Operator - 01 (2 page)

“Well, my car is on the other side of the hill, too. Why don’t you walk me there?” she says and steps forward, linking her arm through mine as if I’m escorting her to a cotillion. She pivots toward the tall blond man for a second as we step away. “We can finish this conversation later,” she says firmly and turns her head, not waiting for a response. He stays rooted in place, glowering as we disappear into the gloom.

We walk in silence for a few moments, but once we’ve crested the hill and are safely out of earshot, she speaks.

“You weren’t really lost, were you?” Then she shakes her head, answering her own question before I can. “I don’t know what I was thinking, picking a fight with him. That was stupid. I could have gotten myself in trouble. Thank you for saving me from my own pig-headedness.” She nods once sharply to accent her point.

I shrug. “Who was that guy?”

“George Jeffries. He was in Russia with us. Now he’s telling everyone he was Mel’s fiancé. Which is an outrageous fabrication. He’s the reason she left the program. She came back home because of him!”

“Russia?”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t know anything.” It is true; I did not speak to Mel once in the last dozen years.

“I guess you don’t,” she says, and we continue on for another moment in silence. “But here’s my car,” she points to a silver Mercedes coupe, “and I need to call home soon, or my parents will worry. It’s amazing that after college and grad school and four years abroad they still think I’m sixteen. Are you going to the funeral tomorrow?” She is speaking so rapidly that it takes me a second to identify the question. I nod slowly.

She opens a slim black purse and with two fingers extracts a silver case. Delicately she opens it and withdraws a card, which she hands to me. The paper is thick and textured in my rough hands.

“I’m Veronica,” she says, extending her hand. I clasp it briefly. It is cool, the ambient temperature of the air around us. “Why don’t we have coffee afterward? Mel talked a lot about you. I’d like to hear your story.” She doesn’t wait for me to answer, just smiles and slips into her car. A second later she’s gone. I’m left standing in the middle of the damp road, holding her card. It has her name, Veronica Ryan, and a phone number printed on it in neat black letters. No company or title, not even an e-mail address. I shake my head. This is a nannies-ponies-and-private-school kind of girl. She doesn’t belong here.

* * *

I sit in the bathroom of the small motel room with my head hanging forward over the tub. A threadbare white towel hangs over my head, dripping monotonously onto the faded white porcelain surface. I watch the beads of water gather into a tiny stream that twists slowly downhill to the drain, and wish they would spin counterclockwise as they do south of the equator. A light veil of steam rises from the towel, inhibited by the damp fall air. I breathe slowly and deeply as I count my pulse descending towards its resting rate of fifty beats per minute. With my fingers I trace the raised lines of the jagged scars on my neck, then the puckered one on my left shoulder.

My mind drifts back to my last days in Conestoga twelve years ago. I can still smell the overpoweringly sour fragrance of lilies at my dad’s funeral. I remember the angry, strained look on my mother’s face as we argue. Mostly I remember the lost look of my youngest sister Ginny as I close the door to my mother’s house, leaving her on the wrong side, then walk away with a single duffle bag slung over my shoulder. The stink of my cowardice overpowers the cheap floral sent of motel soap. Eventually, I lie down on the narrow bed, close my eyes and wish to God that I smoked.

Chapter Two – Saturday

Dawn comes late to Conestoga, as the sun must scale the bluffs on the east side of the Hudson before peering down on the town nestled against the river. My footfalls echo softly against the row of clapboard houses as I run through the sleeping town, now and then peering up at the gray sky. The houses on King’s Road huddle together on their small plots like crows perched on a telephone wire. The colors on this street are muted, almost monochrome in their palette, with the exception of an azure blue house with yellow shutters sitting in the middle of the block like an orphan flower in a sea of weeds.

I reach River Road and turn left, heading north toward Main Street. Conestoga is still, but for the occasional car that passes with headlights on or a stray head poking out from behind a door to snatch the newspaper from the front stoop. I’m conscious of retracing my childhood as I move through the deserted streets. I loop around Church Street onto High Bridge Road. Mel’s parents live here. Their driveway is full and there are a number of cars with out-of-state plates parked on the road. The house is dark, excepting a single light in an upstairs bedroom. Three blocks further and I make the turn onto Green Farms Road. My childhood house looks the same, except that someone has painted the old swing chair on the front porch. Mom’s battered Chevy pickup is parked in the driveway next to a spotless Cadillac Escalade that could only belong to my oldest sister Amelia and her husband Jeff. There is a beaten down Jeep Cherokee from the nineties sitting behind the Escalade and a Honda Civic parked on the street in front of the yard.
Everybody’s home
.

I arrived at the funeral home late enough last night to miss my own family, though I did see Mel’s. I’ll see them this afternoon at the cemetery, though – no avoiding that. It can’t be put off any more. The farther I get from Conestoga, the more it pulls at me. I shake off the thought as the house fades into the gloom and I turn onto Ridge Road, climbing in earnest. I keep up a brisk pace for three miles as the road twists and turns until I reach the old mill. I pull up just shy of the rusted chain link fence barring the entrance. This is where my father and grandfather spent every working day of their lives. This is the mill that closed two weeks before I graduated high school. The place has power for me, like a Native American burial ground.

Three towers thrust up from the site, looming over Conestoga like the witches from
Macbeth
over their cauldrons. In front of them are several buildings, the largest made of staged platforms with crazy pipes running through them. It looks like a competition diving platform constructed with a Lego kit. The platform structure is flanked by a schoolhouse-style administration building on one side and an enormous warehouse on the other. The buildings are crowded together – piled up against each other like old shoeboxes in a closet. The enormous yard in front of the mill has fallen into disuse, and grass has grown over the railroad tracks. A boxcar stands empty in the yard, waiting to be loaded. I see the first touch of red light hit the top of one of the towers in anticipation of the arriving dawn. Before I have a chance to think too much, I put my hand on the fence, testing the links. Then I back up a few yards and with three steps I am up and over. My real workout is just beginning.

* * *

The interment ceremony is brief. The cemetery behind Riverbend Church is the oldest in Conestoga, dating from the time of the town’s first settlement as a royal charter to a wealthy merchant in 1745. Conestoga has been going downhill ever since. Mel – Melissa Jane Harris – was Catholic but because of the manner of her death, she can’t be buried at Holy Oak Cemetery. Mel’s parents managed to convince the parish priest to say a few words for her, which he does. Then some of Mel’s friends and students say a few more words. I have certainly attended more funerals than any of the 300 Conestogans standing around me but this ceremony is especially raw. Nobody should have to bury a girl like Mel.

My mother is not around, which is just as well. She was never close to Mel. I haven’t spoken a word to the woman for twelve years and a burial doesn’t seem like the right place to break the silence. I’m standing between Amelia and Ginny, who is leaning on my shoulder and sobs through the whole wretched affair. My sister Jamie is on Ginny’s right and Jeff is on the other side of Amelia. In the end, I put a shovelful of dirt onto the grave, hug my sisters, and shake hands with Jeff before walking silently from the gathering. I’m remembering my father’s funeral. He’s here somewhere, too.

Veronica stands waiting for me outside the cemetery. I didn’t see her during the interment, but that’s not surprising given the size of the crowd. It must have been intimidating for her. When a small town buries one of its children, it is a communal enterprise. Every family in Conestoga had some connection to Mel and would have, even had she not been teaching half of their children. For days now, Ed and Beth Harris’s home will have been overflowing with people stopping over to deliver pies and casseroles. They won’t cook for months. For the next year, they’ll get a call every few days from some fellow parishioner, asking them to play bridge or go to a movie. It will probably take them a few months to identify the pattern. For all of its flaws, Conestoga takes care of its own.

“Where should we go?” Veronica asks. She’s wearing another simple but expensive-looking black dress under the same jacket with a different set of pearls. This strand is a bit longer, long enough for her to twist into a loop with her finger while she bites her lip, waiting for my reply.

I have to think for a moment. Conestoga has exactly one diner and three bars, but it will be difficult to talk privately at any of them. I suddenly realize that I’m already attracting stares from people leaving the cemetery. I can see a pair of middle-aged women looking at me as the one with a moon-shaped face points at me insistently with a jabbing gesture and whispers furiously into the other’s ear. I think the thinner one is my mother’s hairdresser. My return might rival the funeral itself for gossip value and I have a strong urge to disappear. Not Conestoga, then.

“Let’s go to the coffee shop in Dill Springs,” I suggest. “It’s about twenty minutes’ drive south.”

I’ve walked to the cemetery from my motel, so Veronica drives. Her SLK-350 roadster with its 268 horsepower motor makes short work of route 9W as we head south. Dill Springs is the northernmost town in the Catskills within a two-hour drive of New York City and it wears an urbane air that marks it a world apart from Conestoga. The coffee shop is set in an old storefront with hardwood floors and a vast ceiling of worked tin. It’s different from what I remember – it now looks more like a Starbucks without the generic Pottery Barn interior. Veronica orders a cappuccino while I puzzle over the menu for a moment, finally asking for the closest approximation to real black coffee that I can find. We sit down in leather armchairs set at an angle to one another and I have the transitory sensation that I’m in someone’s living room. There are some impressively detailed portraits of kitchen appliances on the wall and I wonder for a second if they might be Ginny’s, but the name on them is Jennie Schaeffer.

“You said that you met Mel in Russia?” I ask after we’ve sat in silence for a few moments. The car ride was also quiet. I wonder if I’ve been rude. Soil gets in your blood and the smells of my hometown – that mixture of red earth and river – have finally caught up with me. I realize that Veronica hasn’t spoken, not because she lacks curiosity, but because she’s both intuitive enough to have figured this out for herself and patient enough to wait for me to start talking.

“Yes I did. We were roommates. We taught English on the Glasnost program. They pay your room and board, you get a small stipend and you get to learn Russian intensively while you teach English. Mel was there for two years – I lasted almost four.”

“Four years is a long time to teach English abroad, isn’t it? Where in Russia were you?”

“St. Petersburg. That’s probably why I stayed so long. Most kids who join end up in some tiny village in the middle of nowhere and come back after a year or two. But St. Petersburg – it was just unbelievable. Even with the mosquitoes in the summer and the dreary winters it was just an amazing place. I still miss it.”

“When did you get back?” I ask, because I realize I have no idea how Mel spent her life after I left home. I never asked.

“I came back about two years ago. Mel left a year before I did.” Veronica starts telling me details about the time they spent in St. Petersburg. It’s a lovely city. I went there a number of times for work. I listen to her describe her experiences and I can’t help thinking how different the Mel she knew sounds from the seventeen-year-old girl I remember.

“What are you doing now?”

“Ah – now I’m writing silly feature stories for the
White Plains Gazette
while I dream about my future job as foreign correspondent for
The New York Times
. And living with my parents in Greenwich,” she adds, waving her hand over her head in a southeasterly direction.

“You drove back there last night? How far is that?” In fact I know that it is over 90 miles and on the wrong side of the Hudson.

“No, I’m staying in a B&B in Rhinebeck for the weekend. It’s amazing how nice everything is when you get just a little further south of Conestoga,” she says off-handedly and then colors, adding, “I’m sorry,” as she realizes she’s insulted my hometown.

“Don’t be. You’re absolutely right. Fifty years ago, Conestoga was a solid working class town. Then the mill started losing business and laying people off every year and the town shrank with it. People who held on, like my family, were living on a tightrope. A lot of them drank or gambled,” and here I think of my Dad, “and a lot of people got involved in bad things. After the mill closed,” I swallow some of the hot black coffee, which is not bad in spite of its pretentious name and inflated price, “things got worse. A lot worse, I think.” If what I’ve seen on my morning run is representative of the whole town, I’m downplaying the truth. The best sections of Conestoga now look like Newark, New Jersey, or the Compton section of Los Angeles. The houses are shabby and the yards unkempt, but there are expensive cars in some driveways. There is money in Conestoga, but it’s the wrong kind.

“So, the guy you were,” I pause, trying to find a polite phrase, “
talking to
last night – what’s his story?”