The Monsters of Templeton (46 page)

When he looked back at me, it seemed he was having difficulty keeping himself from tears. "You must forgive me for asking," he said. "But I am. I have a lot of. Well, I do have money, and if this is a way to get..."

In response, I stood and was about to stalk out when he grabbed my hand. "Stop," he said. "I believe you. I just can't believe it."

"I know," I said.

"This is just," he said, his face suffused with red, "a miracle. A miracle. Willie Upton. I have a daughter."

"And she's me," I said. I squeezed his hand.

"And she's you," he said, shaking his head. "I couldn't have asked for better."

The invisible waitress laid our food down gently, but neither of us ate it. We sat there as the restaurant began to fill, baseball families and Templetonians both. But the people we knew steered clear of our table, sensing something, perhaps, and we could see them at their own tables, heads together, wondering what was going on.

A fourth wife, I think some of them were thinking. I wasn't far from the profile.

At last, Sol Falconer heaved a sigh. "I couldn't have asked for a better surprise," he said, shaking his head and beaming. "I couldn't be prouder of a surprise daughter, Willie Upton. I am just," he said, "well, to put it simply, moved."

I KNEW, EVEN then, what I couldn't admit that I had known: that now that I could lay claim to more predecessors, to more history, it wouldn't vastly change the course of my future. Because before a little humanoid came striding across the Bering Strait, and died and left a tiny smidgen of his existence in the tundra to be dug up by people in the unimaginable future, there had probably been a good number of humanoids before him who had also stridden over those same ancient rocks. Because, even though I now had a father, he brought with him such thicknesses of ancestors that it would be impossible to dig and understand them all, and they would be stamped only in the DNA of whatever future children I could have. It was too much. It was impossible to understand it all.

And yet, we cling to these things. We pretend to be able to understand. We need the idea of the first humanoid in North America though we will never find him; we need a mass of ancestors at our backs as ballast. Sometimes, we feel it's impossible to push into the future without such a weight behind us, without such heaviness to keep us steady, even if it is imaginary. And the more frightening the future is, the more complicated it seems to be, the more we steady ourselves with the past. I looked at my father, Sol Falconer, and felt an impossible relief. It didn't matter, not really, that I had him at last. It didn't matter, and yet, in my illogical, unfathomable heart, it did. I was glad to have his real, breathing self on that long road behind me. I was glad to know he was there.

LONG AFTER SOL Falconer and I shook hands, after an awkward embrace that turned real and warm, I walked up Main Street trying to gather myself. The day was beginning to blaze with bone-melting heat, and already the high school druggies were taking shelter under the huge old oak in Farkle Park, too hot even to play hackysack. Piddle Smalley stood, sweating, ringing a bell, wearing a yellow rain slicker backward and his signature bloom at his crotch. Small children wailed against the heat, cars seemed to have to push through the thickening air, even old Mrs. Pea, sweeping the steps of the post office, had bands of sweat deepening on her blue shirt. As I walked up past old Temple Park, where the Manor once was, I saw someone across the street who made me flush again. I hurried across the road and under the great Corinthian columns of the town library, where Ezekiel Felcher was sprawled on the stone steps in the shade.

He looked good, I saw, when I came closer. He looked great. His thick gut had trimmed into a tapered waist, and I had a wild urge to run my hand up those small muscles marching in rows up his abdomen. His cheekbones had reemerged; he was tan. He saw the way I was looking at him, and he raised an eyebrow, and I laughed.

Then his face changed, and he said, "Queenie," sadly. "Come sit. This marble's the coolest place in Templeton."

"Radical," I said, sitting beside him. It was true: the stone was almost shockingly cold under my rear.

"I meant in terms of temperature."

"I know, Zeke," I said. "I know. You on the job? Towing those cars?"

"Yup," he said. "Slow day." I tried to pretend I didn't feel him watching my profile carefully.

"Ah," I said, and didn't say any more for a moment. Over the bustle of town, the voices of the tourists pouring into the baseball museum, I could hear the slow August course of the Susquehanna, only half as high as it was when I had returned to Templeton only a few weeks before. Zeke sat up again, and looked straight at me.

"I'm pretty mad at you, Willie," he said. "I heard you're leaving today for California."

"Yup," I said. I had stopped by the NYSHA library the day before to give Peter Lieder a copy of Vi's recipe book. I also slipped Guvnor Averell's note to Hazel Pomeroy, though I kept Cinnamon and Charlotte for myself. Oh, gracious, the old woman had crowed. You're going to make my reputation in my old age, Wilhelmina. I wasn't surprised the news had circled back to Zeke. "I'm taking off in a few hours," I said. "I'm finishing that goddamn dissertation and moving on."

"You going to stay in the Bay Area, you think?"

I shrugged. "Maybe," I said. "Eventually I'll come back here, though, I think."

"That's funny," said Zeke. "Because I'm going out there."

My breath caught in my throat, and I looked at him. "What?" I said.

"I was thinking Berkeley," he said. "But I'm afraid it won't be challenging enough. I hear top colleges like Stanford love unconventional students. Especially ones who got really high SAT scores."

"Probably," I said. "Jesus Christ. What about your boys?"

"Ah," he said. "I didn't say it wasn't complicated. Everything is complicated. The older you get, the more complicated life gets. It's one of those joyful things we have to look forward to, I guess."

"I guess so," I said.

"Could I have a good-bye kiss?" he said.

I leaned over and gave him one small one on the cheek, right where his dimple sometimes emerged. Then I stood. "Shucks," he said. "That's not at all where I was hoping you'd kiss me."

"Bye, Zeke," I said. "Be good. Look me up when you come to San Fran." We held a strange current between us until I began to feel a sort of panic in my gut, a growing feeling that, if I didn't move it I wouldn't, maybe, leave that day. I laughed and broke the moment.

And Zeke's face fell. He said, "Sure thing, Queenie," a little bitterly and settled back on his arms. "It was nice knowing you." He looked away, and bit his bottom lip hard. He looked so young, so wounded, it was all I could do to take a step away.

I went down the steps and smiled up at him, shading my eyes with my hand. "Oh, I think we'll know each other again, Zeke," I said. "Ezekiel. Sexy old Felcher, you," I laughed and I heard his reluctant chuckle all the way down Fair Street to the wide blue spread of the lake.

RIGHT BEFORE MY going-away dinner we had appetizers on the porch, and Clarissa was telling, with her usual wild gestures, a story about an undercover assignment she'd once done as a stripper in a North Beach club. Her shtick, of course, was a schoolgirl dancing to AC/DC, and she made great money on the stage, but always fell into arguments when it came time to do the lap dances.

"Then," she was saying, "the night the city commissioner came in and wanted me to call him 'Uncle Billy' and tug on his tie until he couldn't breathe, that was the end. I gave a little shimmy and was reaching out toward his tie when I planted my foot in his..."

I had just gone inside to open another bottle of wine. I'd heard this story before, many times, and so I was already laughing softly when I saw, in the bouquet of mail my mother had brought in earlier, the unmistakably lurid corner of a postcard. My heart did a slow revolution in my chest. My stomach sank, sour. I pulled the postcard out until I could see it whole.

On the front was an overexposed photograph of a municipal building that could've been from anywhere in the country: Redwood City, California; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; Delhi, New York. A boxlike 1960s affair, bland and gray.

I turned the postcard over, and, next to my name and address, was one word: Sorry.

For a moment, grief woke and stretched like a cat in me. Primus, I thought, and imagined him in his Mr. Toad waistcoat, stealthily slipping the postcard into the mailbox and hurrying away into the California sun. But then I looked more closely and recognized the script. Neat, tight. Architectural. Sully, from his small Arizona town.

I held the postcard and looked outside where Clarissa was miming putting her dukes up for my mother and Reverend Milky, who were laughing, clutching their ample sides. She grinned and shook her finger at her imaginary opponent; their laughter pealed into the dusk. I could've brought the postcard out to show her, put it on her pillow for her to find later; it was, I think, what Sully had intended by sending it; it was what I would've done before that summer. Instead, I spun it across the room like a Frisbee into the trash, where it settled among the wet coffee grounds and soaked brown and unreadable. Then I slid open the vast glass door and stepped through it, closed it behind me. I walked toward Clarissa, who was finishing her story, whose face had a faint flush to it, and I was already applauding.

I left Templeton as the sun began to set in the crown of trees on the West Lake hills. In the rearview mirror, I watched as my mother held Clarissa beside her, and my best friend settled into Vi's kind bulk. Reverend Milky had a plump hand on my mother's shoulder, and this little cluster seemed so right, so good, I almost turned the key and stepped out of the car again, and joined them in the magnificent Templeton August dusk. But I didn't. I put the car into gear and rolled up Lake Street, pinching them small and then smaller in the mirror, until they disappeared.

As my car hummed over the Susquehanna, I had a bright vision of myself coming home. And unlike fantasies, where I am far more glamorous and beautiful than I ever end up becoming, this, I knew, was real: there was a child in my arms, a plumpness swelling in my belly, and it was nighttime, and the lights of Templeton glittered in the deep black of the lake. Some dark shadow beside me was a husband, maybe, and perhaps he was singing, and though I couldn't hear the voice or the words, I know it made me calm.

This stayed in my mind like a song, this vision of myself, as I drove out of Templeton that evening. The air through my windows smelled fresh, pine-clean. I thought of Primus Dwyer, awaiting me in his little office at Stanford, and though I tried to be stern with myself, I couldn't help a tiny little smile from spreading over my face before I tamped it down again. I couldn't wholly swallow that rising knot of badness in me.

But then the road uncoiled long and shaded before me, the good, glorious world in its perpetual rot, in its constant downswing, the whole world before me in its headlong, flaming fall, and I still didn't know when the dark ground would rush up toward us. Just then, I couldn't care. My town glimmered at my back. The asphalt hummed underneath. And the last sunlight sparking off the lake winked through the spinning trees.

Chapter
35

The Running Buds (Big Tom, Little Thom, Johann, Sol, Doug, Frankie) Yet Again

THIS DAWN, WE all saw it, we have seen it, we know it; we all saw that gold leaf as it fell from the tree. We ran up to it, we ran under it, we ran past it, we fell silent. The arbiter of autumn and we watched its long, slow seesaw all the way to the ground. It is now September, the summer will be over; it was long, it was hard, but soon there will be the geese. Soon, breath in the mornings, soon long sleeves and tights, headbands to protect our delicate ears. The dawns will turn blacker and they will come later, we will skip work for the cold football field, the leaf smoke in our noses, coffee in hand, cheering those young boys who could be our sons but are not, and we will stand there watching for the fun of it, for the game. We will watch their young legs run and cheer them on. Today the dock is being taken out at the country club. The tourists have thinned after the Baseball Museum Induction Weekend, the opera singers have packed themselves into their undramatic little sedans and driven home to Manhattan or Topeka. The Chief Uncas, the guide boat in the lake, will be withdrawn tomorrow and packed away in a boat hangar in Hartwick. We will settle in, settle down, curtail our runs to under four miles. We will then wait for winter.

Big Tom has his daughter back, detoxing at his camp on the west side of the lake. She won't say where she was, but she is back. Little Thom underwent a bypass, and all looks good; he will run again with us in a few months. We are planning to make tee shirts saying CAUTION: OUR TICKERS ARE TIME BOMBS. Now he meets us at the Cartwright Cafe and drinks his decaf and laughs at Frankie. Frankie is happier, has gained weight back, has scattered his parents' ashes over the ocean on his vacation. Doug was dumped by his little mistress for a six-foot-eight ex-baseball catcher whose name is being bandied about to be added to the baseball museum. His wife forgave him. The IRS has not, but his jail time will be short, and we will not speak of it ever afterward. Johann's daughter brought home her lover, and she's so funny, so butch she looks like a man, so good with power tools that they've made plans to put up wainscoting in the guest bedroom on their next visit.