Empire Falls (4 page)

The dynamiting of the Robideaux Blight some seven miles upstream could be felt all the way to Empire Falls, and on the day in August when the blasting was complete C. B. Whiting knelt on the riverbank before his newly completed house and watched with pride as the freshly energized currents bore off what little remained of the moose, along with the ever-increasing mound of milk cartons, plastic bottles and rusted soup cans, all bobbing their way south toward an unsuspecting Fairhaven. The river no longer whispered despair as it had earlier in the summer. Reenergized, it fairly chortled with glee at his enterprise. Satisfied with the outcome, he lit a cigar, inhaled deeply of sweet summer air, and regarded the slender woman at his side, whose name, by no coincidence, was Francine Robideaux
.

Francine was a bright, ambitious young woman, newly graduated from
Colby College, some ten years C. B. Whiting’s junior, and until the day her family closed the deal to sell her future husband the Robideaux Blight, she’d never laid eyes on him, though of course she’d heard of him. C.B. himself had graduated from Colby, as had his father and grandfather, whereas Francine was the first Robideaux to continue her education beyond high school. Thanks to a scholarship, she had emerged from Colby no longer recognizable as a Robideaux in deportment, speech or mannerism, which disturbed and angered her family, who never would have allowed her to attend college had they known how contemptuous of them she’d be upon her return. A poor girl among rich ones, Francine Robideaux had carefully observed and then adopted their table manners, fashion sense, vocal idiosyncrasies and personal hygiene. At Colby she’d also learned to flirt
.

In the soft light of his lawyers’ book-lined offices, C. B. Whiting, who had not looked seriously at a woman since returning to Maine, liked the look of Francine Robideaux. He also appreciated that she was a Colby graduate and admired that she appeared to understand that he was snookering her family and didn’t necessarily object. Every time he glanced at her, every time she spoke, he was more impressed, for the girl seemed able to convey, without contradiction, that she was observing him carefully, even as other of her mannerisms suggested that maybe, so far as she was concerned, he wasn’t even in the room. Maybe he was there and maybe he wasn’t, depending. To resolve the issue of whether he was there or not, he resolved to marry her if she would have him
.

Well, as it turned out, she would. They were wed in September, leaving C. B. Whiting the rest of his days on earth to try to remember what exactly it was about the look of Francine Robideaux that had so appealed to him in the soft light of the lawyers’ offices. In natural light she looked rather pinched, and in the manner of a great many women of French Canadian ancestry, she lacked a chin, as if someone had already pinched her there. He also came to understand that marrying Francine Robideaux would not answer as conclusively as he’d hoped the question of whether or not he was actually in the room. On that late afternoon in August when he lit a cigar in celebration, his wife-to-be at his side, C. B. Whiting studied his fiancée carefully. Whiting men, all of whom seemed to be born with sound business sense, each invariably gravitated, like moths to a flame, toward the one woman in the world who would regard making them utterly miserable as her life’s noble endeavor, a woman who would remain bound to her husband with the same grim tenacity that bound nuns to the suffering Christ. Fully cognizant of his family history, C.B. had been understandably wary of matrimony. From time to time his father would remind him that he would have need of an heir
,
but then C.B. regarded his father and grandfather and wasn’t so sure. Why not put an end to the awful cycle of misery right there? What was the purpose of producing more Whiting males if they were predestined to lives of marital torment?

And so C. B. Whiting scrutinized Francine Robideaux, trying to envision some future day when he might want to beat her to death with a shovel. Thankfully, he was unable to call such a scene into vivid imaginative life. About the best he could do was contemplate the possibility that it had been unwise to go to war with God. If He could deliver unto you an unwanted moose, what was to prevent Him from delivering something even worse. Say, for instance, an unwanted woman. This would have been a worrisome contemplation had he not wanted this woman. But he
did
want her. He was almost sure of it
.

His bride-to-be had other thoughts. “That would be a fine place for a gazebo, Charlie,” she observed, indicating with her thin index finger a spot halfway down the bank. When Charles Beaumont Whiting did not immediately respond, Francine Robideaux repeated her observation, and this time her future husband thought he detected a slight edge to her tone. “Did you hear what I said, Charlie?”

He had. In truth, though he had no objection to gazebos in general, he was not entirely taken with the idea of erecting one as an architectural companion to a hacienda. This aesthetic reservation was not, however, the cause of his hesitation. No, the reason he hadn’t responded was that no one had ever called him Charlie. From boyhood he had always been Charles, and his mother in particular had been adamant that the fine name she’d given him was not to be corrupted with more common nicknames, like Charlie or, even worse, Chuck. For a brief time, in college, his friends had called him Beaumont, and in Mexico he’d been Beau. More recently, his business acquaintances mostly referred to him as C.B., but they did so reverentially and would never have presumed to address him as Charlie
.

Clearly, the time to set the record straight was now, but as he considered how best to suggest his preference for Charles over Charlie, he became aware that “now” had already passed into “then.” Strange. Had anyone else called him Charlie, he’d have corrected that person before his or her voice had a chance to fall, but for some reason, with this woman whom he had asked on bended knee to be his bride, he’d delayed. A beat passed, and then another and another, until Charles Beaumont Whiting realized that he was mute with a new emotion. At first he noted only its unpleasant sensation, but eventually he identified it. The emotion was fear
.

“I
said
…” his wife-to-be began a third time
.

“Yes, dear. An excellent idea,” Charles Beaumont Whiting agreed and in that fateful moment became Charlie Whiting. Later in life, he was fond of remarking, rather ruefully, that he always had the last word in all differences of opinion with his wife, and that—two words, actually—was, “Yes, dear.” Had he known how many times he would repeat that phrase to this woman, how it would become the mantra of their marriage, he might well have recollected the river’s invitation and committed himself to its current then and there and followed the moose downstream, thereby saving himself a great deal of misery and the price of the handgun he would purchase thirty years later for the purpose of ending his life
.

“And would you mind putting out that awful cigar?” Francine Robideaux added
.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

T
HE
E
MPIRE
G
RILL
was long and low-slung, with windows that ran its entire length, and since the building next door, a Rexall drugstore, had been condemned and razed, it was now possible to sit at the lunch counter and see straight down Empire Avenue all the way to the old textile mill and its adjacent shirt factory. Both had been abandoned now for the better part of two decades, though their dark, looming shapes at the foot of the avenue’s gentle incline continued to draw the eye. Of course, nothing prevented a person from looking up Empire Avenue in the other direction, but Miles Roby, the proprietor of the restaurant—and its eventual owner, he hoped—had long noted that his customers rarely did.

No, their natural preference was to gaze down to where the street both literally and figuratively dead-ended at the mill and factory, the undeniable physical embodiment of the town’s past, and it was the magnetic quality of the old, abandoned structures that steeled Miles’s resolve to sell the Empire Grill for what little it would bring, just as soon as the restaurant was his.

Just beyond the factory and mill ran the river that long ago had powered them, and Miles often wondered if these old buildings were razed, would the town that had grown up around them be forced to imagine a future? Perhaps not. Nothing but a chain-link fence had gone up in place of the Rexall, which meant, Miles supposed, that diverting one’s attention from the past was not the same as envisioning and embarking upon a future. On the other hand, if the past were razed, the slate wiped clean, maybe fewer people would confuse it with the future, and that at least would be something. For as long as the mill and factory remained, Miles feared, many would continue to believe against all reason that a buyer might be found for one or both, and that consequently Empire Falls would be restored to its old economic viability.

What drew Miles Roby’s anxious eye down Empire this particular afternoon in early September was not the dark, high-windowed shirt factory where his mother had spent most of her adult working life or, just beyond it, the larger, brooding presence of the textile mill, but rather his hope that he’d catch a glimpse of his daughter, Tick, when she rounded the corner and began her slow, solitary trek up the avenue. Like most of her high school friends, Tick, a rail-thin sophomore, lugged all her books in a canvas L.L. Bean backpack and had to lean forward, as if into a strong headwind, to balance a weight nearly as great as her own. Oddly, most of the conventions Miles remembered from high school had been subverted. He and his friends had carried their textbooks balanced on their hips, listing first to the left, then shifting the load and listing to the right. They brought home only the books they would need that night, or the ones they
remembered
needing, leaving the rest crammed in their lockers. Kids today stuffed the entire contents of their lockers into their seam-stretched backpacks and brought it all home, probably, Miles figured, so they wouldn’t have to think through what they’d need and what they could do without, thereby avoiding the kinds of decisions that might trail consequences. Except that this itself had consequences. A visit to the doctor last spring had revealed the beginnings of scoliosis, a slight curvature of Tick’s spine, which worried Miles at several levels. “She’s just carrying too much weight,” the doctor explained, unaware, as far as Miles could tell, of the metaphorical implications of her remark. It had taken Tick most of the summer to regain her normal posture, and yesterday, after one day back at school, she was already hunched over again.

Instead of catching sight of his daughter, the one person in the world he wanted at that moment to see rounding the corner, Miles was instead treated to the sight of Walt Comeau, the person he least wanted to see—the one he could live happily without ever laying eyes on again—pulling into a vacant parking space in front of the Empire Grill. Walt’s van was a rolling advertisement for its driver, who’d had
THE SILVER FOX
stenciled across the hood, just above the grill, and its vanity plates read
FOXY 1
. The van was tall and Walt short, which meant he had to hop down from the running board, and something about the man’s youthful bounce made Miles, who’d seen this both in real life and in his dreams just about every day for the past year, want to grab an ax handle, meet the Silver Fox at the door and stave his head in right there in the entryway.

Instead he turned back to the grill and flipped Horace Weymouth’s burger, wondering if he’d already left it on too long. Horace liked his burgers bloody.

“So.” Horace closed and folded his
Boston Globe
in anticipation of being fed, his inner clock apparently confirming that Miles had indeed waited too long. “You been out to see Mrs. Whiting yet?”

“Not yet,” Miles said. He set up Horace’s platter with tomato, lettuce, a slice of Bermuda onion and a pickle, plus the open-faced bun, then pressed down on the burger with his spatula, making it sizzle before slipping it onto the bun. “I usually wait to be summoned.”