Idyll Banter (19 page)

A PASSING OF HISTORY AND HOSPITALITY

THE FLOWERS WERE
yellow and white along the southern tip of Marshall Hutchins's casket (lilies and daisies), and pink and blue toward the north (delphinia, larkspur, and roses). This wasn't the result of anyone's design or chosen aesthetic, it was simply the way the flowers had arrived.

Marshall's funeral began just after lunch on an overcast Monday toward the end of September, but the clouds were drifting east throughout the service. By the time the choir stood to sing “How Great Thou Art” toward the end, sunlight was sluicing through the thin tunnels of stained glass along the sanctuary wall: forty-five-degree angles of light, each an ethereal buttress that seemed to support the structure, but was, in reality, sustaining Marshall's family and friends.

Marshall Hutchins was seventy-eight when he died, and we were only acquaintances. To imply we were more would be unfair to his memory.

But the paths of our lives crossed once, and they met at the clearing in which I now sit. And type. And remember.

I am writing in the room that was the bedroom Marshall shared with his wife, Louise. A room away—across an entry hall and a stairway—my daughter's troll house rests on the spot where Marshall's easy chair once sat.

Upstairs, I hear my wife at work in the room in which I discovered my two favorite antique newspaper clippings. One marks the perfect game that New York Yankees pitcher Don Larsen hurled in the 1956 World Series (an achievement that is remarkable not because it was in the World Series, but because Larsen was an unremarkable pitcher at best). The other is a front page story from the newspaper describing the incredible possibility that Montpelier and Burlington might someday be linked by a four-lane “super highway.”

Those newspapers were laid on the floor underneath a linoleum rug that Marshall—perhaps Marshall and his then young son, Roy, or Marshall and his brother Martyn—had laid.

I live in the yellow house in Lincoln that for almost four decades belonged to Marshall and Louise. I've lived here ten years now (ten years, in fact, this month), but to this day when I meet elderly people for the first time in the nearby supermarket, they are likely to nod and say, “Oh, yes. You live in Marshall's house, don't you?”

I do indeed, and I am glad. Marshall and I first met in the summer of 1986. I was a young, presumptuous New Yorker in a gray suit. He was an older, wiser retired state legislator, selectperson, and volunteer firefighter.

Marshall was not the sort who would ever have pointed out to me the tremendous amount that—to paraphrase Disney's Pocahontas—I didn't even know I didn't know.

Instead, when it was clear that my wife and I were buying his house, he phoned the cubbyhole I was renting in Burlington one September evening and asked, “You lived in New York, right?”

“Right.”

He then extended to me one of the most important invitations I've ever received in my life: “Want to come down here Saturday? Have a glass of cider and some doughnuts? This house runs pretty good, but there are a few things I can show you.”

I don't know if my wife and I would have survived our first winter here without that autumn Saturday. I still have the yellow legal pad filled with my notes about the furnace and the kitchen heater, the water tank and the fuse box. I still have memories of those doughnuts, my first in the fall in Vermont.

And I still have—and will probably have always—the sense, thanks to Marshall, that houses have histories. Sharing his with me was not merely a pro forma part of the process of selling a house.

It was a ritual of transition. A gesture of hospitality. It was his way of welcoming me to Lincoln.

AN ELEGY FOR THE STATE'S FINEST RED SOX FAN

VERMONT
'
S
—
PERHAPS
New England's—greatest Red Sox fan died the other day.

He died at the age of eighty-one, as peacefully as anyone can who has watched an endless litany of pennants and titles and world championships slip away.

His name was Ken Hallock, a farmer from Waltham who lived the last fifteen years of his life up in Lincoln. He was certainly not the most famous Red Sox supporter, nor was he the most articulate when it came to that special, heartbreaking kind of masochism that links the fans to the team. You won't, for example, find his poems about Fenway Park in collections with Donald Hall, nor will you find his essays about the game reprinted with those of Bart Giamatti or George Will.

But he was aware without question that to root for the Red Sox—to root with knowledge and passion and patience—is to root as an act of faith. It is to love people who you know will disappoint you, but to forgive them and to love them just the same.

It is to know people are human.

I met Ken Hallock when I sat behind him in church. My wife and I had arrived in Lincoln only three days earlier, and she steered us to the pew behind the “nice older couple” who had brought her a Christmas cactus our first day in town. He spoke to me at the end of the service, after the minister had given the benediction. Taking my hand and shaking it vigorously, he exclaimed, “God loves you, and so do I!”

The jaded New Yorker in me said—for lack of anything better—“Thank you.” But I was nonetheless touched and flattered to be accepted without judgment by both him and his God.

When I learned from Mr. Hallock that he was a Red Sox fan, I wasn't at all surprised—not because he was a native New Englander, but because of his confidence that the meek someday will indeed inherit the earth. I only knew Mr. Hallock from church, and I only knew him in the context of church, but I believe the same optimism that served as the foundation for his faith in God, served also to buoy him through the hard times with the Red Sox.

I know, for example, that every year he would make a pilgrimage down country to watch the team play, and almost every time it lost. Sometimes in the last inning.

I know that although he listened religiously to their games on the radio, it was not uncommon for the reception to disappear. Usually in the midst of a rally.

And I know how well he handled what had to have been the most astonishing Red Sox collapse of his life: the 1986 World Series loss to the New York Mets. He was undaunted. He was completely undaunted, even though the team managed to let its first title in almost seventy years slip away when it was only one out from victory. One out! A cluster of bloop singles and a ninety-foot squibber was all it took to dash the team's—and Mr. Hallock's—dreams of a championship.

From the pew behind him, I witnessed Mr. Hallock bear this defeat with his customary courage. The Sunday after the Red Sox had lost he turned to me and said, “As awful as that was, it'll only make next year even sweeter when they win!” And if I had any doubts about the sincerity of his faith, they were dispelled by the way he sang our last hymn, raising his arms and uttering and repeating the words, “How great Thou art, how great Thou art.”

Ken Hallock was buried in a small family plot in Waltham, wearing the Red Sox warm-up jacket that helped him to remember that no cause, not even the Red Sox, is so irrevocably lost as to be beyond hope.

HOW A FAMILY COPES
WITH LOSS: BUILDING LOVE ON LITTLE WHITE LIES

THE WORLD IS
rich with elegies for mothers, so I will spare you one more. Besides, my mother was never particularly good with good-byes (“See you,” with a small salute was about as good as it got), and I believe she would prefer that the idiosyncratic privacies of our parting and her death were preserved.

But amidst those moments last month, her last in this world, was one that will endure for me as both a wondrous illustration of the love my family shares, and the weird ways our little clan functions. Or malfunctions. Or—to take grammatical license with an especially popular little adjective—dysfunctions.

On July 5, my father was flat on his back in a Florida hospital, awaiting an angioplasty. My mother was home alone with her cough, hoping desperately that the hack was the result of radiation, pneumonia, or a virus that had besieged her body after months of chemotherapy.

At that point she had been battling lung cancer for eight months, and she still clung to the dream—evaporating a bit with each rasp—that she was getting better.

My mother's oncologist was making his rounds at the hospital that morning and saw my father. He shared with him some bad news: The X-rays he'd taken of my mother's lungs the previous week showed, to use his words, “a significant infiltration.” He wouldn't know for sure until a CAT-scan was done, but the prognosis was bleak.

My father had been an extraordinary cancer coach: part dietitian, part nurse, part-Knute Rockne. The day after my mother had been told of her cancer, he'd bought a Vita-Mix blender for broccoli shakes and carrot juice. When my mother decided she'd prefer not to wear wigs, he bought her hats and scarves and turbans with the care he had once reserved for blouses and jewelry on her birthday.

He called me from his hospital bed with the news, unwilling to share it with my mother on the phone, but unable to keep it solely to himself. The doctor had said he would tell my mother some version of the truth that afternoon when he was scheduled to see her in his office to discuss the X-rays. He had added that he would be gentle, possibly evasive, and my father needn't fear my mother would get the worst of the news while he was unable to comfort her.

My brother and I agreed we would leave for Florida: He'd leave immediately from New York, and I'd fly down the next day.

My father's angioplasty was not scheduled until the evening, and so he called again that afternoon. He sounded tired but peculiarly happy: He must have misunderstood the oncologist that morning, he said. My mother had just told him of her meeting with the doctor, and while there was a spot on the X-ray, it might be just a pneumonia scar. They'd do a CAT-scan to be sure, but we needn't despair just yet. More important, he said, I had to get a message to my brother, who was 35,000 feet off the ground, and tell him that he should not convey to our mother our fear that her time might be short.

I said I would. I was surprised my mother's doctor had painted so rosy a picture, but I assumed he knew what he was doing.

My father had the angioplasty that night, and by July 6, we were together as a family. We all took comfort in the idea there was still room for hope, and I know at least twice I said something to my mother about “that pneumonia scar in your lungs.”

I didn't believe for one moment it was a pneumonia scar, but I did believe this was what she had been told. I was wrong: My aunt told me later that given the questions my mother had asked the doctor that day in his office, he had decided to be candid about the progress her disease had made and honest about her chances. He had told her that afternoon what he had told my father that morning.

And so when I spoke to my mother of pneumonia, we'd come full circle: She had lied to my father so he would have one less thing to worry about in the hospital; he—at once hopeful and disbelieving—had passed the story along to me; and my brother and I had then brought it back to her. As a family we've never been particularly good communicators, but it has never been for want of love.

My mother never had that CAT-scan, because her lungs filled so quickly with water. By the time she went to the hospital, her cough prevented her from lying flat enough for the machine to record an image of the intruder inside her.

She died in the hospital on a Sunday morning in July, moments after my father arrived. Her nurses were astonished that she had made it through the darkest part of the night, and said they thought she had hung in there for her husband. She died in his arms, a small smile in this case a surrogate for her salute.