The Monsters of Templeton (3 page)

Vi as yet had no idea of this imminent betrayal: Templeton was her town, she felt. She was related to the tremendous Marmaduke Temple, a direct descendant of both the great man and his great novelist son, Jacob Franklin Temple. She thought of the town as her ancestral seat, even though she also had a vague idea that, as a hippie, she wasn't supposed to believe in all that jazz anymore.

Poor Vivienne. When she disembarked from the bus by the old railroad depot and dragged the (stolen) blue suitcase to the curb, she didn't realize that there would be nobody to pick her up. She sat there for an hour, quaking with cold, sure she had told her father to come for her when the bus pulled in. At last, she remembered the car accident and the terrible telephone call during a party, when she thought for a long time that the attorney trying to tell her of her parents' death was a friend playing a practical joke.

Then the new orphan in her flimsy California dress dragged the suitcase behind her all the way down the lacquered ice on Main Street, past the courthouse, past the Civil War memorial, under the one blinking yellow yield light on Chestnut, all the way to Averell Cottage, where there were no lights, no warmth, nothing to greet her but even more silence.

She saw the note from the lawyer by the telephone but was too tired to read it. And it was only when she wearily climbed the stairs to where there were twin dips in the mattress where her parents had lain for so many years that she understood what had happened. That though this felt trippy, it was actual unsleepoffable reality. When she awoke in the morning in their bed, her parents were still gone, and she had missed their funeral by a day.

The next day Vivienne walked about with her head thick, as if overstuffed with wool, feeling for the first time like an orphan. But she didn't cry then, and wouldn't cry until years later, when, chopping a tomato still warm from the garden, she would put down her knife and go upstairs to the bed and weep and wail for three days straight, not even getting up when her four-year-old daughter stood in the doorway, sucking her finger, bringing up boxes of cereal and pushing the little o's one by one into her mother's wet red face. At the end of which time, Vi would dry her eyes, pick the three dried tomato seeds off her chin, and go back downstairs to restart the gazpacho she was making when she had her little breakdown.

The official story of my grandparents' deaths went like this: George and Phoebe Upton (nee Tipton) died together by automobile. The obituary said that they were speeding too fast over East Lake Road when they hit an icy skid and roared off a thirty-foot precipice onto soft ice, which they cracked through. Knocked out from the crash, they drowned in the wintry water. George was the town historian, PhD Yale, working out of the New York State Historical Association library. This library was in the vast fieldstone farmhouse called Franklin Manor that George had, perhaps not unrelatedly, donated to NYSHA; although it was built by Jacob Franklin Temple and had been passed through the generations, it was so vast and expensive that George couldn't carry it with his limited means.

George was not a man to care about lost fortunes, but his tremulous little wife, Phoebe, often started her sentences with a sigh and, "When we were rich..." As in "When we were rich, the butcher always let us pay with credit," and "When we were rich, we knew the Roosevelts," though that was an outright fib: it was George's parents who had known the Roosevelts. In town, it was commonly assumed the family had lost its fortune in the great crash of '29, though it was more due to George's absentminded mismanagement than anything else.

As George often said, he couldn't care less for filthy lucre. He was strange: prematurely antique, stern, smelling of musty books and cattails. Vi never once had a hug from him. But she understood him, she always said: he was raised by his grandmother, whose sole enthusiasm was the orphanage where the old folks' home, Pomeroy Hall, is now, and Vi often wondered if he felt less like her kin and more like one of her orphans. His own mother had drowned in the lake when George was tiny, and after that he never saw his father, who, crippled with grief, moved to Manhattan and only sent a check and a terse note to the boy every month. Still, George was happy enough, in his way, Vi told me. He, she found out when she returned to Templeton, had a private obsession that had taken up all his attention.

That morning Vi found herself sitting, shivering, in the lawyer's office, glimpsing the idea that her father's passion for his work was deeper than she had imagined. In fact, the lawyer intimated, its souring was perhaps what led her phlegmatic father to send the Cadillac spinning over the brink.

"Ahem. Your father," he said gently, "was perhaps too, well, susceptible to criticism?"

To this, Vivienne could only say, "Hell, yeah," remembering the way her square daddy-o would freak out even at the slightest criticism of the Republican Party, Templeton, or his own uneven bowties. The lawyer smiled with great unction at the girl. Chauncey Todd was an old friend of her family's, a man who had a habit of drawling over words he wanted to emphasize. He was also a breast-ogler, addressing her two great sagging boobs as if he were primarily sorry for their loss--of possible support, perhaps--and only secondarily for the girl's they were attached to. He wondered if what they said was true, and those hippie girls really were as loose as they were said to be.

"Vivienne," he said hesitantly toward her nipples. "You have, ahem, perhaps heard of your father's book?"

"Nah," said Vivienne, giving her chest a gleeful little shake to make the old man sweat. "He wrote a book? Wow."

In fact, she did know of the book, having received it in the mail with the fifty-dollar check she got every month from her parents. She even sent a rare note of congratulations, read three chapters, and then used it to prop up a wobbly leg on her bedside table. She simply forgot. The pot she smoked every day upon awakening, after eating, before bed, tended to make her forgetful.

And so the lawyer refreshed her memory. The book was eight years in the making, he reminded her: her father had begun it long before Vivienne turned rebellious and left town for "freer waters." The book, he said, was about Marmaduke Temple and a shameful secret he had. This secret affected Vivienne herself, her mother's family, as well as the view of Marmaduke Temple in the eyes of American historians everywhere. The lawyer paused, then, for effect.

"And what was the secret?" Vivienne asked, interested despite herself.

The lawyer cleared his throat; rhetorical drum-rolling. "Your father proposed that your mother's old Templeton family, the Averells," he said, "are the descendants of Marmaduke Temple and a slave girl he owned named Hetty." And he sat back, and looked up at her face for the first time all morning to see her reaction. There had been such tremendous outrage on all fronts since the book came out that the lawyer was expecting sudden shock to flit over my mother's face.

But a dazed smile burst out, instead. "Cool," said Vivienne, "I'm a Negro."

In the time it took Chauncey Todd to digest this idea, the slow crunch of Vivienne's mental machinery had brought her to a different place. Her face grew grave and disappointed. "Wait a second," she said. "If my father was related to old Marmaduke and my mom was too, that's incest, right? I mean, I'm a product of incest?" She felt this was a great tragedy. That explains it, she said to herself, though it was not quite clear what about herself had now been explained.

Chauncey Todd dragged a hand over his bewildered face and sighed at the breasts. "Now, Vivienne," he said. "We're talking perhaps five generations here. Your parents were only slightly related."

"Ah," she said. "Right." She waited for a while, and then frowned again. "So, what's the problem?"

Chauncey Todd felt as if he were on a merry-go-round spinning out of control. He squeezed his eyes shut. And, thus safe against my mother's magnificent though untethered bosoms, he explained as calmly as he could that Marmaduke Temple was perhaps the archetypal American, the first self-made man; that he, a Quaker, had slaves was scandal enough; and far worse, that he, a married man, had relations with his slaves--scandalous! It made everyone very uncomfortable. It shattered the idol that was Marmaduke Temple. He was not the man everyone had thought he was. After twenty minutes of impassioned speech, Chauncey Todd was panting, surprised at his own zeal, pleased with his eloquence. When he opened his eyes, Vivienne was gazing at him with more bewilderment.

"So?" she said at last. "Like, he was a human being, right? Nobody is saying he was a god or anything. Human beings do shitty things sometimes. Oh well. We're over it. I don't see what the big deal is."

"Well," said Chauncey Todd, "you are in the minority, here. The extreme minority. All of Templeton was greatly upset, I'll have you know. And so was the nation's historical community. Your father was berated for such speculative history. There was even talk of taking away his job at NYSHA. I, for one, as his confidant, know that he couldn't bear the idea, and that he was bewildered with all of the negative press. He, like you, couldn't understand what the brouhaha, if you will, was about. The poor, blind man," he said soulfully, shaking his head, "had no idea what hit him. And so I do believe that perhaps your parents' accident was not an accident."

"You know, Mr. Chauncey Todd," said my young mother. "I don't think so. I mean, it's not like the relations were ever a secret or anything. My mother and grandmother always said they were related to Marmaduke Temple through something illegitimate. Like, they used to make this joke about it. They were always so proud of it. But they said they couldn't prove it. I mean, all my daddy did was prove it, right? It doesn't change the facts. I mean, it's history. Like, what's history, but the facts we find out later, right? I don't know, it's like I'm getting all deep now."

For a while, there was a silence between them in the dusty, walnut-paneled room. Chauncey Todd went to the window and looked down onto Main Street, where a small pack of young male joggers was going by, their thighs a skim-milk blue under their tiny shorts. "Health nuts," he said with disdain. He turned back around, gave the breasts a doleful stare, then sat down again. "I suppose, Vivienne," he said, "we should carry on and finish our business for today. Now, for the will," he said, and pulled the document from a folder.

This was when Vivienne learned that almost everything her parents had was gone. Edgewater, the brick mansion built by her great-great-great granduncle Richard, the rent of which supported her family for years, would have to be sold for tax purposes. The Gilbert Stuart oil painting of a fleshy Marmaduke Temple and the smirking painting of novelist Jacob Franklin Temple had to be taken off the walls of Averell Cottage and sold to NYSHA to cover the funeral expenses. Almost the entire library of first-edition Jacob Franklin Temple books would have to be sold off to pay other bills, though she should feel free to keep one of each book as a family memento, Jacob having been in the habit of keeping five copies of his own editions on hand at any time. The jewels of her great-great-grandmother, Charlotte Franklin Temple, would be sold, though Vi would keep the pocket watch inscribed to the authoress from her dear father. George had already donated to NYSHA all of the valuable papers: Marmaduke's maps and letters and Jacob's notes of admiration from the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Samuel Morse and General Lafayette, etc. Vi would get the family Bible, Marmaduke's wife's prayer book, the large collection of baseball memorabilia collected by her father's father--Asterisk "Sy" Upton, the longtime baseball commissioner. The only furniture she could keep was the furniture already in Averell Cottage. She had about fifteen thousand dollars in the bank when all was said and done, a gift from her grandfather at her birth, all that remained of Marmaduke's millions.

"The good news," said Chauncey Todd, "is that you get to keep Averell Cottage. Your mother had held it in trust for you all this time."

Vivienne stared forlornly at the lawyer, who was sitting back and pinching the bridge of his nose. On her long bus trip across the country, she had come to the secret resolution to sell off everything, take the money, and buy a sweet, wisteria-covered house in Carmel-by-the-Sea that overlooked the ocean. She would be a poet: words, she always told me when I was growing up, burned her fingertips from her late teens until her twenties. Years later, she would read my clumsy high school essays and rearrange the words with great innate skill until they tripped lightly across the page. On the bus home, she had imagined in detail the long life she would live in the cottage by the sea, how she wouldn't have to ever work again. We all have our theories about why people react the way they do, especially when they're acting eccentric; mine is that those daydreams of Carmel-by-the-Sea were how she staved off the sorrow ticking at her from inside, the incomprehensible loss of both her parents at once.

Now, in Chauncey Todd's office, it looked as if she would have to stay for a little while to get ramshackle Averell Cottage back into shape, and then try to sell it. Even then, she would probably only have enough money for a decade or so in a smaller place than the one she longed for, and then she would have to get a job, if she weren't a famous poet already.

The lawyer looked at her pale face with its burning carbuncles of acne, and felt a tiny mewling movement of pity in his breast. "It is not much," he said, not unkindly. "But it can be a good life if you manage it well."

"Good. Fantastic," she said. And Chauncey Todd, unaccustomed to the sarcasm of the next generation, took her at her word, and beamed her bosoms a tender smile. In response, Vi took her left breast in hand and shook it at him for a good-bye, then trudged home in her scandalous dress and cork shoes, the ratty zigzag of her part lowered into the lake wind.