The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (46 page)

But at the moment I was more interested in what the man said. “You pipe the boy?” They don’t always talk so fine themselves.

“Did I!” she said. “Whew.”

“Quite an Apollo, wasn’t he.”

“If there were two,” she said giggling, “who could bear it?” She sighed. “What a waste. Such a beautiful kid.”

“Think that barn
is
birch?” said the man.

“Of course not. Let her think she’s putting something over on us, poor thing, if she wants. But you and I know what it would cost at a lumberman’s, aside from the
color.
To buy all that oak.”

That was the way it always turned out between Hillsborough and the summer people, from the very first, when we sold off the land by the lakeshore that was no good for farmland if they only knew, and woods that didn’t have nothing in them, anything in them but birch. Until I came home this June, I didn’t know who was to blame. I found that out at the college. Let me tell you about Hillsborough, first.

When you come north by the state road, on your way to the White Mountains, the road goes straight for a while, past a few houses; then all of a sudden it humps up very sharp, through a few stores at the hilltop, with a side road going east over the hill and down out of sight. If you continue on, there’s a garage and some empty stores at the bottom again, then whoosh, the town is gone. If you park your car at the top and stay a while—that’s us. Or if you’ve been there forever.

In the summertime, with the summer people all here, used to be such a big bottleneck in that ring of stores, on a Friday shopping especially, that the town board had the hump all divided in those slanted, white-painted parking lines. Still is a bottleneck, but if you look hard and knowing enough, it’s mostly all tourists, of a bright summer afternoon. As they drive up the hill, on their left side, first comes a few old mashed-together buildings every town here has, nobody knows much what they were, then comes the closed-up church, then the store where the number one soda parlor always was, and then the supermarket, once the barbershop and the corner shoe. It came the last few years ago, for the summer people, but it may be too late for them. Has a coke machine out front. Next to it is The Service Shop, still there. That’s for sewing wools and stuffs, the kind of thing women call “notions,” and seems to last, no matter what. Or old Mrs. Hupper who keeps it does. “Shut up shop, or hang herself,” she says, before she’ll go to selling junk as antiques. Still has a few customer ladies from the lakeshore, so old and pinkfaded they still look to us like all the lakeside houses and inhabitants used to, just a summer vision that would soon fade.

On the other side of the crest of our hill, hung over the steep road that goes off it down and east, is a numb little grocery, just the sort you’d think we’d shop in ourselves—washed-out cardboard signs in windows under the old house eaves, and packaged bread. But in the fall, you’d be surprised how bright it is, when the fishing talk is over, and the gun talk begins. Fellow who owns it, used to have his gun collection hung on the wall right over the milk-and-cheese counter, until he sold it, all but one deer rifle, last year. And nowadays he stocks frozen food and all that, like for the summer people, and we eat it, hoping for health. But it may be too late for that too.

Next to him, just before you get to the crest, used to be the second soda place, just a home restaurant but where we kids could go for ice cream; now it sells sandwiches in booths meant for tourists, but it has no beer and looks like it would have the crummy coffee we do have, so they don’t go in. And neither do we. And back down the hill, next to that, used to be a stationery and male notions sort of place; he had a malted-milk machine we could hang around too—but he was no Hupper, he’s gone too, though not far. Most any afternoon until dusk, you can see him sitting there on his front lawn behind the tables with anything from hubcaps to kitchenware to framed saints’-pictures on them; often he’s there with a light, after dark. Or in the morning, if he’s not, the tables are, and anybody takes the trouble to knock, he’s out in a jiffy. “Just shavin’. What vase? Be one dollar, that vase.” Anybody takes the trouble to go down any of our side roads, will find any of us with our things all set out, sitting back of the tables, or in a rocking chair if we’re old, or inside. We’re a town on a hill, so we can’t stretch the business out straight like some can, and catch it all in one trough. And we haven’t got the knowhow like FitzWilliam, where the professionals are. Or the houses and granges and live churches to look at, like Hancock. Houses and hardware both, we run closer to junk than antiques. But you’ll find us. Behind that hillside everywhere, is us. We’re still there.

On the grocery’s eave, pointing down the east road, there’s a marker says Aunt Marietta’s Antiques. That’s us in particular, I and Aunt Mary, and her husband, my uncle Andy—in our family there’s only one of each of us. Before you come to our house, there’s the mill—the standard, red brick, New England, New Hampshire knitting mill, with its sluices and iron gone to rust, and what seems like a hundred gross of spidered windowpanes, not half enough of them knocked in. Those Victorian windowpanes stay orderly looking until the end, and good red brick don’t ever seem to fall, or get haunted. Those greenery things, sumac and ailanthus, that always take over, look feathery nice around it. It could start up again in a minute, you think, passing by. Opposite it though, is what, after the church of course, used to be our real pride.

It’s a chocolate-and-tan frame structure of some seven stories high, built in the seventies, with balconies and fretwork running even and complete around every story; if it leaned just a little, or was skinny and not square, it would look like a monument. As it is, it is supposed to be one of the last specimens of that architecture, and when we first had Aunt Mary’s shop, she used to take picture postcards of it, which sold very well. I don’t know why she hasn’t the get-up to, anymore. Or I’m beginning to think I do. Anyway, the Geracis, who now own it, you sometimes hear one of them tell a tourist it was a hotel, but it never was; it was a kind of high-class rabbit warren for the mill workers to live in, with enough railing and banisters to match those factory windows across the way. To give the Geracis credit, they keep it painted. They’re Italians, Hillsborough’s only, and they still have the energy for a place like that, and the relatives; Italians can always take in each other’s washing from all the other onlies in the towns roundabout, and keep separate that way; in the basement they even have a store none of us sets foot in, unless ours runs out of something and we haven’t got the gall to sneak in opposite to the supermarket, which is what we would like best. The Geraci children still have separate names, too—saints’ names, but separate.

And after Geraci’s, down the road that leads straight to the lake shore and to all the summer people, that’s us in particular. Our house is one of the larger old white ones, an old Apollo of a house, you might say, and we are accustomed to hearing, in summer, how beautiful it—could become. In winter we are inclined to think how comfortable it could be—to keep. But we still have it, and we’re the only house out that way, with our back garden—or that once was—on a little rise too, and pointed straight toward the lake that is really a huge, circular “pond” as we call it—Willard’s Pond—and toward them. We’re the only family on the way to them, and that is our peculiar distinction—though we have another. Between them and us, is our woods, or what used to be ours, where, last year, I used to make out with one of their Barbaras. From our back windows we can see them, in all their homes they’ve made out of our houses and our barns—stretching on and on in a half-circle, but even bright with upkeep though they are, a mirage.

In summer, what with boats and docks and waterskiers this year and all that gradual growth of plastic, they tend to seem brighter, and it’s true every year they seem healthier, staying on longer each year. They like to keep up what they call their relationship with us; that helps to keep them healthy too. “That’s
their
upkeep,” my aunt once said tartly. Truth was, she thought some of their ladies liked to keep it up with my uncle, who at thirty-nine years old is blonder and taller than I am, a retired Marine with muscles that last year he used to maintain, too, with a set of barbells my aunt swapped somewhere.

The swap shop was no distinction, only what my aunt got into years ago out of sheer energy and not liking to embroider, starting it out as a gift shop with a line of dollclothes, and those new gilt memento cups—none stamped for Hillsborough, we were too small for that, but Portsmouth and so forth—when the new people came. If they started her on the antiques, always being so wistful after our chipped buttercrocks and old end-of-day vases, who was to blame? Meanwhile, it didn’t say we weren’t just as healthy as ever, only rightfully lazier—if now and then we swapped a bit of land. Or woods that were mostly only birch. White birch is good sure enough for those new-style kitchen cabinets. But the sawmill over at Nubanusit is all ailanthus too.

And meanwhile, there they were, only the summer people, that mirage across Willard Pond. We took care of their houses, shut off their waterpipes and promised to turn them on again come “the season,” and to mow their first lawn. Come Labor Day, they began to go. Come October, they were gone. With their extra keys jingled away in our dresser drawer, we forgot them, or sometimes, just to check up of course, in the performance of duty, we toured their houses and habits from top to bottom, fingered their linen and the quilts they’d bought from us, laughed at that other junk, the cobalt glass bottles and a Stafford pitcher in the window and somebody from Antrim’s greatgranny on the wall—and remembered to remind ourselves how faded, like the new owners, all this was. Come November, when gun talk was all over the grocery, bright as apples and the huntsmen’s china teeth, we had forgotten them altogether. Mrs. Hupper took the needlepoint wool out of her window and hung there a glorious pink-and-purple afghan, with a sign saying it was to be raffled for the church, and chances could be bought right there. The church itself came open, with a visiting preacher every third Sunday. And then at last, our real mirages took over again all the way, from the woman in white you could see on one of the balconies at Geraci’s on a moonlit evening, to the sea monster that was supposed to be in the Pond.

This was all the change I noticed until I went away and came home from college, but that’s supposed to be natural, isn’t it?—even though college wasn’t the real state university I like to say. It was a state-run one, sure enough, but the old two-year Agricultural and Manual-training unit, switched off now from Guernseys, and onto economics and business courses—gone to that kind of grass. There were a lot of dopes there who would do well at these, plus a few hopelessly smart ones, still on the agriculture, like me. We quickly discovered who we were—there was usually about one of us from a particular town.

We were the aristocrats of the upkeepers, all of us, and many of us were the Apollos, too, who some summer person had stuck the idea of a scholarship in the mind of, or had even written away for to help him, all the way back from “Ooo, Aunt Mary, what a beautiful little boy you have, and so smart.” And keep him away from my Barbara. We knew who we were, and began pooling our information right away. We were the elite.

And we were the ones (though we learned to hide it except among one another) who came from the towns where people’s names had gone back to grass too. The way we found out about each other was—there were so many Johnnies. There are always a lot of people named John anywhere, I understand that. But were there ever so many boys who answered—unless they were quick enough—to the names of Johnny One, Johnny Two, Johnny Three and so on? We even had one Johnny Ten, but he was unusual. Our families weren’t so big anymore.

“Sometimes even the summer people do better,” said the boy in whose room we were, a skinny Johnny One from over to Contoocook, but still with a lot of tawny gumption in his cheek—he didn’t eat their frozen, and his folk had a pig littered every spring; wouldn’t let them eat
her,
wouldn’t let them sell her either.

“Over our way,” another said proudly, “we’ve still got Buddy names as well; my best friend is a Buddy Four”—but he wasn’t much. And there were a few other reports of the old original names, the tombstone ones—Lukes and Patiences and so forth—though there would still be only two names to a family, for the girls and for the boys. But mostly, the families were running to Mary One, Two, and Three and so forth for the girls, and Johnnies of the same.

“Why is it do you suppose it’s happening?” said Johnny Ten, not the brightest of us, only there because if a Ten wasn’t eligible, who was?

Nobody liked to say, even among us though there wasn’t a boy didn’t have an inkling.

“But I can tell you why we’ve still got our different last names,” said the boy from Contoocook. “Otherwise, it would be too confusing to them—even though they don’t much use those. And too noticeable. This way, we can just fade quietly. And they can keep tally on us, like they like to do of the oldest stones in the graveyard.”

Well, we didn’t do much but form the club, that year. Freshmen do that. Then we came home, and I suspect that ordinarily the same thing would have happened to the boys from those other towns as to me; clubs fade too, like winter seasons. But now it was summer again. And I was shocked to the gills when I saw my uncle and aunt. People not forty years old yet don’t just all of a sudden look like that, not when they’ve both always been lively as a barn dance—not unless they have a mortal disease. And it wasn’t as if they just suddenly looked older in any healthy way, or even downright old, the way some people’s hair turns gray overnight. He was still blond as could be; she was still brown. Morning early, and evening late, that is. In the strongest noon light, you couldn’t quite tell. What’s sucking them?—I thought, but we are a reserved family and I knew even if I could bring myself to ask, they wouldn’t say. They moved lightly these days, and vaguely—my uncle, with tattoos half the length of his burly forearm, and his machinist’s shoes and his heavy fingernails powerful as old yellow horn!—and their thoughts seemed to come from a long way back.