The Monsters of Templeton (44 page)

Winter melted into early spring. Birds flittered into the trees, trailing arias. Vivienne had thrown open the windows of Averell Cottage so the fresh March air blew in. She had a red handkerchief on her hippie head, and those days of painting and stripping wall-paper and sprucing the house up for the quick sale had made her lose some of her flab. She went through a strange sort of drug withdrawal in the last few weeks where she shuddered and couldn't sleep for weeks on end, at which time her acne, miraculously, cleared. Perhaps, she thought, she had been allergic to cannabis. Perhaps she was allergic to not washing her face. Home again, she had fallen into the routine with which she was raised: obsessive tidiness, a sense of order.

With its yen for cleanliness, the dovelike ghost was pleased, showed itself again to Vi, cooed approvingly when she walked by with a washcloth in hand. Its vague feathers accumulated under the beds and its down rolled around her feet like mist when she walked.

Then came a day when Vi rode a wobbly ladder in the entryway, rolling white paint onto the age-yellowed ceiling, singing to herself, Summ-mer time, time time, whoo-hooo, the living's eeeeasy. She crowed up there, she cackled. She felt possessed by Gershwin. There was a drop cloth on the floor, so she was not too concerned about drips, but when she looked down, there was a man holding the base of the ladder, and on the crown of his curly red head a splotch of paint very much like a bird dropping.

"Whoops," she said, beaming down at his gray summer wool suit, the necktie tight in a Windsor knot. "Who are you?"

He must not have felt the paint through his thick reddish curls, because he blinked up at her, confused. "Pardon?" he said. Then, seeing how she was waiting expectantly, he said, "I'm Sol. Solomon Falconer. The Fifth."

"Okay," said Vi. Then, "Oh. You mean you're the beer guy. The Heir of Beer."

"Well," said Sol. "Yes?"

The two stared at each other for some time until Vi said, musing to herself, "'To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more.'"

"Pardon?" stuttered Sol. "I'm sorry?"

"Oh, I'm being rude," she said. "That was Walt Whitman. A great poet."

"Oh, I know Whitman," said Sol. "Haven't read him since college, though. Ages ago."

Vi put her roller down and beamed at Sol below her. "A friend of Whitman's is a friend of mine," she said. "You look hungry. I'm making lunch. I rarely have guests, but I found some really beautiful tomatoes in the grocery store yesterday. I'm Vivienne Upton."

Then she climbed down off the ladder and shook Sol's hand, and he wiped the paint off them with his handkerchief, surreptitiously, as he followed her into the kitchen. "Thank you," he said, surprised. "That's very kind of you to offer. But I'm here to talk business. A business proposition. If you will."

"Business," said Vi, as if the very word tasted bitter. She pulled olive oil down onto the counter and sniffed the dimple of a tomato. "I'm hungry. Who cares about business?"

"Oh," said Sol Falconer. "Well, I went to business school. I mean, I do."

"I don't," she said. "There's nothing less interesting to me," and she frowned a little.

An awkward silence fell between them, and Sol watched Vi slice the tomato neatly into segments. "So," he said. "Should I take it to mean that you're not interested in selling Averell Cottage then?"

"Aha," said Vi, looking up, her eyes dancing. "Well, that kind of business. Maybe I am, after all. First, sit down, though. What the heck, open that bottle of wine. Tell me all about yourself, Mr. Sol Falconer. I want to know the man with whom I aim to conduct my business."

Was she flirting? Perhaps she was: to be honest, Vi's head was a little swimmy from paint fumes, and Sol's hands were sweating too much for him to take much notice. No new addition to Averell Cottage existed yet, no vast glass doors that opened into the glorious early spring world--that would be my mother's big architectural mistake when I was six--so Vivienne escorted young Sol Falconer through the kitchen and directly out into the day and had him sit at an old wrought-iron table, flaking with rust.

"Sit," she said. "Stay."

And she imped back in and imped back out with tomato salads and fresh-baked bread and yogurt she made herself and a great bottle of wine and a plate of her special tuna fish salad that she was careful to garnish with a lettuce leaf frill.

At last, she sat down and drank a goblet of wine in one go. "Now eat," she said to Sol Falconer, who looked upon the meal with hungry eyes--he'd been working all day, it was now three in the afternoon, his father never let him take a lunch hour, only five minutes to gobble half a sandwich, which he hadn't had time for today--and he tore in. He washed each mouthful down with a gulp of the sour wine. After about ten minutes, he had loosened the knot in his tie. After fifteen, he was light-headed, and he suddenly saw the sweet way the cherry trees would, very soon, burst into bloom; he saw this now as if he'd never seen a flowerbud before in his entire life. And, perhaps, he hadn't. Back then, he never had time for joy; he had never joined the generation of love, only dancing alone in his parents' great house to some of its music on the radio, turned low.

Vivienne, drinking happily, watching her handsome guest chew, asked him one question when it seemed he'd slowed down. "So, who are you, Mr. Sol Falconer?" she said.

And that unleashed the torrent. He told her he was a fresh graduate from Harvard, both undergrad and business school, twenty-five years old. His family only came to their old house in Templeton in the summer: the rest of the time, they were in Wisconsin, overseeing the brewery. This summer they came early, and his father decided to make him his own personal toady, and there he was, working his butt off for no money just so his father could teach him the business, but, frankly, a monkey could run the business; beer was not something that people would ever stop drinking; and, besides, he didn't see how fetching contraband cigars from very shady places in Manhattan could count as learning the beer business, but, whatever, he'd do it, if only the old donkey's behind ended up giving him the business when he croaked.

"Oh," said Vivienne, intermittently nodding. The sun sank a little lower, the shadows edged away from where they'd begun. With the sunlight tamped out, the spring day reverted again to winter, and a chill draft rose from the lake. Sol seemed so flushed and warm inside his story that Vi didn't have the heart to ask him to go inside. Instead, she kept drinking to keep her bones from freezing.

Frankly tipsy now, Sol Falconer leaned back in his chair and expounded anew. Anyway, that old bastard had also put him in charge of buying up old property in Templeton to make sure the hoi polloi didn't take it over and start ruining it with all sorts of fast-food restaurants and strip malls and, frankly, when they heard this morning that Vi might be selling Averell Cottage, his father had bellowed from his perch on his throne--the toilet, Sol-the-Fifth clarified for Vi, as if she were a child--that no goddamn way was she going to sell that place to any rank developer because, frankly, it would be the perfect place for a strip mall, and there was utterly no way that he was going to allow a strip mall to come into Templeton, no way. So here Sol was, vowing that he would best any offer anyone would make for the place, just to keep it from being snatched up.

"Oh," said Vivienne, watching the way the lake had turned an opalescent gray in the late sun. She sat on her hands, shivering, yearning to go inside, but her guest was wild now, and the cold didn't seem to bother him. Now Sol veered wildly off course and began telling Vivienne about his family. She knew they were the big cheese around here, but had no idea that they were some of the original settlers, Solomon Falconer the First coming with Marmaduke Temple the very first time he surveyed and sold the land.

"Some say," whispered poor, drunk Sol, "that Marmaduke even screwed around with some Indian girl and they had a girl who the first Solomon Falconer married. Get it? Marmaduke's illegitimate daughter married Sol-the-First. It's all very hush-hush, but if it's true, I'm related to the Temples, just like you. How exciting!" Then he put a finger on his lips and blew to signify the sanctity of the secret. Vi, suddenly alert, smiling hugely, nodded.

Sol continued, saying they had a history, the Falconers, of marrying in great late age and leaving one son behind. Only five generations of very old Solomon Falconers with very young wives between him and the original. They were originally farmers up on West Lake Road until Euphonia Falconer had the brilliant idea to plant hops when she herself was an old woman. At one point at the end of the nineteenth century the Falconers were the employers in town, and they even ran a place on West Lake Road, right underneath their mansion that still sat there, a place that housed over three thousand seasonal workers (way bigger than Templeton at the time!) and was called Hops City. It had a barber's, a butcher's, a dance hall, a grocery store, a blacksmithy, a bakery, tons of huge longhouse-style dormers, et cetera, et cetera.

"Oh," said Vivienne, and imagined the entire hillside full of twelve-foot hops poles, turning buttery and golden in the August heat.

The rising musk of the hops.

A man twanging a mouth harp as he walked the shadow-ribbed rows.

However, Sol began to relate with a wine-thick tongue, then there was an overproduction of hops for about five years in a row and prices were terrible and then there was a blight and then there was the Great Depression, and his family fortune almost died out once again, but then Solomon Falconer the Fourth (his father) had the idea to open a brewery in Wisconsin of all places, and it took off, and now nobody grew hops around Templeton any more but the Farmers' Museum out at the old Franklin House barns. Sol-the-Fifth was in Templeton that summer, he said, because he had been in love with the town all his life.

"It never changes, does it?" he mused, eyelids heavy with drink. "Incorruptible."

"Oh," said Vivienne, shuddering now. All this talk had thrilled her: it was more conversation than she'd had for as long as she'd been home. It was sweet, a relief. Besides, she wanted to get out of the cold. She put a hand on Sol's thigh. "Kiss me."

He leaned over the wrought-iron table and put his wine-soaked tongue in her mouth. She kissed him back. They fumbled their way inside, and there, on the ancient floorboards of the dining room, floorboards that the beautiful and proud Hetty Averell once scrubbed on her hands and knees, there, on those old boards, I was begotten.

VI FINISHED HER story that night by leading us into the dining room and pointing with great majesty at the exact site of my generation. We stood in a circle and gazed down. It may have been my imagination, but I swear I saw a lighter stain in that place. I had to look away.

"This," said Clarissa, "is just so weird."

Vi sighed and led us away, back into the bright-lit kitchen. "I stayed here," she said, "because he went off to Manhattan the next day and I waited and waited and waited for him to come back and make another 'offer' on the house, if you catch my drift. But he didn't. And then, the next time I see him, I'm four months gone and he has his wife on his arm, and I just couldn't tell him. I didn't know that he was going to get married, but I did know, just by looking at them, that it wasn't going to last. So I decide just to ride it out. It would only be a year or so until they broke up, I was sure, and then I'd show up one day with Willie in my arms and say, just take a look at this little one--she has you written all over her." Here, Vi stopped and shook her head. "I think"--she sighed--"I was reading too many historical novels at that time."

"But," I said, "that never happened. You never took me to him."

"That never happened," she agreed. "His first marriage lasted for five years. At first I was a little, well, unhinged. I stalked his wife through the Great American. I got drunk and set fire to his front porch. It was stone, though, and didn't take. By the end, I'd gotten over him. Came to my senses. I didn't want him to know. I don't think he ever knew about who you really were, Willie--I think he thought I was hounding him because I was anticapitalist and taking it out on him. He never knew about you being his."

We sat there, the four of us, for some time, mulling this over. Clarissa took a meditative sip of her tea, and the mug in her bony hands looked so large I had to hold myself back from snatching it up, afraid she'd break her wrists. And then I glanced up at my mother to find her looking at me with a strange glimmer in her eye--merriment? pride? relief?--and I narrowed my own and frowned a little. We stared at each other like this for some time until, with a great watery crash, it broke like three tons of whitewater on my head. Perhaps she'd meant this all along, wily old Vivienne. Perhaps this was her grand plan, the way she would make me heal. She knew me, in and out: she knew my obsessiveness, the way I'd learned as a little kid. She could've told me who my father was easily, but I needed to know the precise weight of what my family carried; I needed to work for my redemption. I wanted to throw something--a vase, a book, Reverend Milky--across the room, but my mother blew a little kiss at me and hid her smile in her mug.

And then there rose a strange squeaking sound, as if some rodent were scuttling over our feet, and I peered under the table to find it. But when I looked up again, Clarissa and Vi were staring at Reverend Milky, whose face was red and cheeks blown out, and eyes squeezed shut, and who was making the little squealing noises. Then he couldn't keep it in and let loose a tremendous roar of laughter, shaking herky-jerky in the chair so it creaked under his weight, letting a tear or two slip down his apoplectic face. Despite myself, I couldn't keep from smiling at the sight of this fleshy wobbly man, at his gasping sobs of laughter and the way his hobnail crucifix danced a jig on his belly.