.

Anthony handled the endless paperwork; I was relieved to stand aside. As soon as Robert and I were alone in my car, I focused on finding my way back to anywhere I recognized. I said nothing for some time, and neither did Robert. Once I was on familiar roads, however, I found that I was as angry as his mother. I shouted, "What in the world could have persuaded you to be a part of it? A part of any of these foolish acts? Please give me something to go on!"

"I was stupid," he said quietly.

I couldn't disagree with that. "This boy you trusted, this--where is he?"

"I have no idea, Granddad. They took away my phone, my computer, any way he'd try to get in touch with me."

"You think he's doing that. Really." I tried, but failed, to curb my sarcasm. Anthony would be the one to inform Robert that the police had found several of that boy's belongings in my cellar; that he had apparently slept there at some point, used my house as his burrow (and the underside of my barn as a storeroom). I had been too upset to inspect the place myself that night. From the lawn, I'd watched the Matlock police, suddenly so self-important, attack my cellar, comb through the rooms in my house. I had stood there, numb, horrified, until it dawned on me that anything implicating that cruel boy would come down on Robert's head as well.

"I was stupid, stupid, stupid to get involved, but he really believes in what he's doing, okay? Believes that the only way to change stuff is to take a radical approach. Turn the world upside down to change it."

"Do you even know who this boy is, other than a cunning sociopath?"

"He's someone with a very complicated past, but he's my friend. He is not a sociopath." Robert's head lay propped against the car window on his side, as if it were too heavy for his body to support. Periodically, he would have a harsh fit of coughing or wipe his nose on a sleeve. I could have offered him my handkerchief, but I decided to ignore his discomfort.

"A
friend
chooses your grandfather's home as a target for mischief?"

"Granddad, it probably wasn't his idea. Or maybe it was, but it wasn't about you. I mean, even Turo heard you go on about how Matlock's become this refuge for the filthy rich, this, like ... all those parents at the nursery school--Remember when you went on and on about Jonathan Newcomb, what he did to those fields?"

I pulled the car over and braked. "Are you even sorry? Or should I turn right around and hand you back to those wardens?"

Silence. Would he actually refuse to answer me? Then he wailed. How well I had succeeded in breaking him down.

"God, Granddad, I am so sorry,
so sorry
, I can't even tell you how sorry I am. I'm sorry, sorry,
sorry."

We were parked by the side of Route 2, in a weedy lot adjoining a long-defunct farmstand, another casualty of suburban wealth and developers' greed. I could remember buying tomatoes and corn at that farmstand with Poppy. Robert cried against the window, openly, loudly.

"Grandson," I said quietly, though I was still angry. "I understand what drew you in. I admit that when it was just fodder for the local media, I found it all amusing. So I was stupid, too. Or arrogant. Here." I gave him my handkerchief after all.

I drove on. By tacit, weary agreement, we abandoned words. I felt Robert look at me when I passed the turnoff for Matlock, continuing toward Ledgely. When we pulled into Norval's driveway, he said, "Granddad, is your house gone, too?"

"Let's just say that what remains of it will soon belong to Maurice Fougere. He tells me he will restore any damage with the utmost loving care. Something I cannot imagine devoting to anything or anyone at this particular moment, so bully for him."

Robert began to apologize all over again, but I didn't wait to listen. I got out of the car and started toward the house. Helena passed me with a look of sorrow. I cut across the grass to avoid her reach. I went upstairs, to the guest room with the twin beds that Robert and I would share like a pair of children (and aptly so) until his mother felt she could bear to see him--or until he was carted off to prison. Out the window, I saw Helena coaxing Robert from the car.

I no longer aim to run every day, but when I do set out, I enjoy learning the byways of my new town, where the houses, many two or three hundred years old, stand hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, angled every which way like guests pressed together at a cocktail party, liquor having stripped them of all inhibition. Many yards are no bigger than a bedspread. My new road (a very old road) is a short one-way lane that leads off a colonial thoroughfare flanked by larger, more symmetrical homes. At the far end, it forks: right takes me to the harbor; left, toward the burial ground that occupies the highest hill in town. The oldest graves dominate the summit, where revolutionary patriots--in their day, insurgents and rebels--are lauded on one worn, tilted slab after another. Granite steps set into the hill take me, if I watch my footing, to a plinth erected in 1848 as a mourning and memorial for sixty-five men and boys who set forth from Vigil Harbor on a dozen fishing vessels and died together in a single storm, leaving--as the inscription so chillingly reports--
43 widows, 155 fatherless children, and many a heart cleft in twain
. Nothing like a hit of hardcore history to put your own troubles in perspective.