The Monsters of Templeton (11 page)

But that black and saucy Hetty was another matter, indeed. I saw she was only out to seduce with her beautiful round face and coral necklace of scars around her throat, and as I was once a pretty girl like Hetty, I knew all the tricks. I kept her busy, cooking and collecting honey and plucking the pears and putting up preserves. I will grant, she was marvelous clean, obsessed, truly, over the last speck of dirt or dust. I had never seen a window gleam the way she could make it gleam or sheets so white as the ones on the beds. But I did not keep her busy enough, in the end, sad to say. I'll admit, when I saw a special roundness when there should be nothing round at all, I had my suspicions, I did, and am proud to have acted upon them. And on the day my mistress come wrath-wracked into town, near bursting with child herself, and stepped from the carriage, all greasy from her travels, and circled Hetty and saw how rotten the girl was to the core, she threw her out into the street and I laughed and laughed to myself. But Hetty was a cat, landing on her feet, and she married that tanner Jedediah Averell, and he became a rich man. She, though black, almost quite a lady, and I could hardly stand it.

But most terrible of all was the day that came dark and heavy over the lake when that Guvnor of hers was born. I looked out the Manor window and saw Midwife Bledsoe scurrying down the road in the rain, and I knew Hetty's labor come. And I'd admit to a great and sinful fury, and so after tea, after changing our little Jacob and singing him to sleep, I put on my own bonnet and cape and took a basket with some provisions and went down to the tanner's on the lake and marched in and went up the stairs where the stink of birth was, all metal and sweat, and went right in, and peeled the swaddling from the child and looked down and saw the red hair, the skin the color of cream tea, the bulgy blue eyes, one drifting off to the side. I put down the basket and covered the baby up again and put him back in the arms of Hetty, who was watching me with a smile flashing under her lips, not on her lips, but under, and went back into the rain. And this I tell as the truth; that even on the day my own Captain Prettybones left me behind in this sorrowful world a widow, I had not felt a cleaving so terrible within me. And though I bless his sinning heart in my prayers, I could not look at Marmaduke the same way again, no, never did I look at him the same again, no.

Chapter
8

Queen and Crane

BETTER THAN AN alarm clock, the Running Buds. I awoke in the gray dawn when they were still a half a mile away, their footsteps reverberating over the Susquehanna bridge. By the time I found an old pair of running shoes, a suitable tee shirt, and a pair of track shorts (loose black polyester, the shameful Templeton mascot of a "Redskin" in orange on the left thigh), they had already gone a half a mile more. When I emerged onto Lake Street, I could trace their passage in the dew-damp footprints on the asphalt.

In light of my love life, it is perhaps a little sad to admit that I chased those six middle-aged men halfway across town. On my infrequent trips home, I had grown used to joining at least a small part of their runs, springing out of bed when I heard them nearing, catching up to them as quickly as I could. The truth was that other than Vi they were the only friends I had anymore when I returned home to Templeton: my friends in high school were the smart kids, and the smart kids never came home, barely even gracing the village for holidays. After college, my former friends and I lost touch, and the only way I knew what was going on in their lives--their medical residencies, marriages, articles, children--was through Vi, or more frequently, the Buds. The Buds were the town gossips, the watch-dogs, the caretakers. And even back when I was in high school, they made a point of going to as many of my soccer games and track meets as possible. This was partially, I'm sure, because high school sports were the only excitement in town when the air crisped into fall and the tourists disappeared. But it was partially, too, because they adopted me, in their way. Every Fourth of July, they invited me to picnics with their families, and I went without Vi, who was always working. I was taken as a babysitter on family vacations to Disney World and Hilton Head, I was escorted to a celebratory dinner by all six when I won the Daughters of the American Revolution essay contest. They paid for a backpacking trip to Europe for my graduation from college. When Vi said I couldn't accept it, it was too much, they were so sad and pleaded so eloquently that she let me take it.

Templeton was crystalline in the predawn that morning. The Buds had gone up Lake Street, past the great brick Otesaga Hotel, a grande dame sunning herself on the water; they turned left up Nelson, past the tennis courts. Right up Main Street, passing the courthouse and florist, crossing the railroad, turning left down Winter Street. Now, I approached them from behind. From two hundred yards away, I could hear them, the low murmur of their voices and the slap of their old feet against the ground. From a hundred feet away, I could smell them, the sweat deep in the fabric of their running clothes, the little poots they made when they thought the others wouldn't notice.

They were:

Johann Neumann, the father of Laura, a girl in my class. Every time Johann went home to Germany, he came back with fat tubes of marzipan for me, and he taught me, over the course of one frustrating summer, how to play tennis.

Bearlike Tom Irving, who sold used cars and gave me my cruddy hatchback nearly for free, and who, when I was eight and walking home from school, sobbing about how mean the other kids were to me, sat down on a bench and put his arm around me and let me cry until I was all cried out.

Tiny Thomas Peters, my pediatrician, so small I could look him in the eye when I was ten, whom my mother called whenever something went wrong with Averell Cottage, because he was as good with houses as he was with children and cheerfully fixed anything.

Sol Falconer, about whom there was always a great deal of gossip, as he'd had three wives, and he was rich and childless, and who, because I'd asked him, let me have my tenth birthday party at his house, with his huge pool, and, because he didn't know any better, had it catered. His family was a long-standing one, all the men named Sol Falconer, and when some people bridled at his money, they called him Sol Falconer the Filth, instead of Sol Falconer the Fifth.

Frank Phinney, whose family had owned the Freeman's Journal forever and who gave me my first internship in college, writing captions for photographs, a man who wouldn't stop telling knock-knock jokes until they were like tickle-torture, fun that was so not fun.

And last, Doug Jones, my high school English teacher, not unlike an aging Jim Morrison, who always had giggling girls staying after school for help with Shakespeare. He cast me as Desdemona in the school play, and when I babysat his three sweet little girls, he'd coach me on my lines. "No, no, Willie. Say it with feeling!" he'd shout, and his daughters would chortle like a little chorus of songbirds.

As I approached, I grinned at their oblivious backs, feeling a great upwelling of affection. At the moment, Doug Jones was saying, "...just jealous because she always turned to me when she was asking questions, weren't you, Big Tom? I thought you were about to seize up on camera."

To which the rest of the men guffawed, and Tom Irving said, "Hilarious, Dougie, hi-lar-i-ous. True, though. I never thought when I went on the Daybreak! show I'd have to play second fiddle to you dorkuses."

Then Johann said, in his little German accent, "That Katie Doyle really vas a vhippersnapper, vasn't she? Much prettier in person. Much prettier."

It took me a moment, but I realized they were talking about an interview they must have done for a national morning talk show, probably something to do with their role in discovering the monster. I was about to step up next to them and ask them about it, already savoring the Heyyy! they always shouted, when a garbage truck briefly pushed between us, and, when the driver nodded down at me, I was seized by a horrific thought. I stopped running altogether and watched the Buds pull away down the street.

It was possible, I'd thought, that any man in town could have been my father. The garbageman, for instance; the Running Buds. Or Dr. Cluny, the sculler who had found the monster. Or my elementary school principal, or the rotund little mayor, or the post-man, or the dry cleaning guy at Kepler's. The baseball museum director, the baker at Schneider's Bakery, John-John the mechanic at Dwight's. Dwight. Dwight's mentally retarded twin brother, Derek. My track coach, my orthodontist, any of the three mute ancient men who played chess all summer in Temple Park. Mr. Clapp the mortician, the pastor at the Presbyterian Church, the Catholic priest, the railroad magnate, the biologist at the Biological Field Station, the town librarian, my friends' fathers, oh God, anyone, any man, could, actually, have been my father. Aristabulus Mudge, even! A man invoked at third-grade sleepovers in the hushed and daring tone one used for the devil himself, a man who looked like the devil himself, all horny calluses and shining pickled-looking skin, a crooked-backed, hollow-cheeked man with eyes set so deep in his sockets no one had ever seen their whites, he who once walked into a cloud of butterflies and made them fall dead like dropped pennies in his wake, even he could have been my father, even Aristabulus Mudge could have been the man who wormed his way into and out of my life in the zip of a zipper and a hiss of relief. I felt my heart slip out of rhythm, and thought, in my melodrama, that I would die of this grief.

But my heart, of course, started up again, and at the end of the street the Running Buds turned left to go back up toward the gym. I felt sick. I felt like the birdie in that terrible children's book by P. D. Eastman, the one that wanders around and asks everything--the cow, the dog, the airplane--"Are you my mother?" I gagged into the gutter and stood up, still feeling ill.

I was now by the elementary school, a squat brick Lego of a building. I would run back to town by Walnut Street, then Chestnut, sidle down Main, and pick up my car from where I stashed it, opposite the baseball museum and next to the post office. I would drive it up into the driveway and drag inside Averell Cottage all of my clothes and books, everything that made home comfortable. And there I would rot until either the Lump came out or Primus Dwyer called, and not, I vowed, until then. Until I talked to Primus Dwyer, I wouldn't decide anything on the Lump, and there was no way I could call him myself. I didn't let myself think of what would happen if he never called me.

And I had to pick up the car without running into anyone I knew, which happened every time I came home. The last time I was in Templeton, two years earlier, I had stopped to pick up some groceries at the Great American for Vi, and saw a girl who was in my graduating class. She was staring at the granola, paying no attention to her three children in the cart. They were horrifying, with thyroidal eyes and snotty noses. And then Cheri turned her head and saw me, and for at least five minutes I was in acute discomfort, Cheri latching on to me as if we had been best friends, showing off her children for my admiration, talking about getting together for a beer sometime. I was so uncomfortable I forgot what I was supposed to pick up and practically ran home. I later drove all the way out to the Price Chopper in Hartwick so I wouldn't have to return to the Great American and risk seeing her still there, with her glassy eyes and the changelings throwing handfuls of sugar cereal into the aisles. When I thought of Cheri, even standing there beside her in the grocery store under the Muzak and fluorescents, I thought of her in bed, sweating and grunting, making more of those frightening children of hers. Some people you just look at and see sex.

That morning I jogged to Main, jittery and furtive. Schneider's Bakery was pumping its old-fashioned doughnut smell into the street, and with the waft came layers of memory. There, the dollhouse furniture store owned by the parents of a rock star, now a baseball card store. There, the candy shop that sold gourmet jelly-beans. There, the baseball cap store that only sold caps from minor-league teams, a place where I worked for a summer so that even now I could list a few off the top of my head: Louisville Bats, Toledo Mud Hens, Montgomery Biscuits, Tulsa Drillers, Batavia Muckdogs, Lansing Lugnuts. I ran down the street, beyond Cartwright Field, and there were no cars out yet, no traffic on the street. Farkle Park, where Santa's house sat in winter, and where the high school druggies sat in summer and played with their hackeysacks or ballsacks all day. Mudge's Pharmacy in the copper-clad corner building. Then Pioneer Street and the Smithy building, the Bold Dragoon, an ancient pub, crouching beside it. Augur's Books. Druper's General Store. The great baseball museum with a crowd of enthusiasts already out in force, waiting beside the velvet ropes to ooh over balls and bats. It was all there, unchanging, save for a few more baseball-related stores every year, a couple fewer interesting small-town places for the locals.

This, too, had been a change. In the past, the tourists had never really taken up much of our attention: they held no part in the social strata of Templeton: they existed in our periphery, essential but unimportant. Since the hospital came in 1918, the doctors had made up the highest base, filling the town with money and brains, running the country club, opening up galleries. The only rung above them held our few millionaires: the ambassador, the railroad magnate, the wonderful wealthy woman who made sure there were flowers everywhere, the Falconers with their beery fortune, not to mention both sides of my family until we lost it all. Below the doctors were the other white-collar people: hospital administrators, attorneys, librarians, and below them the farmers, who used to be important, but with the decline of the New York dairy heifer were now associated with malt liquor and bonfires and hickishness. Below them the random townies who filled the Bold Dragoon on weekends. When the new Opera House opened in 1986, we reluctantly opened ranks for the Opera visitors with their couture gowns and Mercedes, but even they were eventually shunted off to Springfield on the other side of the lake. When the Park of Dreams opened in a cow field in Hartwick Seminary, south of town, we thought that a few Little Leaguers wouldn't be able to change the topography of the town that much. We didn't expect that they would bring their parents, and that the parents (cheesy, loud people with cellulite under their shorts and minivans soaped up with TEMPLETON OR BUST! and CHESTERTON CHARGERS ARE #1!) would demand cheap restaurants and a better grocery store and plasticky chain hotels and miniature golf. We had no idea that the Park of Dreams would expand to hold eight teams of Little Leaguers every week throughout the summer, 1,200 screaming baseball brats per week, plus about 600 of their awful parents. Though we tried to keep them relegated to Hartwick Seminary, three miles south of Templeton proper, we didn't know that such demand would transform the face of the town. The sewing store, the dollhouse store, the toy store, even Farm and Home would become stores that merely slutted themselves to baseball. Now, nearly every store was brimming with memorabilia or bats. The tourists were getting hard to ignore.