Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (34 page)

Milt chimed in, breaking the hush. “It's been great to have you here—sort of great, mostly great—maybe you'll take one whiff of Europe and come back to smell the roses of Columbia. You're always welcome because we love you. And love what you've brought to this town—medicine, a great personality, and hey, even though it's Penny and my and Amy's loss, we admire you for sticking it out the year and thirteen days to get the money. Shows guts, shows fortitude, shows fiscal responsibility. To my favorite brother-in-law, a helluva guy,
L'chaiyim!
” They raised their glasses again and drank.

During dinner Orville had felt out of it, walking along the edges of the current of conversation. First it had been an inane mix of talk of new machines. Henry had bought a new Harley-Davidson. Milt had come back from Seattle with a new computer so compact that it fit into a small suitcase and ran on something called
MS-DOS
, which he claimed was going to make a mint. Penny had bought a new golf cart, Nelda Jo a new StairMaster. They then talked about movies and
TV
shows. And then the Schooner campaign and then their children, notably Maxie, who was flowering at his Soccer and Firearms Campout at the Federation of Polish Sportsmen.

He drank another beer, feeling the buzz. He found himself staring out the front window of Ahern's at the slight dip in Washington as it crossed Fourth, and he was hit by that hard fist of grief. Miranda Braak. She had told him that when the town was created, there had been a deep gully at Fourth Street and that the Quakers, in marching their utopia from the port at Parade Hill up to Cemetery Hill, had built a massive stone bridge to cross the gully. It had been a marvelous construction, a long stone arch in the Roman style, and had become something of a wonder of the time. Later they'd buried the stone bridge under tons of fill.

Eerie, he thought now, to realize that a bridge lies there, buried. Looking at it now, the intersection seemed less solid for its secret. Settling had revealed something else there, a significant depression. If the fill shifts, will the bridge hold? Orville stared at the dip as if it were a patch of skin over a torso, secreting away the bones of a corpse below. Miranda understood history with a wordless, nameless sense of the town through time, much like a virtuoso in music or math or chess senses their art. Through her, the town for a time made sense. Even the century made sense, through her.

I miss them so much! Where are they?

But he was being roughly hoisted up out of his seat by Nelda Jo and Henry and ushered on out the door. The party was over.

It was still early in the summer evening. The light had that glossy luminescence of late July and reminded him of being in the red rowboat out on the lake with Celestina, looking back through the haze to the
Sacre Monte
with its twenty chapels and the pilgrims moving, stopping to pray, moving again, as they made their way up.

He was off duty and had nothing to do. Facing an evening alone in the house, he felt a blast of desolation. “Henry, can I ask you a favor?”

It was a rare moment—Henry seemed caught off guard. Orville had never done this before. Before, it was always Henry asking. But Henry's response was quick and tight, “Thought you'd never ask, old buddy. Anything.”

“Could I take your Harley out for a birthday ride with Amy?”

“Amy on a
motorcycle?
” Penny said. “Over my dead body.” What she was really saying, Orville knew, was that motorcycles were for the
goyim.

“Can I, Uncle O.?”

“Up to Henry.”

“Ever been on one, Doc?” Henry asked, revealing a certain and unusual caution.

“Owned a BMW during my year in Holland.”

“Nice bikes, those. Here's the key, and here's the helmet.”

“Only one?” Penny asked. “It's illegal.” Amy was putting on the helmet.

“Maybe, Pen, but hey—if I go down, you get the money, the house, and the Chrysler.” He pecked Penny on the cheek, shook hands with Milt, and was about to clasp hands with Henry but was engulfed in Henry's warm hug. Nelda Jo hugged him too, the aerobic push of her breasts against his chest firing up his engines as always.

“When will you be back?” Penny asked.

“September.” Orville got on the gleaming bike, showing Amy how to put her arms around his waist and hold tight. Her hands felt great there.

“What a wit, eh?” Henry said, shaking his head as if in amazement.

“Let's make sure to get together again sometime soon,” Milt said.

“I can't, Milt,” Orville replied. “I'm busy that day.”

“What?”

He started the bike, revved it. “
Ciao!
”

“Hey, old sport,” Henry called, over the roar. “We're goin' to a prayer vigil at the AME Zion Church tonight, for that poor kid shot last night, then we're at a campaign appearance out at Spook Rock, so just leave the key on the kitchen table. Door's open.”

“Deal.”

They roared off, Amy hanging on tight and screeching with delight.

They idled down Washington to Third and turned left and hit the last light and then accelerated down the hill into the Great South Swamp, the pink foam noodles of Styrocusp Corp. whirling in their wake like confetti. Riding the sticky asphalt through the high cattails and the infestation of imported purple loosestrife, feeling the flecks of bugs on his unhelmeted face, Orville recalled getting off the broken-down train and walking the tracks through the swamp up into town. Hard upon this memory was Miranda's showing Amy and Cray and him the Henry Ary painting of the pre-railroad South Swamp, when it was still a marvelous bay, a deepwater port filled with so many whaling ships that you could walk deck to deck all the way across the bay from Mount Pecora into Columbia.

They went left at the entrance to the Rip Van Winkle Bridge and down 9-G before turning left into the curly road rising up a hill through the woods toward Olana. Orville stopped the bike and parked in the lot. A tour bus was disgorging a procession of blue-haired ladies from Wappingers Falls for the last tour of the house that day.

Amy took off her helmet. Flushed, she yelled, “Fantastic! What is this?”

“Olana. Home of Frederick Church.”

“Who?”

“A truly great Columbian. Come on.”

A great Persian-tiled turret rose before them. The Moorish doorway and the three stories of echoing windows and flirtatious balconies were a shock of color and shape in the lowering sun. This, he thought, was my first sight from the train. Ages ago.

They signed the guest book and joined the tour. The guide quoted an entry from Church's diary: “I think it better to reside on a mountain which overlooks the world than to be a mere creeping thing trying to see it as a mass of details. From an eminence you take in the beauties only. About thirty miles south of Albany is the center of the world—and I own it.”

The house—in Arabic, “Olana, Our Place on High”—was Church's living art, done with the care of his landscapes, which had made him the most famous American artist of the late nineteenth century. Olana was zany, a crazy mix of Italianate and Persian, made of polychrome stonework from local quarries, filled with fanciful Moorish arches framing each landscape like one of his landscapes, symmetrical mirrored chambers, purples leading to golds and golds to reds, and furnished with remarkable objects from all over the world—Arabic brass pots and English suits of armor and Chinese life-sized Ibises riding turtles and massive sideboards from Tuscany—all assiduously preserved from the 1870s.

Amid the famous landscapes of Niagara, the Hudson, the Amazon, the view through the dark cleft of rock to the amber desert light of
Ruins at Petra,
all of which held the artist's signature shafts of angel light of gold, and fluid rock, were smaller, darker, unapplauded paintings. In the sitting room were two small landscapes,
Sunrise
and
Moonrise,
each the birth of dim light over the edge of a lowland, both somber yet lit. These had been painted to get through the deaths of his oldest two children during a diphtheria epidemic in 1865. On a living room wall over a grand fireplace hung two portraits: one of a stern older man, his father the Hartford industrialist; the other of a younger man with eyes raised to look away, higher and farther, with and toward imagination—his son the artist.

Orville pointed out the small stage of the living room on a platform leading to the grand staircase. The curtain was a Persian carpet hung on brass rings from a brass rail. The Church family loved putting on amateur theatricals with their guests and had a large wardrobe of costumes of silk and satin for pashas and princesses, kings and queens.

Finally, they stood before a ten-foot-high Moorish arched window of amber-colored glass laced with delicate black paper stencils cut out by Church himself, layered between the two panes of glass. The window threw a gold evening light into the room, so buttery a color they felt they could taste it. The amber reminded Orville of
Le Grand Souk
of Marrakesh. How I miss that world, he thought, the vitality, the expansion. He caught himself. But isn't that world right here, right now, with this dear, hurting girl? She and I, balanced together on an edge of pain, maybe even of sorrow, keeping our balance by holding each other up and by the potential solace of this art.

“In the days of oil lamps and gas lamps,” the guide was saying, “the amber window was placed there precisely with regard to the changing tilt of the planet, to provide what Church called, in his despair, ‘perpetual sunlight.'”

As the tour ended, a man was waiting for them. He introduced himself as Orlando Durney, director of the Olana Historical Site. He said he had seen their names in the guest book and “Simply had to meet you.” He was bald and tall and slender and kind of splendid in his enthusiasm and clear diction. He wore a lilac dress shirt and red bow tie, the tie wilting in the heat. His most striking feature was a handlebar moustache waxed so severely that Orville imagined it could poke out an eye.

“Simply had to meet you and thank you.”

“For what?” Orville asked.

“For your splendid mother. Selma quite single-handedly piloted the movement to save us. The last remnants of Church's family had let the thing go and it was in rather abysmal shape. They were about to sell it as an ordinary house—imagine! Selma took charge and called me. Together we held bake sales and harassed our fascist congressman. She was tenacious, staying with it during some quite high winds, if not tornados. Yes, yes, we stayed with it together and resurrected it, as almost a postmodern passion play. And now it is a National Historic Site, a treasure for the ages.” He sighed, a happy man. “She was a force,
a powerful lady. What she set her sights on, she got. One wouldn't dare disagree with her, would one?”

“It's tough to, yes.” The present tense startled him.

“Yes, she was a force of nature. Ironically, she was much like what Church painted. Sorry, but if you'll permit me, your mum was quite the ‘Niagara,' and . . .” he took out a hankie and blew a surge of emotion from his reddened nose into it, “she not only supported me, she accepted
me. When no others did.”

Orville could almost see him in a Selma letter: “Nice, but
queer.
”

“You must be very proud,” Durney said.

“I must be. Thanks.”

Durney stared at him intently and then smiled. “Church was
such
an oddball! The man didn't fit in anywhere, really, except here in Columbia. Here, a lot of oddballs have, and do.” He winked—he actually winked! “See you at the unveiling next week. Bye-bye now.”

She's everywhere! Orville thought, walking toward the door. He remembered Penny saying something about setting a date for the “unveiling”—the Jewish ceremony to unveil the tombstone on the first anniversary of the death. Gotta ask her when it is.

They walked out the Moorish arch into the soft sunlight. The door squeaked closed behind them. The bus had eaten the blue-haired ladies and was grinding down the hairpin slope toward the lowlands and home. Unwilling to leave just yet, Orville led Amy around the corner of the house.

The sudden panorama stunned them. To their right, to the north, the high waves of the ridgeline of the Catskills against the reddening sunset flowed down from Albany. Shading their eyes they could see, far below, sparkling in the sunlight like a silver nail laid across a glittery ribbon of river, the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. To the south, down past the friendly neon of Mike's Pizza and on toward Red Hook, the Hudson ballooned out, a small inland sea, mimicking several of the paintings they'd just viewed. Turning east, they saw a heart-shaped reflecting pond that Church had designed to balance the shape of the ballooned-out river, the apex of the pond's ventricle leading the eye down through an arbor of a hundred or so of the 40,000 trees he had planted, and then their eyes traveled further east, hopping over the spewing smokestacks of the Universal Atlas Cement to the easy green vista slurred in the fading and damp light of the Taconic Hills and the Berkshires. Breathtaking.

“Holy moley!” Orville said.

“Cool! C'mon!” Amy took off across the lawn, running and then tripping and rolling and lying on her back. Orville strolled over. He took out a Camel, lit it, and lay down on his back beside her.

“You shouldn't smoke.”

“Thanks for sharing.”

“Can I have one?”

He gave her a look. They put their hands behind their heads. They looked up at the clouds passing across. They said “Mmmm” responsively, in delight.

“You're really leaving?” Amy asked. He nodded. “Can I go with you?”

“What?”

“I need a break from here. When my best friend Eliza moved to New Mexico it was bad enough—without her, I don't know if I can
stand
the boys in my class next year! And since Miranda left, it sucks—I worry about her and Cray a lot!” She leaned up on one elbow, looking intently into his face. “I wanna go with you. You can convince Mom, I know you can, please?”