Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (12 page)

“Worth Saving?” he called out to her through the clattering rain.

“What?”

“Worth Saving?”

“Yes! ‘Worth Saving,' most definitely, yes!”

Part Two

No one is responsible for their face
until they're forty.

—
Abraham Lincoln (apocryphal)

· 9 ·

The next Sunday afternoon, Miranda Braak was driving into Columbia toward the Worth Hotel to meet Mrs. Tarr and Orville and his niece, Amy. Orville had called the morning after their schoolhouse meeting, saying he'd like to see her again and how about the next Sunday afternoon.

“We could talk more history,” he said. “Starting at 1803.”

“Why talk when we can do?” she answered. “I mean, if you'd like, we could visit a historical site. I promised Mrs. Tarr—she's my coconspirator from the Daughters of the American Revolution, the DAR—that I'd do an hour's picketing with her at the Worth. We could start there.”

“Deal.”

Miranda still felt high from the afternoon in the schoolhouse. Like a kid anticipating a great tomorrow, she'd had a restless night and had awakened early, even before her son, Cray. All week long she'd been trying to match the reality of the man with what his mother had told her.

Selma had said that in the summer of 1961, when Orville was sixteen, she had come home from brain surgery at Albany Medical Center. She left home a beautiful woman. Two months later she came back with one side of her face slack, an eye sewn shut, and her shaven head in a turban. Back then, the normal way to handle such a thing was not to tell your children what the surgery was and not to allow them to visit. Weak and depressed and wanting to die, the only thing that kept her alive, Selma said to Miranda, was her children, “wanting to see them grow up and settle down.”

When she came home that June, Sol tried his hardest to help, but hey, it was golf season. Her daughter, Penny, at loose ends after graduating from New Paltz State Teachers College and dating Milt Plotkin up in Albany, was skittish about caring for her. Milt was about to take off on a Beth El Synagogue Summer Program to a
kibbutz
and had invited Penny to join in the Dead Sea fun. Selma encouraged Penny to go, to pursue being pursued by Milt—as Selma had put it, “sacrificing my happiness for my only daughter's only chance at her own.”

Which left Orville. That summer he had fallen in love for the first time, with a Columbian girl named Laurice. “Nice, but Lithuanian,” Selma had said. He finally seemed to be coming out of his shyness, Selma thought, having friends on the basketball team, and hanging around with Bill Starbuck. He was blossoming at last, his days and nights full of adventure.

“But you know what?” Selma had said. “Despite the pull of his very exciting life, Orville was there for me. Day after day, week after week, my son sat with me out on the back porch, helping me learn to use my face again, my brain again. I told him, over and over, don't stay with me today. Go out and play with your friends, go swim at Taconic, go to Catskill and golf with Sol, hang out with Bill, go out even with Laurice—but don't don't don't sacrifice your summer for me. You're free to go, honey-bunny. Fly!” With a grand humility, Selma looked Miranda in the eye and said, “And you know what? That boy would have none of it. He stayed. Stayed and took care of his mother. My son took care of me.”

When Miranda realized who it was standing before her in tears that afternoon in the schoolhouse, her heart floated up to her throat and in an instant it all made sense. His tears were from the recent death of his beloved mother. Loving her so much, how could he have gotten over it in just three months? Especially after missing the funeral. She saw, then, that the whole thrust of his life, the conjunction of his caring for his mother with his finding a kindly old doctor to hang around with, had been determined by that summer of helping, that summer in which a shy boy had learned compassion and had grown into what Miranda had come to feel was a rarity in her world: a truly caring man. And now a caring doctor besides? She knew from her own long history with doctors how rare that was.

Yet there was no way that Miranda would have volunteered to Orville that she had heard about him from Selma, or even that she had known his mother. Miranda had a love affair with secrets. From the time she was a girl, keeping secrets was at the core of her being. It began in earnest on the day when she was almost seven, as she was walking from the living room into the lanai of her parents' house in Boca Grande, Florida, and she fell down. She got up, surprised, but when she tried to walk, again she fell down. Poliomyelitis had entered her life, and it would never leave. Like a tree growing around a spike, the girl grew around the crippled part, taller and stronger, and more muscular for the paralysis.

But she grew differently. In the face of the other children's small cruelties about her limp and her steel brace, she grew a will of iron. She learned to keep her rage secret, ironclad. After the war, her father, a postal clerk, and her mother, a junior high schoolteacher, had migrated from Minnesota to the Gulf Coast. Their cool northern reticence melted into a southern courtesy; in her family, anger was transformed to politeness, hurt to feigned interest. She learned to keep her steel brace secret under her pant legs, her leg secret under dashboards and desks and tables and counters. Only occasionally did it come to frank attention, such as when someone could not get past her in the aisle of a darkened theater and she had to say out loud the humiliating, “I'm sorry, I'm disabled. You'll have to go around.” The iron spike inside even prevented her from getting a car sticker for handicapped parking.

Miranda came to think that, in a world she saw as often unkind, secrecy worked. To be open, to tell the truth, meant being vulnerable. And to be vulnerable was to be powerless. It was out of the question. Secrecy for her became a virtual daring.

Her husband, Cray's father, was an actual daredevil. He was a young engineer on a series of oil-drilling platforms in the Gulf. They had met when he was vacationing for a week at the Gasparilla Inn in Boca Grande, where she was waitressing, earning money for history graduate school in Tallahassee—she had always loved history, first going with her parents to the sites, then the study. He overwhelmed her with his passion for action, and for her. He was always pushing the edge, from fast cars to fast boats to fast planes to, finally, in those planes used for stunts in the movies, aerobatics.

Soon after Cray turned two, her husband dared too much. At an air show in Clearwater, which she refused to attend, in front of hundreds of people in a viewing stand, he took off and did a daring flip too close to the ground and crashed. Both of Miranda's parents were dead by then, so she was left with no one but her two-year-old son and a spinster aunt in Grand Forks, North Dakota. So three years ago she and Cray had moved up to a piece of property left her by an uncle, a house on the banks of the Hudson River north of Columbia. She had spent parts of her summers there as a girl and loved it. Cray and she were poor, but okay.

Miranda grew around the tragedy of her husband's sudden death, but again grew differently. Except when Cray or someone else asked, she never talked about it. It went up into her attic of secrets. Over the four years since his death she came to realize that, in a sense, secrets are lies told to the world, and each has a price. But for her the price was acceptable. Her virtual daring was now overlaid with a certain fear. She had opened herself up to the world and had fallen down, opened herself up to loving a man and had lost him.

So when Orville called that Monday morning and asked to see her again, she was thrilled and scared. She feared being thrilled. Hadn't he said, about working with Bill Starbuck, that he was only there “temporarily”? Much as she had opened up to him at that first moment, she could not afford a temporary man. Her fear was not only for her being left. The life in her life was her son.

Then there was Selma. The two women met about a year before Selma's death, in the Columbia Area Library. Miranda was working in the archives, researching her thesis. Selma was volunteering at the main desk. Seeing Selma's facial disfigurement, Miranda's heart opened to her. They talked. It turned out that Selma was involved in many civic projects in Columbia and out in Kinderhook County. She said Miranda would be perfect to join the committee planning the faithful restoration of the library. Miranda agreed.

After one of the meetings, Selma invited Miranda back to her house for tea. Driving up Washington in the Chrysler, Selma took a detour at Second Street, before going back across Fourth to the Courthouse Square. Miranda asked why.

“I'm superstitious,” Selma said. “I never drive by the Worth Hotel. It's the one project I won't get involved in.”

“Why not?”

“It reminds me of when I was still beautiful. When we first came here in '46, there was only one place where all the gala events were held—the Worth. It was a grand hotel then. I volunteered in anything that would have me, and when I was in charge—president of the Hospital Auxiliary, the library, even the Junior League (first Jew, imagine!)—I had all my affairs there. It and I were beautiful. After, I never went back.”

That afternoon and into the evening, the two women had a heart-to-heart. Their handicaps drew them together. Not only the sagging face and withered leg but the mutual understanding of a life-tree trying to grow around that spike pounded in. The younger woman had many more years to grow around her insult. She would not talk about it, but she listened to the older woman with understanding.

Selma, having lived through conflicts with her own daughter and the increasingly long flights of her only son, and having felt the stirrings of new love for her only granddaughter, reassured Miranda about the ability of the life force to compel endurance in the face of losing a loved one. Miranda saw Selma as so blunt that she dared reveal a core of truth. Selma saw Miranda as so shy that she could be trusted. Both were daughters and mothers. Both had lost men. Lost men were in the air.

Selma told Miranda about Orville's kindness after her operation and about the terms of her will—his getting the money and house and car if he lived there continuously for a year and thirteen days. Why thirteen days? Selma smiled mischievously but didn't say.

Hearing this, at first Miranda was startled. It seemed controlling and weird. But as she listened further to Selma, listened to how two years ago her son had gone “gallivanting around the world” and how “every day I think of him and it's like the worst heartburn on earth,” it resonated with how she herself was starting to feel about her own son, Cray, now six. He had started moving away from her. She saw in Selma's pain where her lesser pain was pointing. She identified with her as a mother of a son. She admired Selma's spunk; the lady was
gutsy.

Miranda could see how badly Selma wanted to give her son a chance to come home to his family and how, as weird as they seemed, the terms of her will might just work. After all, those times when Cray didn't want to be with her or didn't want her around was like death, was it not?

When Orville walked in, Miranda was sitting behind the desk staring at an oversized facsimile volume of Ellis's 1848
History of Kinderhook County.
Usually she read it with such fascination that she lost sight of time, finding herself awake at 3
A.M.
when she thought it was only about eleven or, like a few weeks ago, almost forgetting to pick up Cray from his play date at his friend Steffie's house, over in Ghent. But that afternoon she couldn't make the words make sense. She kept reading the same passage over and over. She was worried about her son. In particular, she was worried about how for the last four years he hadn't had a father, or any other man, consistently in his life. She felt she was failing him. Lately she felt him spiraling out.

Earlier that afternoon Cray had his sixth birthday party, which she held at her house. Nine boys and Steffie. Cray and his friend Maxie Schooner, who had recently broken his wrist and was in a cast, had been playing baseball cards when Cray traded one to Maxie and then decided he wanted it back. Maxie didn't want to give it back. They argued. Theo Geiger, of the junkyard Geigers, and Cray's best friend, tried to intervene, but suddenly Cray hit Maxie as hard as he could on the cast. Miranda was stunned. He'd never done anything like that before. Maxie was more surprised than hurt. Cray was the one who started to cry. Shaken, she made it through the end of the party, the cake and the favors.

When Maxie's mom, Nelda Jo, learned about it, she was angry. “I've been meaning to tell you this, Miranda,” she said at the door before she took him home, “you need to do something about your son—he's impulsive
.
That boy needs a man around to straighten him out.”

Miranda had always felt fairly good about how she'd raised Cray since his father's death, but she always had doubts. Suddenly all she had were doubts. Her whole mothering world seemed to be collapsing around her. What mother wants her son to be cruel?

After the party, Cray and some of the other boys were supposed to go to their soccer game in Stuyvesant Landing.

“Do you still want to go, Cray?” she had asked.

“Yeah, but I don't want you
to come.”

Swallowing her pain, she said, “Fine,” dropped him and his friends off, and, fearing the thought of being alone, called Mrs. Tarr and arranged to volunteer with her that afternoon at the Ichabod Crane Schoolhouse.

Being in historical sites always made her feel safer, even safe. She had been sitting in the one-room schoolhouse feeling a little more safe, but her heart felt raw—raw about her failure as a mother and about celebrating a son's day of birth that echoed down the hollow where his dead father lay, raw about the losses and failures in her life—and then Orville walked in. He thought he was alone. It was one of those times, she thought, when you see a person absolutely the way they are. When he noticed her, his tears touched her deeply. His eyes were so open. A few minutes later, when she realized who he was, her heart went out to him—he was a son crying for his mother.

By the time she'd driven back out to the soccer field, there was no one there. The rain must have started sooner up in Stuyvesant. She stared at the soggy field, at a single soaked orange jersey left behind. Mike Fredrickson, Zeke's dad, must have driven Cray home. Nice going, lady, she thought. Yet another shred of evidence of your being a Bad Single Mom. She got out, put up her umbrella, walked carefully out onto the battered grass, picked up the orphaned jersey, and sloshed back to the car.