The Monsters of Templeton (13 page)

I stretched my arms above my head and yawned. "I didn't," I admitted. "I'll be back tomorrow. And if I'm going to be seeing that much of you, I should know your name."

He blushed and said, "Peter Lieder," and held out his hand for me to shake.

But I was far too surprised to do so and just stood gazing at him until he dropped his hand in confusion. "Not," I said, "Peter-Lieder-Pudding-and-Pie?"

"Well," he said, "in fact, yes."

"Holy shit," I said. Peter Lieder was four years older than I was in high school, and quite porky at the time. Probably over three hundred pounds during his senior year, and the best musician we had in school: oboe, flute, saxophone, tuba, trumpet, drum, violin, Peter Lieder could play them all. The Peter Lieder I knew could have gobbled up this fey little man with his fries. "You're Peter Lieder?" I said. "I'm so sorry I didn't recognize you all day. I feel like a jerk."

But the new Peter Lieder beamed at me. "Oh, Miss Upton, don't worry about it. I'm not the same person, clearly. Nobody has called me Peter-Lieder-Pudding-and-Pie for years. A thyroid problem! Who'd have thought? And after the gastric stapling, too. Such a pity."

"Oh, God," I said. "Wow. But don't call me Miss Upton. I'm Willie, Peter."

"All right, Willie," he said, flushed with pleasure. He cleared his throat and then said, "Now, I know you're mainly interested in your great-grandfather Sy, but I found this all the way back in Special Collections. Looks like it's the journal of Sarah Franklin Temple, his wife, you know. Your, well, great-grandma. About the time that Sy came to town. I thought perhaps there was some information in there. Insight or two. Worth a try. Interesting stuff, from what I can tell. Smith girl, prolific writer. Nobody has ever really read them--they're just sitting there awaiting the day that Sy gets a biographer."

"Oh," I said, my heart doing a joyful shimmy in my chest. "Thanks. Can I take this home tonight?"

His face pinched tiny with regret. "So sorry," he said. "Special Collections stay here."

"Please?" I said. "Just one night?"

"Miss Upton--" he began.

"Willie," I said.

"Willie," he said, "I'm so sorry, no."

"Pretty please?" I tried again.

He looked troubled, then peered around in the gloomy shadows. "All right," he whispered, peering around for the goat-woman, who was in the back with a cart and a few books. "Seeing as it's you. And your family. I shouldn't do this, but all right." Then he looked at me with large eyes and gave a curious giggle as I stood and slid the book into my bag.

"I'll bring it back tomorrow," I said. "Thanks so much, Peter Lieder," and then, fast, I was out the door before he changed his mind. Outside in the uprush of rose smell from the bushes by the door, I imagined the little librarian in the door behind me, in growing distress, frowning and rubbing his hands together like a chipmunk.

I DIDN'T SEE it until I entered the house that night and went up to my room. But there it was, framed in the twilight in a window, surreal and vivid: the monster in midair, suspended by the crane. Its neck was thrust backward so that its head tilted toward the east mountains, its arms and legs were drooping toward the ground, the great, delicate tail one long comma, looking tattered and unlovely out of the water. Like this, the buttery belly was exposed to the sky, and the monster, though huge, looked vulnerable. Water poured from the body back into the lake like long silvery strings in the dusk.

And then with a great mechanical groan, the crane pivoted the body until it was over the double-rigger flatbed truck that was to transport it, and began lowering it down. On the wind up from the lake there swept a new smell, both fishy and vegetative, a darkly rotting stink. When I looked away from the window, I felt the ghost there, an ethereal midnight blue, clenching. Angry, I could tell. I remembered the cold touch of the monster; I remembered its great sadness, which was apparent even in its corpse, and I understood the ghost's fury.

With the monster now out of the lake, something had ended, I knew. Sadness fell over me like a velvety curtain and I pressed the Lump, feeling a pulse there.

When I was small and easily wounded, books were my carapace. If I were recalled to my hurts in the middle of a book, they somehow mattered less. My corporeal life was slight; the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered. Returning to books was coming home.

So, as I heard my mother move downstairs making dinner that night, I sat on the bed with my angry ghost and picked up Sarah Franklin Temple's journal and began to read. She was a fresh college graduate when the volume began and her words were so strange that I became lost in them. Vi had to call me three times to come downstairs. At last she came up herself to take the book out of my hands.

I looked up, eager, thrilled. "Your grandmother," I said, "was a total nut job."

"Willie," she said, suppressing a smile. "I'm so glad you're pouring yourself into your quest. But even great scholars need food."

"Vi?" I said. "Weren't you ever curious about them? Sy and Sarah? The glamour of your grandparents? Never?"

She blinked at me, seeming trapped for a second before she dropped her eyes to the little book in her hands. "A little," she said. "They were so...removed. Like c elebrities. I asked my great-grandmother about them, but she was bats then, and who knows whether the things she said were real. And I could never ask my father. He always seemed so stern when it came to her. I don't know. I'm still maybe that obedient little girl at heart, I guess." Then she gave a rallying sigh and said in her economical way, "Doesn't matter. I'll hear it all from you, I'm sure. But now our casserole is getting cold and it's late and I have my prayer group tomorrow that I still have to bake cookies for."

"Ugh. Baptist cookies. Locusts and wild honey, I'm guessing," I said, reaching a little, because my mother seemed so sad.

"Nope," she said, giving me a little weary smile. "But they must be dunked to find salivation."

"Hardee-har. You sound like Clarissa," I said, but I actually did giggle a little.

Vi held my hand all the way down the stairs, and turned to me at the bottom. "Despite everything," she said, her jowls gently wobbling, "Sunshine, I'm so glad you're home."

Sarah Franklin Temple UptonHer graduation photograph from the Emma Willard School, taken in 1927

Sy and Sarah in a canoe on Glimmerglass Lake, with Hannah holding an orphan in her lap. CIRCA 1932.

Chapter
9

Sarah Franklin Temple Upton, from Her Journal,

Abridged

MAY 15TH 1932 TO AUGUST 1ST 1932

Today I arrived, and the boxed-up soul of mine is at last set free. Manhattan, the mere word's a song...a good idea of my father's to send me here for the summer, although my brothers seem to believe I am to be married. "How in the world," they must have been thinking, "did we allow our lovely sister to graduate from college unmarried?"...how little they know me! I will accept no bourgeois striver, no paycheck-whore, no infernal attorney, editor, bachelor they're so intent on introducing me to, I will have an artist, I will be the wife of a genius, or I will be a fierce spinster, dedicated to intellect...

...Today Manhattan is no longer glitz and dazzle. There is dirt, men in business suits selling things nobody wants, newspapers flying, rats with their beady eyes, breadlines. I feel sick. I rifle through the papers and find a story of famine forming behind those few tense lines...women in the Ukraine on broomstick legs, their children with balloons for bellies, one gust of wind and they'll all float away...and all the while, my brothers serve caviar on delicate ivory spoons. These nights, I dream of Templeton, Lake Glimmerglass, my lake like ice on the tongue...

...two weeks here, and already this place makes me sick; already I have seen my private people on the street-corners, holes where their eyes should be...I am afraid...words beating behind my tongue like flies at a window...inappropriate, curious words, sometimes they slip out, my brothers and their wives looking at me silkily, then at each other...Not the needles again! I cannot go back to the hospital...Smith cured me, I thought, only one episode, there, only two weeks insane in four years...all that hockey, all those teas, all that menstruation and thinking...I was safe there. I am not safe, here, at all.

...sick, my brothers are sending me home. This place infects me. Templeton my smooth little pill...such images I have. Such voices, that high voice, the little girl's, so naughty, talking to me, all the time now. How I hate her...the train is empty, Albany a small, spangled fish...this train is all brown velvet...the train slows, I am in Templeton, oh. Templeton, Templeton, the train says, slowing down. The lake, the blue, is an embrace.

...Father picking me up in his wretched old car..."a rich man, darling, should never show his wealth in a time of such misery"...gesturing toward the shantytown beside the railroad..."There are poor people everywhere, Sarah, even here"...Father is so old! So worn! Seventy-three and tottery. Mother has grown snappish, busy with the Orphanage, feeding the people in the shantytown, rather skinny in her forties, though still quite fine..."Hello, my dear, you look beautiful as always, I'm afraid you will find our circumstances reduced. Your father is over-generous, you see, and we can only keep a gardener and a housegirl now. Little Sally, from the Orphanage"...I do not like this Little Sally, mute girl, knobby face, wild hair...Father, closing the door behind us in his study. Over the mantel, Marmaduke Temple, and on the mantel old Cartwright's baseball. Ratty thing of twine, curious my father holds such stock in it. Everyone knows baseball is an ancient sport...the Mills Commission all balderdash, bought by the Spalding Corporation, baseball manufacturers, to grow an American myth...baseball wasn't invented in Templeton or anywhere else, it developed, like plants develop, out of other things...

Father looking weary, rubbing his eyes..."Sarah, I am afraid I have bad news. We are not as rich as we once were. The Crash was not good for us. Also, I have seen how Templeton was about to spiral downwards, invested much of my money in the town...The Hospital I built for my good friend, Imogene Finch, the gymnasium on Main, the electric streetlights I have put in, the Civil War Memorial near the Knox School for Girls, the tennis courts...Now, that work-initiative I have, Kingfisher Tower...they are calling it 'Temple's Folly'...a great, stone castle on the lake with a red tile roof...the men, I am afraid, are taking advantage of me. I have seen red tile roofs on a number of outhouses in this town...Oh, Sarah, Sarah, what can I do? I am afraid, my girl, that Templeton is dying."

Dying! He told me then of what I couldn't have known: Prohibition killing the great Falconer hop-fields all over the county--what remained had caught blight in the early twenties and nowadays trickled to nothing--the piano factory burnt down, the Phinney Printers moved to Rochester, the mercantile factory in Hartwick abandoned, the glove factory dead in Fly Creek. There were the dairy farms now, and that was about it for Templeton. People were poor, and getting poorer, he said...

...my walk today...paint flaking from houses, shutters swinging...gardens overrun with weeds, squashes in old flower-patches...the streets rough, great potholes, horses again...horses! In the Modern Era! Lumps of manure everywhere!...a small urchin, running by barefoot, in rags, grinning and holding a pathetic little trout, still flapping, the boy so happy that he would eat tonight...houses abandoned...Main Street filled with empty storefronts, like vacant eyes...yes, my father was right, there is death here...even that shrill little girl in my head silent since I arrived...as if even she were frightened...

...what can I do? The five days since my father told me, the certainty that I must do something in me. What can I do? My brain is only suited for literary analyses, not for such mundane and essential problems as this! It is surely my father's job to revive Templeton, but I fear he is too old. And if Smith taught me anything, it is that women are as capable as men, if not more so. I must save the town, it is repeated in my head, a refrain, a Greek Chorus! I must save the town! I have thought of my French class...Jeanne D'Arc...La Pucelle...divine, inspired, leading her men into battle like a winged thing...I think of her...but I am no Saint, no genius, I am a girl who knows too much to know anything at all...

...today motored out to Kingfisher Tower with my father...Point Judith...the Tower is less pitiable than I had imagined and far more sad...local fieldstone, it seems to burst organically from the lakeside until it explodes in decidedly unorganic red at the roof-level...not lovely, but a fine monument of my father...smacks a bit of droit de seigneur, true, changing the entire landscape of the lake on a Temple's whim. I liked it, for all that it is awkward and unfinished...as my father talked to the men (all ten stopping work to chat with him), I found myself gazing at the lake. I had dreamt of it so often when I was away...a fine marbled green...the ducks landing joyfully, summer campers far away on their tiny sailboats, sweep of wind across the surface...but then something very strange happened. In the center of the lake, about a mile away, I was sure I had seen one vast thing surface for a moment, and then duck back in...must have been some great bubble of gas escaping from some subterranean vein under Glimmerglass...my own eyes tricking me. Then, Father still talking, I looked into the water below, and saw a head emerge from the grassy weeds...saw a body take form in the jagged lake-stone...a smiling little Indian, loincloth, not one of my private people, a ghost. A ghost! He pressed to the surface of the water as if pressed to glass, and I kneeled on the rocks...put my ear near the water to hear what he was saying...but my father's hand on my shoulder, I looked up...looked down again, and the little Indian was gone...