Taking Off (2 page)

I was, as I hope you will agree after reading the pages that follow, blown off course by the accident of Albertine's injury as much as I was lured off course by the siren call of unsolicited recollection. The first was no fault of mine, an accident. The second I count a virtue, since it served the cause of completeness and accuracy. As a result, however, the short book that I had intended to write about my exploit has become three books, the Flying trilogy:
Taking Off
(in which I make my plans and depart),
On the Wing
(in which I meander from Babbington to New Mexico), and
Flying Home
(in which I return to Babbington, somewhat older and, perhaps, somewhat the wiser).

Peter Leroy

New York City

January 25, 2006

Chapter 1

Babbington Needs Me

I WAS BORN AND RAISED IN BABBINGTON, a small town situated on the South Shore of Long Island, lying between the eastern border of Nassau County and the western border of Suffolk County. (Actually, I was born in the hospital in neighboring South Hargrove, since there was no hospital in Babbington, but that made mine a birth so close to being born in Babbington as not to matter.) My roots in the town reach a couple of generations down into its sandy soil, deep roots for an American family. Babbington formed me: I was a Babbington boy. I enjoyed my childhood there, but, like many other small-town boys, I began to want to leave the place in my adolescence. During junior year in high school, a friend of mine, Matthew Barber, had the good fortune to win a scholarship to a summer institute sponsored by the National Preparedness Foundation. It was to be held at the New Mexico College of Agriculture, Technology, and Pharmacy, in Corosso. Matthew's winning the scholarship inspired in me a fierce envy and an even fiercer determination to get to Corosso myself. By giving me a destination, Matthew's acceptance at the summer institute justified my building an airplane, an undertaking that my father might otherwise not have been willing to allow—certainly not in the family garage—and by taking me such a distance from home, my trip to Corosso gave me the taste of a wider world that I had come to crave.

While sampling that wider world, I was surprised to find how much I missed Babbington and how much I measured the rest of the world by the standards and peculiarities of my home town. Later in life, in college, and later still, during my brief experience of conventional work, the larger world made a further impression on me, but I persisted in interpreting it by translating it into the familiar terms of the small world of Babbington and my childhood experiences there. Late in my twenties, I returned to Babbington, with the intention of staying. My wife, Albertine, and I worked at one job and another to accumulate enough for a down payment on Small's Hotel, and when a surprise bequest from the estate of an old bayman, “Cap'n” Andrew Leech, gave us the last bit that we lacked, we put our money down and bought it. For the next couple of decades we tried to make a success of Small's, but in the end the sum of our success was that we were able to sell it, pay our debts, and escape with a small amount of equity. We moved to Manhattan, where we live now, with the intention that we would return to Babbington often. Albertine has relatives living in the neighboring towns, and for me the place has the draw of a spiritual home, the place where the heart lies. I fully expected that in Manhattan I would be homesick for Babbington, as I had been so often during my trip to New Mexico, but I was not. I kept intending to return, but my intention was inspired more by feelings of obligation than by desire. I felt that I ought to visit certain old friends and acquaintances, ought to see how the hotel was faring under the management of its new owners, ought to go clamming, just to keep my hand in, and yet, however much I felt that I
ought
to go, I never quite managed to get around to going.

Then, not long ago, I received a postcard …

Years passed. The Long Island Rail Road continued to run trains to Babbington at convenient hours daily, but I never took one, never attempted to go home again. In a very short time, Manhattan became my home, my playground, my seat of operations. I had been a Babbington boy, but I had become a man of Manhattan, a part of the great urban crowd.

Then, not long ago, I received a postcard from a woman who had lived in Babbington throughout her childhood and youth, as I had, a coeval named Cynthia, who had been called Cyn or Sin or even Sinful when she and I were classmates in elementary school and high school. During the critical formative years of our lives, we had been suckled on the culture of Babbington, in circumstances that were nearly identical. However, Cyn had remained in Babbington after high school, had married a Babbington boy, was still living in Babbington, and had no intention of leaving.

Her message was brief but unsettling.

Peter,

I wish you would return to Babbington and see what they are doing to our town. It's enough to make your flesh crawl. If you can possibly get here on Friday the 29th, at around five, I'll meet you at the bar at Legends restaurant in the “Historic Downtown Plaza.” Please come. Babbington needs you.

Cynthia

Her words dealt me a stab of guilt, for they inspired within me the feeling that I had betrayed the town by leaving it. I would have to return. I would have to see what “they” were doing to the place. I would have to see what I could do to make things right.

Chapter 2

In the Historic Downtown Plaza

Already the teaching of Tlön's harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has obliterated the history that governed my own childhood; already a fictitious past has supplanted in men's memories that other past, of which we now know nothing certain—not even that it is false.

Jorge Luis Borges, postscript to “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

THUS IT WAS that, late in the afternoon of the Friday following my receipt of Cyn's note, Albertine and I found ourselves seated side by side aboard a Long Island Rail Road train bound for Babbington, where, for me, it had all begun. Albertine was with me because she and I are together whenever it is possible for us to be together. We discovered long ago that the point of our lives is to be together, so we try to avoid all individual experience, within the limits of practicality and gracious living. This practice has brought us as close as any two people can be, I think. It also allows her to keep an eye on me.

“I have no idea what the ‘Historic Downtown Plaza' might be,” said Albertine, who knows the town as well as I do.

“I picked up this brochure in the station,” I said, handing the brochure to Albertine. “It promotes excursions to Babbington. The writer attempts to explain the Historic Downtown Plaza, but the explanation doesn't succeed in clarifying it.”

The brochure was titled “Babbington: Gateway to the Past.” It bore the logo of the Babbington Redefinition Authority, and it described my home town in the following manner:

The delightful town of Babbington is the Central South Shore's nostalgia center—or, if not precisely its center, not far off the mark. Babbington offers fine accommodations, restaurants, its own historic charm, and many fascinating attractions and diversions.

The Historic Downtown Plaza, a pedestrian mall lined with buildings dating from the 1950s and even earlier, serves as one of the major “destinations” for Babbingtonians and “out-of-towners” alike.

Downtown employees and shoppers frequent the Plaza to have lunch or stroll through the variety of shops, to slip out of the drudgery of everyday life in the early twenty-first century and back into the blissful middle of the twentieth. The beautifully landscaped Plaza provides a setting for town festivals such as the Clam Fest, traditionally held on the first weekend of May. Highlight of the weeklong extravaganza is the crowning of Miss Clam Fest. Despite the controversy that has plagued the Fest for the last several years, it still draws an enthusiastic crowd. The clam-fritter-eating contest is always exciting and tense. Deaths have occurred.

The Babbington Redefinition Authority is hard at work to make Babbington everything it might once have been. In Babbington you will find the perfect starting point for your passport to the past, the perfect place to start or end your day.

“‘The perfect starting point for your passport to the past'?” said Albertine. “What on earth does that mean?”

“Oh, it's just somebody's attempt to squirt a little of the flavor of foreign travel onto a visit to Babbington,” I said.

“That somebody has confused
passport
and
passage,
I think.”

“Probably a fellow graduate of Babbington High,” I muttered, rescuing the poor pamphlet from her before she picked any other little nits of illiteracy from it.

“Sorry,” she said. “I forgot how touchy you are about—”

“Here we are,” I said. “Let's find out why my town needs me.”

*   *   *

ALBERTINE AND I found the Historic Downtown Plaza easily enough. It was a T-shaped stretch of Upper Bolotomy Road and Main Street at the center of town. Two blocks of Upper Bolotomy and four blocks of Main (two to the east of the intersection and two to the west) had been closed to vehicular traffic, though there were cars parked at the curb. I admired some of these as I walked along, because they were handsome examples of the cars that had been the objects of my adolescent car-lust when I was in high school.

“Wow,” I said in exactly the tone of awestruck reverence I would have used when I was too young to drive.

“Watch where you're going,” Al cautioned me, taking hold of my arm and steering me away from a collision with a vintage lamppost.

“Did you see that car we just passed?” I asked. “A 1956 Golden Hawk. Two-hundred-seventy-five horsepower and Ultramatic Drive.”

“But not much of a back seat,” she said with a wink and a leer. With a sigh for days gone by, we went in search of the restaurant called Legends.

It would have been hard to miss. It announced itself with a large neon sign that bore its name and the slogan “Portal to the Plaza.” A smaller sign beside the door offered “Our Incomparable Happy Hour” Monday through Friday, 4:30
P.M
. to 6:30
P.M.
, featuring free hors d'oeuvres and “special drink prices.”

The restaurant was just at the northern limit of the plaza in a space that had been filled by a large grocery store when Al and I were kids. The interior had been turned into a miniature shopping mall, with skylights overhead, giving it some of the feeling of a suburban shopping mall, but on a compact scale. Legends occupied the center, and the surrounding area was filled with shops, kiosks, and pushcarts stocked with souvenirs, gewgaws, and “antiques” from approximately the time when Albertine and I were spending Saturday nights in the back seat of her parents' Lark sedan, parked among the concealing rushes at the edge of Bolotomy Bay.

A small group had gathered at the circular bar for the incomparable happy hour. They all seemed to be regulars. They sat and drank. Now and then they spoke to one another. One of their number was addressed by the others as “Judge.” The free hors d'oeuvres on this evening were potato chips and a bowl of clam dip.

“Amazing,” I said after sampling the dip. “This could have been made from my mother's recipe.”

A younger woman came in, apparently stopping by after work, climbed onto a barstool, crossed her eye-catching legs, and ordered a Tom Collins.

“A Tom Collins,” I whispered to Al. “When was the last time you heard anybody order a Tom Collins?”

“Nineteen sixty-one,” said Albertine, “in the summer, the night we crashed that party in—”

“Shhh,” I said with a finger to my lips, and we settled into the poses we assume when indulging in silent eavesdropping.

The happy-hour drinkers were talking of an approaching storm, Hurricane Felicity. Thousands had been evacuated from the New Jersey Shore, one of them noted. Tens of thousands more were without power in that area, according to another. Weekend plans were off, announced the woman with the Tom Collins.

“Hurricane Felicity,” I whispered to Al. “There was a Hurricane Felicity when we were in high school, wasn't there?”

“There was,” she said.

“Al,” I said, “this place is—”

Chapter 3

The Birdboy of Babbington

JUST THEN, CYNTHIA ARRIVED. She seemed to be wearing a disguise, having gotten herself up as a woman of a certain age. “Hey, there,” she said, in the breathy come-hither-big-boy voice that had inspired her teenage nicknames, “if it isn't the Birdbrain of Babbington in the flesh.”

“That's Birdboy, Sinful.”

“Birdboy to your face, but it was always Birdbrain behind your back.”

“It was?” I asked. “Are you serious? Or are you just making that up? I never knew that anyone—”